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CANADA House of Commons Debates VOLUME 142 Ï NUMBER 023 Ï 2nd SESSION Ï 39th PARLIAMENT OFFICIAL REPORT (HANSARD) Friday, November 23, 2007 Speaker: The Honourable Peter Milliken CONTENTS (Table of Contents appears at back of this issue.) Also available on the Parliament of Canada Web Site at the following address: http://www.parl.gc.ca 1275 HOUSE OF COMMONS Friday, November 23, 2007 The House met at 10 a.m. We had commenced work on that in a special legislative committee prior to prorogation. The prorogation by the government of course ended that bill, as it did the other four, three of which by the way were in the Senate, and the fourth one was out of committee Prayers at report stage in the House. So now, because of what I think is a very foolish decision but a GOVERNMENT ORDERS very political decision on the part of government, we are having to go back through all of those four bills and we have wasted a TACKLING VIOLENT CRIME ACT significant amount of time. The House proceeded to the consideration of Bill C-2, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and to make consequential amendments to other Acts, as reported without amendment from the committee. The government is historically very proud to stand in this House and accuse the opposition parties of delay. Of course, what has Ï (1005) happened here has been entirely on its desk and it is something of [English] which the Conservatives should be ashamed. SPEAKER'S RULING The Speaker: There are five motions in amendment standing on To come back to Bill C-27, as it was then and now that part of Bill the notice paper for the report stage of Bill C-2. C-2, the dangerous offender section of the Criminal Code has a history going back in this country to 1978 at which time it was Motions Nos. 1 and 3 to 5 will not be selected by the Chair as they incorporated. could have been presented in committee. The remaining motion has been examined and the Chair is satisfied that it meets the guidelines expressed in the note to Standing Order 76.1(5) regarding the I do not think there is any disagreement about this no matter selection of motions in amendment at report stage. which political party one belongs to, that there are individuals in our society that we are not able to cope with in terms of rehabilitating [Translation] them. They commit serious, oftentimes heinous, violent crimes Motion No. 2 will be debated and voted upon. against other residents of Canada. When we use our traditional attempts to deal with them by way of prison terms, oftentimes I shall now put Motion No. 2 to the House. psychiatric or psychological treatment programs, they are not [English] successful. MOTIONS IN AMENDMENT Mr. Joe Comartin (Windsor—Tecumseh, NDP) moved: Our psychiatrists, our psychologists and our best experts admit there is a very small number of individuals that we simply, as a Motion No. 2 society in terms of our psychological and psychiatric treatment That Bill C-2 be amended by deleting Clause 42. modalities, are not able to treat and rehabilitate to the point where He said: Mr. Speaker, thank you for the ruling on this amendment they are no longer a risk to society once released from our prisons. indicating that it is within the proper scope of the rules and The dangerous offender section was introduced into the Criminal admissible. Code to deal specifically with those individuals. The amendment deals with the specific section of a very large bill, an omnibus crime bill, and specifically with that part of the bill that Based on some very good research from the Library of Parliament, deals with the dangerous offender designation in the Criminal Code. since 1978 we have had 384 individuals, up until the spring of 2005 so it is a bit more now, all male, designated as dangerous offenders. Just quickly, the balance of Bill C-2 encompasses five separate It is interesting to note that of those 384, 333 as of April 2005 were pieces of legislation that were before this House in the previous still in custody, still in prison. Only 18 had been released and were parliamentary session. The dangerous offender section at that time on parole. The balance of approximately 33 died in prison. I think was Bill C-27. It has now been incorporated into Bill C-2. this is the point that we need to recognize. 1276 COMMONS DEBATES November 23, 2007 Government Orders Ï (1010) My amendment, pure and simple, would delete the reverse onus from this bill because it would not survive a charter challenge. We This designation, unlike a conviction for first degree murder and a are going to have tremendous litigation on this and at the end of the life sentence, is in fact a life sentence in the 90 percentile of the day one of our superior courts, or even the Supreme Court of cases. These individuals never get out. It is a recognition that we are Canada, will strike this section down. The amendment would take not capable of dealing with them. They stay in custody, in prisons, care of that right now and we could save all that trouble. for the balance of their lives and literally, as I have said, die in prison. That is what we are dealing with when we are dealing with a Ï (1015) dangerous offender designation. [Translation] As I indicated earlier, there are no women who have been Mr. Gilles-A. Perron (Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, BQ): Mr. Speaker, designated, up until April 2005. There are a couple of applications I listened carefully to my colleague across the way. One thing he said outstanding against women currently. really shocked me. What struck me is when he said that 3% of the population is aboriginal and 20% of them are designated as One of the other points that I would make that comes out of the dangerous offenders. research done by the library is that a full one-fifth, 20%, of all the individual criminals who have been designated are from the Would it be right to conclude that the crime rate among aboriginal aboriginal population, from our first nations. nations is higher than among other groups? If so, what are the causes of this high crime rate and what can we do about it? There is no question, and we see this more when we look at [English] statistics in the United States, that subgroups within our society often times are individuals who are more targeted and receive greater Mr. Joe Comartin: Mr. Speaker, I am always proud to say that punishment. our criminal justice system is as good as any in the world and maybe the best in the world. However, from a number of studies, including I am not going to suggest for a minute that the designations in a book that was published by one of the professors at the University those cases were inappropriate; they may or may not have been. of Windsor law school, the reality is that discrimination enters into However, that is the reality, given that our aboriginal population in our system. It is systemic. It is not overt. It is subtle but it creeps into this country is roughly 3% of the population but slightly over 20% the system. are designated as dangerous offenders. I will not suggest, by any means, that all cases are like this, but We know that this is a section of the Criminal Code that we would what happens is that the police, prosecutors and, yes, the judiciary on use, obviously, very sparingly. The issue of the constitutionality of some occasions come with a hidden bias and the process starts. this section has been to the Supreme Court on a number of occasions Unfortunately, because of the general economic status in which our and reviewed also by a number of our appeal courts at the provincial first nations find themselves, they end up being disproportionately level. found. The message that comes out very clearly is that it is to be used All of the experts, psychologists and psychiatrists with whom I sparingly, that it is to be used with extreme caution, that the have spoken have absolutely rejected the suggestion that the ratio of individuals who are confronted with this are to be given the greatest serious violent offenders is any greater within the aboriginal amount of doubt as to the usage against them because of the population than it is within the general population. We saw that in consequences. the Callow case in Toronto. The prosecutors for the province of Ontario in that case should have brought a dangerous offender I want to repeat that the consequences in more than 90% of the application against him and they did not. cases are that these individuals, once designated as dangerous offenders, will stay in prison for the balance of their life. They will We can go through any number of cases and ask why they did not. never get out. That is really where the solution is to the use of this, not in trying to force individuals with the reverse onus to show why they should not Faced with that, if we look now at the bill that is before us, Bill be held. There is that subtle discrimination and so we end up with C-2, the government has introduced into clause 42 a provision for a that kind of a statistic.