- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- NDP
- Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke
- British Columbia
- Voting Attendance: 67%
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- Government Page
- Apr/17/24 6:32:41 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, once again we have Conservatives bringing forward a bill that calls for imposing mandatory minimum penalties. I am wondering what evidence they have, in describing this as a tool, that mandatory minimums actually works as a deterrent because, as a former criminal justice instructor, I can cite stacks of information that show that mandatory minimums have absolutely no deterrent effect.
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- Jun/14/22 12:21:03 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-5
Madam Speaker, while I might not use quite as broad a brush in condemning my Conservative colleagues as the hon. member did, I think he draws attention to an important ancillary benefit of these changes in Bill C-5.
We certainly heard that one of the problems that comes from the existence of mandatory minimums is that they prevent the ability to plea bargain and keep cases out of court that take up valuable space in our courts that could be used for tackling, without delay, the more serious crimes. They increase court delays. They increase court costs.
Of course, when we keep someone in custody, as I talked about in my speech, for only a short period time, it is very expensive to do so and, at the same time, guarantees that they will not get the rehabilitation and training they need to successfully rehabilitate into society. It is not a good economic deal, as well as being not a good justice deal, as well as being not a good public safety deal.
Eliminating mandatory minimums will help us make progress on all of those fronts.
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- Jun/14/22 12:15:19 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-5
Madam Speaker, I am going to take a moment here to do what the Conservatives like to do and use an anecdote.
What about the case of a woman who is travelling with her boyfriend and he is involved with drug trafficking and he puts the drugs in her bag? When they come across the border, she is caught. Does she deserve a mandatory minimum sentence for importing drugs, or can the judge take into account the circumstances here that she may have been financially dependent on her boyfriend, or she may or may not have known he was trafficking drugs? As the law currently stands, she is going to end up in serious custody and do serious time in detention.
Just like the Conservatives like to give those extreme examples, there are many examples of where the law right now catches people and sentences them to mandatory prison time, when it is obviously not in the interest of the public to do so.
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- Jun/14/22 10:47:07 a.m.
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- Re: Bill C-5
Madam Speaker, I want to thank the parliamentary secretary for the good work that we managed to do together at committee to improve the bill.
We have just seen a couple of examples from the Conservatives and the Bloc of the attempt to somehow say that Bill C-5 threatens public safety. I wonder if the parliamentary secretary could talk about the actual evidence we heard at committee on the impact of mandatory minimum sentences and how their impact, if anything, actually improves public safety by eliminating them.
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- Jun/9/22 11:19:12 a.m.
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- Re: Bill C-5
Madam Speaker, there has been some discussion about why it is urgent to pass this bill and there is the idea that we can somehow just let this drift on. If we do not pass this bill soon, it means that additional people will be sent to detention or prison under the mandatory minimums.
Those people, through no fault of their own, will end up losing their housing, losing their jobs and having their kids apprehended. There is an urgency here that we correct this mistake. It does not matter to me who made it in the past. It is urgent to eliminate these 20 mandatory minimums so that people can get sentences that are appropriate to their crimes and get things that will help reintegrate them back into the community instead of forcing them into worse situations.
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- Jun/1/22 6:17:51 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-5
Mr. Speaker, I enjoy working with the member on the justice committee.
Of course I support all those measures he is talking about. The law on mandatory minimums is not the solution to everything, but it is a solution to systemic racism and it is a partial solution to the opioid crisis.
Do we need more measures to interdict the illegal importation of guns into our communities? Absolutely, I support those kinds of things, but the reason that this does not create public confidence is that some people are putting forward the myth that somehow eliminating mandatory minimum sentences makes our communities more dangerous. It does precisely the opposite.
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- Jun/1/22 5:30:25 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-5
Madam Speaker, I know there is a lot of shared ground here in the House of Commons on wanting to make communities safer. That is a goal we all share, but we share a difference of opinion on how best to do that. I am always disappointed when I hear the Conservatives implying that somehow mandatory minimums create safer communities, when all the research and all the evidence show that this is simply not true. I guess I am hoping the member could acknowledge that we have a difference of opinion about how best to protect communities. It is not that some of us care about communities more than others.
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