- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Brantford—Brant
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 64%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $129,861.80
- Government Page
- Jun/15/23 10:28:05 a.m.
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- Re: Bill C-5
Madam Speaker, it is always a privilege and honour to speak in the chamber, but, more importantly, to lend a voice to the fine residents of Brantford—Brant. On a topic such as this, with next to no notice, it is even more important that I lend an appropriate voice.
I come at debates on criminal justice issues and victim issues from a place of significant experience. I know that several members have heard me explain my background, but for those who have not, it is important to remark that, prior to being elected in September 2021, I enjoyed a 30-year legal career. In those 30 years, I saw both sides of the equation. I defended the worst of the worst for 12 years. I defended individuals charged with shoplifting, mischief, paintball, tagging and spray-painting offences, all the way up to and including murder.
I decided, after reflecting on my 12-year defence career, that it did not give me a sense of satisfaction, because, ultimately, when I cross-examined victims of crime from all walks of life, from young children all the way to senior citizens, it was heartbreaking to see how our criminal justice system works. It is extremely adversarial. Defence counsel have a job to do, and that job is to ensure that there is a fair trial, but, reflecting on the fairness of trials, sometimes one has to sacrifice one's personal beliefs and morals.
After 12 years, I was at the point when I was about to get married and wanted to start a family, and I asked myself what type of husband and father I wanted to be. I was taking steps to ensure serious violent offenders were escaping justice and responsibility. Although it is ultimately the task of a defence lawyer not only to ensure not fairness but also, hopefully, win the case, it certainly creates havoc with respect to the victim's sense of what type of system we have. My colleague, the member for Fundy Royal, could not have said it better: in our role as a parliamentarians, the theme we hear over and over again is that this is definitely not a justice system but merely a legal system.
When I joined the Crown's office in 2004, every single day that I was a public servant for the Province of Ontario left me with a gratifying feeling. Not only was I contributing to the fairness aspect of our legal system, our justice system, by holding offenders accountable, but also I was, in my small way, giving victims the voice they felt they had lost in being victimized, not being believed by police services, not being believed by legal professionals, or not being believed by judges. I took it as my personal mantra to dispel as many myths as possible when prosecuting, as I said, shoplifting, which has a societal impact, all the way to multiple murders. I have seen it all in my 18 years of Crown experience. I was left with a goal to ensure that, in my small way, I left victims whole again.
While offenders who do get punished usually end up in jail, depending on the nature of the crime, they will serve their sentence and move on with their lives. The same cannot be said for victims of crime. Some victims of crime live with the trauma of this experience for the rest of their natural lives. It was important for me as Crown counsel for the Province of Ontario to equip those victims who went through this horrific process and to give them the tools to put together their lives after this crime.
It begs the question of why I chose to leave a very rewarding, satisfying career as a Crown attorney to enter these halls. The answer is simple. I was sick and tired of seeing the escalation of crime from coast to coast to coast, but particularly in my small riding of Brantford—Brant.
I was born and raised in my riding. I remember growing up, all through high school, my university days, my law school days and ultimately my career as a lawyer and Crown attorney, it was a safe place to live and to raise a family. Literally, in the last 10 years of my practice as a Crown attorney, I was seeing a gradual increase in the prevalence of crime, but more so a prevalence of serious violent crime.
Early on in my Crown days it would be common not to prosecute a homicide for several years. Fast-forward to 2020 and 2021, when I ultimately took a leave of absence to pursue politics, and we had 12 homicides on the books, with a small office of six Crown attorneys. It was overwhelming.
It was not just the homicides. We had shootings, drug trafficking, fentanyl and all kinds of the nasty criminal activity this House speaks about literally on a daily basis and that we read about online or in the papers. That is what was happening. I felt my effective voice as a Crown attorney could only go so far. I wanted to be an instrument of change. I wanted to correct the wrongs with respect to our legal system.
I must say it was completely frustrating for me to arrive in this House and hear the government touting how serious it is about our justice system, about holding offenders accountable and about victims' rights. Everything it does ultimately is the complete opposite.
