- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- NDP
- Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke
- British Columbia
- Voting Attendance: 67%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $148,586.11
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Mr. Speaker, I want to start tonight by stating something that is particularly obvious to most people, which is that “tough on crime” is a slogan and not a policy that contributes to keeping communities safe. Dealing effectively with crime requires a laser focus on the reality before us. Exaggerating crime statistics to promote fear brings us no closer to solutions; in fact, it often leads us to counterproductive measures.
As such, I would ask everyone to beware of those who cite percentages when we are talking about crimes. It is an easy way to distort the situation we are facing, and the most basic example of that is that two is, of course, 100% greater than one. I am not in any way saying we do not have a problem with extortion. We clearly do, but to combat it, we must understand what is actually going on with extortion in this country.
Last month, media reports identified 74 active investigations of extortion in three provinces. What do all these investigations have in common? All the extortion cases targeted South Asian businesses. Whether they were restaurants, laundries, bakeries or convenience stores, they were all owned by members of the South Asian community. All these cases used the same methods: letters, phone calls and social media messages threatening arson, drive-by shootings and even kidnapping if protection money is not paid. All the included messages threatened bullets, rather than future messages, if the police were contacted.
Clearly, there is no coincidence here. This is organized crime at work, targeting the South Asian community.
There were incidents last November in White Rock and Abbotsford of threatening letters that gave a month to pay up. In December, shots were fired into at least one home in White Rock, while there were two shootings at homes in Abbotsford and one case of arson.
In Ontario, Peel Regional Police opened 29 investigations in November and, as in B.C., Peel Regional Police reported several shootings in which multiple shots were fired at homes and businesses. There were 34 identical incidents in Edmonton.
Some arrests have been made, including two in Surrey, seven in Edmonton and five in the Peel region. The RCMP has created a task force, which it calls the RCMP national coordination and support team, to share information and coordinate efforts to combat what is clearly a targeting of the South Asian community by organized crime.
Delivering resources to those local police forces and the RCMP, so they can share information and coordinate their efforts, is key to combatting extortion.
In February, in the midst of these instances in Surrey, the Conservative leader delivered a speech where he laid out the three things proposed in the bill before us: imposing a mandatory minimum of three years for extortion and four years if using a firearm, as well as adding arson as an aggravating circumstance. He called these additional tools for police to use.
Here is the problem with this proposal and the reason the NDP will be voting against Bill C-381: The evidence is clear that mandatory minimums are not effective as a deterrent. As a tool, mandatory minimums do not deter people from committing crime. No criminals sit around at home thumbing through the Criminal Code to see what possible penalty they face, before deciding whether to commit a crime. What they do evaluate is how certain they are to be caught and prosecuted, so devoting resources to enforcement and prosecution are the keys to deterring offences such as extortion, which are clearly premeditated and planned.
There is another problem with this, of course, and that is the unintended consequences. The member for Kingston and the Islands clearly identified that mandatory minimums disproportionately impact those most marginalized in society: the poorest in our society, indigenous people and racialized people. However, there is a second unintended consequence that is often missed, and I know about this from my experience as a police board member and from teaching criminal justice.
If we have a mandatory minimum, then the prosecutor cannot really plea bargain.
That is important in extortion, because the people who most often get arrested in extortion investigations are the ones who do the drive-by or throw the firebomb. These are most often young men who have been pressed into service by gangs. If we want to get at the organizers, the people who hired them, in effect, to carry out these crimes, we have to be able to use plea bargaining. However, with a mandatory minimum, where they know they are sure to go to prison, we have no way of getting at the people who actually organize these crimes.
As such, it is an unintended consequence of mandatory minimums that obstructs the investigation and prosecution of crimes such as extortion.
I will not go on at great length here, because we have had to make these arguments many times. It is clear that mandatory minimum sentences do not work to deter crime. It is clear what works, and that is the devotion of resources to enforcement and to prosecution. We have to understand that although the Conservatives like to situate us in some great, huge crime wave that is sweeping the country, extortion is a particularly focused campaign by organized crime to target the South Asian community in this country, and we have to respond appropriately.
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- Nov/30/23 5:23:48 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I would like to point out to the hon. member that, of course, her private member's bill had a poison pill in it for people like me who want to vote for things that are effective.
Does reform to the bail system cause crime? No, it does not, and reforms to the bail system in Bill C-75 did not increase the crime rate. There are lots of other very complicated factors we could look at about why that happened, but the Conservatives like to point to the headlines and not actually point to the things that really work when it comes to combatting crimes and preventing future victims.
