- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- NDP
- Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke
- British Columbia
- Voting Attendance: 67%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $148,586.11
- Government Page
Madam Speaker, my question for the member for Thornhill has to do with solving the large number of repeat offenders who are not involved in violent crime. I wonder if she would agree with me that part of the solution for most of the people who cause most of those cases the Conservatives like to talk about is to get people into substance abuse treatment and mental health programs and lift them out of poverty so they can truly become more productive members of our Canadian society.
Instead, the Conservatives have been arguing against a lot of the decriminalization of drugs that would lead to better treatment programs. Which is it for the Conservatives? Are we going to put money into resources and treatment so we can reduce this incidence of crime in our local communities?
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Madam Speaker, my question to the hon. member is about how we deal with repeat offenders. One of the proposals in the bill is to make the option of community-based bail supervision available in all cases for the judge to select. That means that people could get bail who would otherwise end up in detention before trial. What we really need is the commitment of resources from the federal government to get that program under way, because it is far cheaper than detaining people and has much better outcomes, in terms of public safety.
Is the member prepared to commit the government to support community-based bail supervision?
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Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for her concern about the lack of services in pretrial detention because it is a very important part of public safety.
I am no expert on the internal workings of the Conservative Party, but it does seem peculiar when its leader, who has said that he was prepared to get this done in a day, no longer seems prepared to do that.
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Mr. Speaker, once again, I am a bit perplexed by the question, since Bill C-48 specifically addresses the question around the use of illegal weapons in the commission of crimes and it creates an additional reverse onus.
That means there are additional requirements of those who have been found in possession of illegal weapons. They must demonstrate why they are not a threat to public safety and why they should not be detained before trial.
That is exactly what Bill C-48 is doing. That is exactly what the bill is responding to, which is the demand from the premiers. That is exactly what law enforcement asked for.
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Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague, the member for Nunavut, for her tireless advocacy on behalf of indigenous people and northern residents in Canada.
I want to point out that one of the areas where there is a severe lack of social services when it comes to things like addiction treatment and mental health services is Nunavut. By providing for community-based bail supervision, this bill would allow a lot of people who are maybe, for the first time, in conflict with the justice system, to find a way to keep their housing, their contacts with family and their employment, and not end up in further conflict with the law.
That means that the federal government would have to step up and help provide the funding to the Government of Nunavut to make those necessary social services available in communities across the north.
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Mr. Speaker, as I said earlier, I do look forward to working with the hon. member as the new parliamentary secretary for justice.
I want to be a little less partisan. The question is not what the public will think about any one party here if we do not get this done. It is what the public will think about us as parliamentarians as a whole. I think we have a responsibility, when we see a large degree of consensus and these large public concerns, to act as expeditiously as possible.
As I said, the justice committee already held hearings and those hearings informed the bill before us today. There is no reason, in my mind, that we could not proceed expeditiously. If members have other things they want to see, let them bring forward private members' bills. Let the government bring forward additional bills.
However, we have a bill today that has broad support from premiers, law enforcement and the public, and seems to have support from all the parties. Let us get the job done.
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Mr. Speaker, I want to address something that the member said, which is that Bill C-48 would result in more people being in pretrial detention.
Precisely because it allows the option of community-based bail supervision, the opposite would be the case. This bill would actually result in fewer people being detained before their trials. That is the important aspect that New Democrats argued for and convinced the government to include in this bill.
If we are interested in public safety, as I said, yes, we need to deal with repeat violent offenders. We also need to deal with recidivism. The way one deals with recidivism is to keep people out of jail, keep them in their employment, keep them with their families and provide them the supports they need to be productive citizens in this country.
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Mr. Speaker, once again, the member is mixing bail with all kinds of other questions in criminal justice and the Criminal Code. What I do have to say, and I want to emphasize it once again, is that while there are a few cases, and they are not very numerous, of repeat violent offenders reoffending, they are serious and we need to act and take care to make sure those do not happen again.
Bill C-48 addresses those. The police associations across the country say that it does. Premiers are satisfied that it does. I am not sure why the Conservative Party is not satisfied that it would deal with that problem.
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Mr. Speaker, I am extremely pleased to rise in support of Bill C-48 today.
I did not think we would get the bill to this stage as quickly as we have in this Parliament. One of the reasons we did so is that the justice committee recognized the public concern about repeat violent offenders and problems with bail. It conducted hearings last year and came up with a series of recommendations that helped inform this bill. Therefore, today, we have something before us that the justice committee has already considered, that the premiers have been calling for and support, and that has broad support in the law enforcement community.
Today, we have heard many people talk about things other than bail reform. However, when we talked about bail reform, we heard the minister say that the government is prepared to proceed expeditiously. We have heard the Leader of the Opposition say that the official opposition supports the bill. I heard some more ambiguous things from the last speaker from the Bloc Québécois, but he still said that the Bloc supports the bill. Therefore, the question I have been asking in this session is this: Since we have this broad support for the bill, are we serious about moving expeditiously? Maybe the bill does not have everything that everyone wants, but certainly there is broad support, as well as an urgent need to make the public more confident in our bail-reform system.