As my colleague has already indicated, Bill C-5 is a disaster. It is still a disaster, taking the most significant, serious, violent offences and opening up the possibility they can serve it in the comfort of their own homes. I am going to go further on conditional sentences, or house arrest. These individuals are entitled to work, spend some time in the community and go shopping.
That is not holding an offender accountable, so it brings me full circle as to why we are here. We are here because the Minister of Public Safety has lost the trust of Canadians and of this House, and on that basis, I am asking that the motion be amended.
I move:
That the motion be amended by deleting all the words after the word “That” and substituting the following:
the Seventh Report of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, presented on Monday, April 17, 2023, be not now concurred in, but that it be recommitted to the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights with instruction that it amend the same so as to recommend that the Minister of Public Safety immediately resign given his total lack of consideration for victims of crime in his mishandling of the transfer to more cozy arrangements of one of the worst serial killers in Canadian history, that this unacceptable move has shocked the public and created new trauma for the families of the victims and that the Minister of Public Safety's office knew about this for three months prior to Paul Bernardo's transfer and instead of halting it, the information was hidden from the families.
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- Feb/2/23 3:32:58 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I wish to inform the House that I will be splitting my time with my colleague, the member for Barrie—Innisfil.
It is always a privilege to stand in this House to speak on behalf of my constituents of Brantford—Brant. After eight years, the Prime Minister and his government are solely responsible for our failing justice system. This is pressing and urgent; bail reform is needed now. Far too often, we are hearing Canadians use language such as “catch and release”, “a revolving door” and “an unequal justice system” to describe the state of affairs in Canadian bail courts.
In my almost two decades of prosecuting in the trenches of our criminal justice system, I have repeatedly witnessed dangerous criminals being released on bail. I am honoured to add my experience working in the criminal justice system to such an important debate. A major concern during my lawyer years was our inability to keep violent repeat offenders off the streets and in custody where they belong. I was unable to vocally criticize the lenient bail system as a Crown attorney, so I made the decision to become a politician to effect change.
The Liberal government wants Canadians to believe it has crime under control with its justice policies and that it is on the right track. I thank our Conservative leader and all my Conservative colleagues for bringing this debate into the House and for showing Canadians that this Liberal soft-on-crime agenda has broken our bail system and eroded confidence in our judicial institutions.
In 2019, to codify the principles outlined in the Supreme Court of Canada case Antic, the Liberals passed Bill C-75. Although it was intended to modernize the bail system, the effect of this legislation was to allow offenders arrested for violent crimes to be released back on the street fast enough to commit other crimes, sometimes on the same day. In fact, this was an occurrence that I routinely saw as a Crown prosecutor. I would often read Crown briefs noting the accused laughed and bragged to the arresting officers that they would be released in hours.
After receiving numerous calls and emails from my constituents, who shared their concerns about Canada's justice system, I met with the Brantford police chief, Rob Davis, and the president of the Brantford Police Association, Constable Jeremy Morton. It was important to learn directly from them what the root causes are and how we as parliamentarians can address them.
Chief Davis shared with me that it is disheartening to all police officers to see that they are doing their job, they are catching people, they are putting them before the courts, they are asking that they be held in custody but they are being released. He said that criminals are brazen and are laughing at the current justice system. He said oftentimes, they are getting back home before the officers do, and the next thing he knows, they are committing twice as much crime. It is a telltale sign of the level of brazenness among criminals. He also reflected on how the system has dramatically shifted and said that criminals' rights have now superseded the rights of victims.
For years, Canadian law enforcement worked hard to build trust in the police and give victims a level of security if they came forward, and the perpetrator was put into the justice system. Now, everything, according to him, is upside down. The Liberal soft-on-crime approach, he says, is bringing the justice system into disrepute, and the concern that law enforcement now has is that if society loses faith in the justice system, we may find ourselves in a situation where citizens will decide to take things into their own hands.