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- Nov/30/23 5:22:09 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I first want to start by saying that I do quite often resent the implication that anyone in the House does not have sympathy for victims and what happens to them, or that anyone in the House actually supports crime and criminal activity. What I support, and my background was in criminal justice for 20 years before I came here, are things that are actually effective in addressing those problems.
We know that if someone is let out on bail now with no supervision, with no access to programming, the chances they will reoffend while they are out on bail are very high. The bill before us, and what we are calling for, would provide for community-based bail supervision programs, which would help avoid exactly the circumstances the member raised in this incident.
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Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise in this debate on Bill C-325 today, and I am going to be brutally honest: It is disappointing to see the Conservatives bring forward a private member's bill that builds on their campaign to exploit public fears about crime and public safety by emphasizing tragic incidents and tragic impacts on victims and continuing to ignore the evidence about what actually works in criminal justice. Of course, members of the House will know that I spent 20 years working in the criminal justice field before I came here. We know what reduces crime and what improves public safety, but the Conservatives seem to have no interest in any of those measures.
They repeatedly refer to the opinions of victims. I will, of course, agree with them that some victims are looking for harsh punishment for the perpetrators of crimes, but it is not all victims. The one thing that all victims of crime are looking for is that what happened to them does not happen to anyone else. If we look at all the scientific studies and academic studies of victims, we see that this is the one thing that all victims share in common. This means that instead of harsher measures, we need more effective measures to make sure that we do not have additional victims of crime in the future.
The main impact of Bill C-325 is to undo the reforms that were made in Bill C-5. Those were aimed at squarely attacking the problem of high rates of incarceration among indigenous and racialized people, those living in poverty and those living with mental health and addiction issues in Canadian prisons. The overincarceration of marginalized Canadians is not only unjust but also ineffective at improving public safety. Even short periods of incarceration cause major disruptions in people's lives when it comes to loss of employment, loss of housing, loss of custody of children and stigma, all of which make involvement in anti-social and criminal behaviour more likely in the future, not less likely.
The New Democrats have always supported measures that will be effective in improving public safety. This was true when we were talking about bail reform, which, again, is not the subject of Bill C-325, even though people would be surprised to find that out when listening to some of the Conservative rhetoric around it. We supported adding a reverse onus for bail in crimes involving handguns. We supported making community-based bail supervision programs more widely available in all communities, including in rural, remote and northern communities.
Community-based bail supervision will require upfront expenditures, and we have been calling on the Liberals to fund those programs. The John Howard Society runs three of those programs now in Ontario, and they have a 90% success rate. What does that 90% success rate mean? It means 90% of people in community-based bail supervision programs showed up in court when they were supposed to, and 90% did not reoffend in the period before they appeared in court. Why is that the case? It is because they had support and supervision. This is in the bill the Conservatives voted for, and now the Liberals need to come forward with the funding.
Community-based bail supervision programs are not the subject of Bill C-325, but I have to address them because Conservatives continue to act like they are. They save money in the long run because they are far cheaper: Putting people into community-based bail supervision programs is one-tenth the cost of putting them in incarceration. The problem in our federal system is that the federal government would bear the costs upfront of starting these programs, while the provinces would benefit from the savings in provincial correction systems.
Again, Bill C-325 is trying to undo the reforms that were in Bill C-5. What Bill C-5 did was to eliminate mandatory minimum sentences for all drug offences and for certain tobacco and firearms offences, none of which are classified as violent crimes in the Criminal Code. Also, Bill C-5 widened the sentencing options available to judges by allowing them to use diversion programs and house arrest as penalties for a wider number of crimes. Why is this important? It is because there are direct victims of crime, but there are also the families of the perpetrators of crime. What we are talking about there is often spouses and children. The importance of diversion programs and house arrest means that oftentimes families are not deprived of the sole income earner in the family, or they are not deprived of the person who can provide supervision for children.
By using diversion programs and house arrest in additional offences, we can help keep families together and prevent crime in the future by keeping people's ties to the community and the wider family active and alive. This is particularly important in rural, remote and northern communities, where the sentence to incarceration means not only serving time in an institution but serving it in an institution many hundreds of kilometres away from the family and supports people need to prevent them from falling back into the problems that caused them to end up as convicted criminals.