Since the leader of the official opposition personally gave me credit for a crime wave on Vancouver Island, I have to take a moment to say that I have dedicated my entire life to working to help keep communities safe. I say that as someone whose professional career was in teaching criminal justice before I came here. Therefore, for him to say that I have somehow supported measures in a deliberate manner that provoke criminality or a crime wave is really quite personally offensive.
What we get from the Leader of the Opposition is talk about common sense. I want to point out a piece of common sense that contradicts most of what he was saying today. Over the last 30 years, we have tripled the number of people in pretrial detention in this country. If detaining more people caused a decrease in crime, we would have way less crime than we have today. Therefore, common sense would tell us that detaining three times as many people does not solve the problem.
Bill C-48 would not cast a broad brush, as the Conservatives are asking for. Rather, it has some narrow and targeted measures aimed at repeat violent offenders; New Democrats are in support of those measures. This means that it would insert a definition of “repeat violent offender” into the Criminal Code so that we would know whom judges should be looking at when it comes to denying bail. It would also create some additional reverse onus categories. “Reverse onus” is a technical term meaning that when it is proposed to put someone in pretrial detention, in certain cases, that person has to show why they should not be detained.
Therefore, the bill would add to the list of offences. It would not create a new category; there are already lots of reverse onus provisions in bail. However, it would add illegal weapons, including handguns. That is an important provision, which I definitely support. People have to go to a lot of trouble to possess an illegal weapon; they do not accidentally possess a handgun. Therefore, if someone has a charge that involves a handgun, they should have to show the judge why they should be released and why they are not a threat to the public.
In addition, the bill would increase the reverse onus in cases of intimate partner violence. Again, we know that when there has been intimate partner violence, it is usually not a one-time incident. When people are charged more than once, this bill would make it much tougher for the offender in an intimate partner relationship to get released, which is something that New Democrats definitely support. It goes along with our proposal, which is now a private member's bill, Bill C-332, sponsored by the member for Victoria.
Bill C-3s32 calls for making coercive and controlling behaviour in intimate partner relationships a criminal offence. That would move the goal posts in the Criminal Code; instead of having to wait for broken bones and bruises, a pattern of behaviour that leads to such violence would be a criminal offence. This would allow earlier intervention and prevent much of that violence from happening in the future.
Therefore, this bill goes together with our proposal on coercive and controlling behaviour to help provide better protections for those who suffer violence in intimate partner relationships. In this country, we continue to lose women to violence; every six days, one woman is killed by an intimate partner. This is part of the urgency of this bill and why I believe that we should deal with it expeditiously.
There is a third piece in this bill that I think no one else has talked about today. It is a piece that came up in the hearings we held at the justice committee. In addition to the real problem we have with repeat violent offenders getting bail, which this bill I believe will solve, we have the problem that we detain way too many people in Canada and at far higher rates than any comparable countries around the world. Why is this a problem? There are two reasons it is a problem.
One is the injustice. One-third of the people who are detained before their trial are never convicted but found innocent. What happens to people who are detained and held in jail before the trial? Most often they lose their job. Often they lose their housing. They lose custody of their kids. There are all kinds of negative impacts for people who are not found guilty of anything. Therefore, we need to improve our systems so we are detaining the people who need to be detained and not detaining other people. Who are the people who are over-detained? Disproportionately they are poor, women, indigenous or racialized Canadians.
This bill adds a provision that would require judges to look at community-based bail supervision programs, which are very successful. The John Howard Society has been running them in Ontario. I am looking through my notes, but I am pretty sure I am right. The success rate of the John Howard Society programs, as limited as they are in Ontario, is about 90%. What does a 90% success rate mean? It means that those people who are on community-based bail supervision have a caseworker assigned to them, they will not commit another offence while they are on bail and they will show up in court when they are supposed to. In the meantime, they can maintain their jobs, housing and custody of their kids. Even if they are eventually found guilty, they may not serve prison time. Therefore, having a community-based bail supervision program would help maintain that coherence of families.
Here is the kicker in all of this. Those who serve even limited time in custody before trial are far more likely to reoffend. If we are actually worried about public safety, one of the best things we could do is get people into community-based bail supervision programs where they are put in touch with the services they need, whether mental health services, substance abuse programs or upgrades to their education. If people are in a community-based bail supervision program, they can get that assistance, which will help lead them out of whatever problems they were in to begin with. When they are in pretrial custody, they are in the provincial system and there are no programs available to them. There are no mental health programs, no addiction programs and no education programs while they wait, with the current delays in our trial system, up to six months for a trial. If we are really interested in public safety, we need to put more people into community-based bail supervision programs, which Bill C-48 would now mandate as an option to be considered by the judge. That would require the Liberal government to provide the upfront funding to get community-based bail supervision programs more widely available across the country.
Now all members will say that the New Democrats are demanding more spending, but guess what? It costs about one-third the amount to put people into community-based bail supervision compared to putting them into custody. Therefore, we need upfront start-up funds for community-based bail supervision, which ultimately would produce huge savings in addition to better public safety outcomes and avoid injustice to those who are eventually found not guilty of the offence for which they were charged.