I never thought as a parliamentarian that I would be quoting Oprah Winfrey, but on her show, every Christmas, she would have giveaways. She would point to the audience and say, “You get a car”, or they got another gift. That is precisely what has happened with the Liberal government and the Prime Minister given their approach to the bail system in Canada. With the Prime Minister, for the last eight years we have said, “He gets bail. She gets bail. Everyone gets bail”, regardless of the fact that they have repeated criminal offences on their record, regardless of the fact that they have an outstanding charge and regardless of how serious the charge is.
It is a statistical fact that the majority of serious violent crimes committed in this country are committed by a handful of repeat offenders. For example, in Vancouver alone, 40 offenders were arrested 6,000 times in one year. That is 150 arrests per person, per year. Brantford Police Chief Davis further spoke on this issue and stated that we have entire neighbourhoods that one or two bad apples will terrorize as repeat violent offenders.
The data published by Statistics Canada clearly shows that between 2008 and 2014, under the Harper government, Canada witnessed an annual decrease in the crime severity index. From 2015 onward, this trend changed dramatically.
Since the Prime Minister took office, the number of crimes has grown year after year. Violent crime has gone up 32% in one year. Gang-related killings have gone up 92% since the Liberals formed government. In 2021, there were over two million police-reported Criminal Code incidents, marking an increase of 25,000 incidents since 2020.
Since the fall of 2022, tragically, five Canadian police officers have been killed while on duty. With hundreds of murders in 2021, one Canadian was murdered every 10 hours throughout the year. The 2020 data shows that Canada's homicide rate is roughly double that of the U.K. and France, and four times higher than that of Italy.
Even though the Prime Minister and his government are claiming that Bill C-75 was meant to clear the backlog of people waiting for bail hearings, experts say it has done much more than that. Essentially, the government has told judges dealing with bail applications that they need to make sure anyone accused of a crime is released at the earliest opportunity and on the least serious conditions. Let that sink in. Primary consideration is for the accused, not for the victim and not for society at large. Some judges and justices of the peace feel that the bill has put shackles on them and has resulted in an increase in releases, even by violent offenders.
Last month, all 13 premiers sent a letter to the Prime Minister calling for amendments to keep more people in custody as they await trial. This call was supported by police chiefs, police associations, mayors and provincial attorneys general from coast to coast to coast. Recently, the Toronto police chief opined on the issue of bail reform and argued that only judges and not JPs should be allowed to hear bail cases when serious gun charges are involved.
A multipronged approach to bail reform is required. According to the Supreme Court, everyone is entitled to a speedy trial. However, it can often take years to get to trial. We need to speed up the system so that when criminals show up in court, the judge knows they will get a speedy trial and may be less inclined to bail them out.
The Liberals said they were open to discussions, but that has been their position since the provincial justice ministers raised that issue last March, almost a year ago. Instead, the government has been busy passing Bill C-5 and Bill C-21.
This January, a judge in my riding of Brantford—Brant said that my hometown community is “plagued by gun violence—murders caused by guns and people walking around with firearms. It never used to be as prevalent as it is today.” She said, “Now it’s an epidemic”, and that the Crown should get tougher on offenders.
To put it into perspective, the Liberals and the NDP have ignored the real way that most criminals get their guns under Bill C-21. They eased bail conditions for serious violent crimes under Bill C-75 and decided to put the safety of victims at risk with Bill C-5. The Conservatives have been calling for a balance to the justice system and bail reform for years, but the Liberal Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada continues to defend the current system.
I have a very quick primer on bail. Bail legislation reflects the fundamental principles outlined in Canada’s charter that attempt to balance the rights of the accused by upholding the presumption of innocence with public safety and confidence in the system. The law allows for people who are deemed risky to be detained for certain indictable offences, or when confidence in the administration of justice would be undermined by releasing a person into the community.
Canada needs bail reform now to pull back from the failed views put forward by the government. We cannot continue to endanger our communities by letting repeat violent offenders walk freely on our streets and simply wait before they harm somebody. How much more blood needs to be spilled on our streets? How many more police officers need to lose their lives before the government finally acts?
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