Bill C-16 (Historical)

Ending House Arrest for Property and Other Serious Crimes by Serious and Violent Offenders Act

An Act to amend the Criminal Code

This enactment amends the Criminal Code to eliminate the reference, in section 742.1, to serious personal injury offences and to restrict the availability of conditional sentences for all offences for which the maximum term of imprisonment is 14 years or life and for specified offences, prosecuted by way of indictment, for which the maximum term of imprisonment is 10 years.

Criminal Code

[Serge Ménard, Bloc, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would very much like to speak with him, because I thought more or less the same thing at first. I thought that the best option for a judge was a suspended sentence. If the individual committed any breaches, the judge could consider the breach and what it meant in terms of how dangerous the individual was. The judge could therefore reassess the length of the sentence.

In practice, however, I defy anyone to name a single province in Canada where suspended sentences have worked, that is, where they automatically brought the arrested individual before the judge who had imposed the suspended sentence. Most of the time, it had to do with a new offence, so it was settled by the second judge.

I remember one judge in Montreal, Justice O'Meara, who was very strict. When someone was brought before him a second time, I can assure this House that the sentence he had suspended was then imposed, and it was definitely a deterrent. At least a number of conditions can be imposed. This can also be done with a suspended sentence, but in that case, the individual is fully aware of the sentence he will be given if he breaches his conditions. This is for practical reasons. I would like to explain to him how this works in practice, and he will probably gradually come around to supporting conditional sentences, just as I did.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Mr. Speaker, with regard to Bill C-16, it is important to set it in its context.

I will try to demolish the myth of the Conservatives being concerned about crime and victims in our country. I wish the person who keeps talking about the revolving door had some knowledge of it. He obviously is fully ignorant of it. The condition that will come from the bill, if it ever gets through the House and into law, will encourage repeat recidivism at a much higher rate than it if does not get through.

Let us go back to the myth. Conservatives stand in the House repeatedly, and in public even much more often, and claim to be tough on crime, but this bill is the classic example of them being not smart on crime at all, but also being highly hypocritical when they take that.

It is one of a series of bills that has not received any attention from the House and not passed through to final debate because of decisions made by the government, whether it called the election in a complete contrary theme to the legislation the Conservatives themselves had passed and which they again had promulgated as a major reform then promptly ignored and breached, but any number of crime bills some of which were in areas that did not need to be dealt with. They just get sloughed off because they call an election or they prorogue the House and we have to start all over again.

We have seen that repeatedly, literally in the range of 10 to 20 bills that are constantly being shoved backwards because the government is much more interested in its political survival than it is in dealing with those issues in our society around crime.

I will make a second point before I go specifically to Bill C-16 because Bill C-16 raises this issue. I have been saying repeatedly in the House, at every opportunity I get, that we badly need a systematic, holistic review of our Criminal Code.

We see it in the sections, and I hope, if I have enough time today, I will be able to point some of these out before I finish my speech on Bill C-16. However, we have huge contradictions in the Criminal Code, repeated contradictions, both with regard to the nature of the conduct we are trying to make a crime and with regard to sentencing.

We will see situations where I think the average Canadian would say that obviously this is the range of penalty and punishment that this crime should elicit. Then they will take another section that has more extensive penalties and punishment and the crime itself is of much less serious consequence in the eyes of the average Canadian. That is repeated over and over again. There is huge duplication in the Criminal Code.

We have been, and the government is particularly guilty of this, piecemealing amendments to the code way too long.

It is interesting, if we look at the experience in the United States and to a lesser degree in England, their approaches have been much more systematic in major reform. There are some ideas we could learn from those. I will not go on with my diatribe on that, but we badly need to do something about the Criminal Code.

Let me finish with this in this regard. One of the things where we could have done this was with the Law Commission, which was promptly done away with in the first term of the government. It was the ideal body in the country that could have initiated this. In fact, it was beginning to do some work on what was a crime, what should be a crime. It was beginning to do research on it when all of its funds were cut by the government. I think that happened in the 2007-08 budget.