These are the reasons that I think we need to proceed expeditiously on this bill. We need to get a commitment from the government to help fund community-based bail supervision programs.
I know this bill is going to pass. We had the hearings. The hon. member for Rivière-du-Nord who spoke before me said that he wants to examine the bill. The bill is the result of the hearings we already held at the justice committee, so I do not think there is a need for that detailed examination. Maybe the other opposition parties will decide we have to go to committee and do it all over again, and I am prepared to do that, but we could proceed expeditiously, get this bill passed and get a better start on making Canadians safer.
I am not saying that the concerns that Canadians have about repeat violent offenders are unjust. There are many tragic examples that all too often are exploited in this House for political reasons, and I have sympathy for those families, but we have to pass Bill C-48 to prevent the release of violent offenders.
Let me say the other part of this. New Democrats continue to call for on-demand mental health and substance abuse programs.
When the Conservatives like to talk about the 6,000 rolling, revolving-door incidents in Vancouver, those are not violent crimes. Those are people who are poor, who shoplift, who are drug-addicted or who have mental health issues. If we could get, first of all, better support in this time of increasing costs for all Canadians who are poor, if we could get better mental health programs and if we could get better substance abuse on-demand records, then we will have progress in making communities safer.
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Mr. Speaker, we have a bill before us today that has the support of all the premiers and broad support in the law enforcement community. It incorporates many of the things the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights studied and recommended in the hearings it conducted.
Since we already had hearings, we have broad support from the premiers and we appear to have at least some level of support from all the parties, I am back to the original question for the Leader of the Opposition: Is he serious about passing this, even if it is not the perfect bill for him? Can we get this done? Can we get this passed expeditiously? Is he serious about this or not?
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Mr. Speaker, I am a bit perplexed by the member for Kildonan—St. Paul's speech. We have a bill before us today that has had broad support from premiers who demanded action. I think it has had broad support from all political parties, with the the leader of the member's party saying that he was prepared to pass it on the first day of this sitting.
In her speech, we heard some things get mixed up, things that had nothing to do with bail reform and had to do with other parts of the justice system. We have a disparaging of this bill, which has broad support from police and other members in the law enforcement community.
Is the Conservative Party serious or not? Is it standing by its leader's statement that it would like to get this done expeditiously or not?
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to add my personal congratulations to the new Minister of Justice. I have worked with him in a number of capacities in Parliament and have always found him to be reasonable and a hard-working member of Parliament. I am sure he will bring the same to his new job.
I would also like to congratulate the new parliamentary secretary, who is sitting next to him, with whom I have also had a good relationship in the past. I look forward to our making progress on issues important to Canadians with these two new people in place in justice.
The minister said today a lot about getting this done today. I am going to express my hope that there is actually a plan rather than rhetoric involved with the idea that we pass this today. Certainly, New Democrats understand the urgency of tackling bail reform, both in the violent crime area and also in assisting those who get trapped in the justice system because they cannot get bail.
Does the minister actually have a plan for advancing this today?
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Madam Speaker, I must say I am bit perplexed as to why the Conservatives would do a quorum call in the middle of my speech. Maybe they do not want to hear what I have to say about parole and the importance of parole to public safety, or maybe they do not want to hear what I am about to say about bail.
One of the things we have been talking about as New Democrats, which is now in the government's bail bill, a bill we have not been able to get to because of the delays of the Conservatives, is community-based bail supervision. That is the idea that we would take similar principles to parole and apply them to bail.
Right now, in the system we have in this country, when someone is on bail, there is actually no supervision whatsoever. The government's bill, Bill C-48, would provide that judges could refer people to community-based bail supervision programs. That means that people who are on bail would actually be supervised if they have a curfew, if they are supposed to be at a certain address or if they are supposed to be going to work, whatever the conditions of bail are. We do not really supervise that now. Community-based bail supervision would be important.
The other thing the bill would do is help with what I see as the real problem with bail in Canada, which is that we detain way too many people before trial, people who have not been convicted of anything. In particular, we detain way too many indigenous people, way too many racialized people, way too many poor people and way too many people with mental health challenges.
We do that because our system says that to get bail, people need a surety. They need somebody who is a friend or family member, who has a stable address and a stable job. They, themselves, also need a stable address, a telephone and usually a car before they could actually get bail. What we are doing is taking a lot of people and keeping them in detention, at very high costs, sometimes over $1,000 a day to keep people in detention.
If we use community-based bail supervision programs, the average cost of those pilot programs that the John Howard Society runs is five dollars a day. What we would get out of that is better public safety outcomes, fewer people in detention, and better public safety because we have better supervision for those on bail.
I am talking about this because it is the other end of the system from parole. Both of these are measures to keep the public safe. If we invest in parole and if we invest in community-based bail supervision, we would have fewer people who are victims of crime in this country. I hope that people in this House will see the wisdom of investing in these ways of rehabilitating and reintegrating people into our society.
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