According to the Conservatives' press release, Bill C-325 would “put a stop to the alarming number of convicted violent criminals and sex offenders who are serving their sentences in their homes.” This assertion is false. Even with the reforms in Bill C-5, judges are not allowed to sentence those who present any kind of risk to the public to serve sentences in the community. The statement that the many people who are convicted of the long list of offences the Conservatives like to cite are getting house arrest is not true. Judges are not allowed to grant diversion programs and sentences served in the community to those who present a risk to the public. That is very clear in our systems.
The Conservatives also claim that Bill C-325 would go after offenders who repeatedly violate conditional release orders. It is important to note that the provisions in Bill C-325 are about parole violations, not conditional release orders. There is nothing about bail conditions in this bill despite the Conservatives continually mixing the rhetoric about catch-and-release bail provisions with the provisions of Bill C-325. What Bill C-325 would do is make all parole violations a new criminal offence and require parole officers to report all parole violations, no matter how minor, to the police and the Parole Board. This would only result in the early termination of parole.
What does that mean? People say it is a good idea because people broke the rules and their parole should be revoked. With the revocation of parole, people end up back in institutions, and at the end of their sentences, they go into the community unsupervised. Therefore, by ending parole early, we end the period during which we supervise people's behaviour, which is to make sure they present less of a threat to the public, and let them out at the end of a sentence with no incentive to complete any of the rehabilitation programs, any of the mental health and addiction programs or any of the things that would keep them from being further involved in criminal activity.
Let me conclude my remarks today by reminding people that what we need to do is support measures that are effective at reducing crime and reducing the number of victims in the future. Bill C-325 would do nothing to advance those goals and instead would further contribute to the overincarceration of racialized and indigenous people and those living in poverty in this country. The New Democrats were proud to support Bill C-5 to try to make sure that we do what is effective when fighting crime and reducing the number of victims in this country.
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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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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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- Feb/2/23 11:58:47 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for that question, which I will not take seriously. However, I think he raises a concern. We have seen this rhetoric about “tough on crime”, and we saw it implemented in Canada under the Harper government. Two things resulted from that. One was that, as the Supreme Court pointed out, most of the measures on the tough on crime agenda were unconstitutional and violated the charter. The second was that they were in place for a time in this country. What was the result of them being in place? Did crime rates plummet? No, they did not. Did the costs of the justice system and correction system skyrocket because of those measures? Yes, they did.
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- Jun/14/22 12:17:13 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-5
Madam Speaker, I do have a great deal of respect for the hon. member for Calgary Rocky Ridge as a member of Parliament.
Again, I think we are talking about something that is not going to happen here.
The penalties for sexual assault rarely come in under two years in custody and so anything with two years in custody is not eligible for a conditional sentence. It is not eligible for house arrest. It is not eligible for serving time on weekends.
I do share with him the concern about the way sexual assault is treated in our criminal justice and policing system and I do share his concern that we need to do better by victims, not just of sexual assault but of all crimes in our community.
In fact, allowing judges to use conditional sentences to get a sentence that fits the crime, fits the offender and fits the community is an important piece of progress in Bill C-5.
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- Jun/14/22 12:13:13 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-5
Madam Speaker, that is an important point we have been trying to get across in this third reading debate. The kinds of examples the Conservatives are raising and saying they will be eligible for conditional sentences will not be eligible for conditional sentences. Both the normal decisions of judges and the sentencing guidelines in use in Canadian courts mean that for serious crimes, conditional sentences will not be allowed. For anything where the sentence is over two years, that time will be served in custody and that time will be served in a federal institution.
The importance of conditional sentences is that they allow the judges to look at the circumstances of the offender and whether the offence is associated with an addiction problem or whether it is associated with a mental health problem and to come up with a sentence that actually fits the needs of the community to be safer by making the sentence fit the needs of the person who came in conflict with the law. There is an additional benefit to public safety when judges are allowed to use conditional sentences for those less serious and less violent crimes.
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Mr. Speaker, that may sound like a tough question, but for me, as someone who has been a public advocate of decriminalizing all drugs for more than a decade, that is an easy question. I think all drugs should be decriminalized, and that is what we put forward in Bill C-216 today.
If we actually look at the statistics on the mandatory minimums that are applied by judges, we see that most of them are for things like simple possession or trafficking to support people's own drug habit. I am sorry that I do not have the statistic in front of me, but something like 61% are for those offences. They are not for the offences that the Conservatives have combed through the code to find and fearmonger on by saying that eliminating those mandatory minimums means that those serious crimes would not be punished by jail time. They would be.
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