Had that not happened, we might have finally seen some meaningful movement on getting that major reform to the code, which would make the job of our police officers, our prosecutors and our judiciary a lot easier than it is now.

Going to Bill C-16, to set this in context, roughly 14 years ago, September 1996, we introduced into the code the concept of conditional sentences. What conditional sentences were to do was part of the overall reform we were doing through that period of time, trying to make our criminal justice system not only more fair but more efficient, more effective. Overall we have seen that we have made some significant progress in that regard by reducing the rate of crime, particularly violent crime, in this country.

I fight oftentimes on the justice committee, as I did on the public safety committee when I was there, with my Conservative colleagues about not seeing the numbers right or numbers being manipulated, which I find frankly quite insulting to Statistics Canada, specifically Juristat that does an excellent job with the statistics. But the bottom line when we get into that debate is we cannot argue about the murder rate. In 99% of the cases there is a body or witnesses to say this person was murdered. We cannot argue about that, and the reality is that the murder rate in absolute numbers, not just in percentages but in absolute numbers, has been dropping for the last 20 to 25 years. We peaked in Canada at about 900 murders in one year. We are now down, averaging over the last few years in the range of 610 to 650. So there has been that kind of drop in murders in this country.

Over that 25 year period, our population would have gone up by 10%, 12% or 15%, so the murder rate has dropped quite dramatically. Part of that is attributable to the reforms we have carried out through this period of time, and the conditional sentences were one of those reforms. We introduced them. The concept behind them is, and this has been found all the way up to Supreme Court decisions, that they are a form of incarceration. This always gets ballyhooed by some of the pundits but mostly by the Conservative Party, but they are in fact a form of incarceration. Prisoners are in their own residences not in institutions, but under very strict conditions, and I think this is the point again that the Conservatives regularly forget, much stricter conditions than we can do under either probation or even under parole, when prisoners are coming out of a federal institution.

The other point one has to make about a conditional sentence is that it cannot be used, no matter what the charge is and what the facts are, unless the judicial officer makes the determination that the appropriate sentence would be less than two years. That is the way it has always worked since 1996, in spite of some of the amendments we made a few years ago. That is still the basic condition. Judicial officers at whatever level of court they are sitting have to hear all the facts of the crime, and the facts around sentencing, and then make a determination that if they are going to send the person to custody, to incarceration, they are going to send him or her to a provincial institution because the determination, after hearing all the facts, is that the person should be incarcerated for less than two years. No matter how severe the offence is, on its surface and after looking at all the facts, judicial officers are determining a sentence of less than two years.

Everybody in the House knows that if people are going to be sentenced to less than two years, they are going to be sentenced to a provincial institution. So the incarceration rate we are talking about, if the bill were to go through, is all going to be about individuals who would be going into provincial institutions. Those people would no longer be eligible for conditional sentence; the judge would determine they are going to be incarcerated. As is so typical of the government, no arrangements are being made with the provincial governments to pay for all those additional spaces.

I want to highlight this by pointing out that the first crime bill the Conservatives brought into the House in 2006, after they were elected, was Bill C-9 and it dealt with this issue. At that time they introduced about 40 sections of the Criminal Code that would no longer be eligible for conditional sentences.

I thought the height of hypocrisy was when they did their public relations work on this and they talked about these being serious violent crimes that were no longer going to be eligible. I have to say, and I say this with some pride on the part of myself, my party and the opposition parties, that there were four or five, maybe six, sections of the code that in fact did deal with serious violent crimes. Some were sexual assaults; some were robbery with violence; they were those types of crimes.

The opposition parties said that the government was right, that people who commit these crimes and are convicted of these crimes, even when the judge is saying they should not go to jail for more than two years, should not be eligible for conditional sentences. We agreed to that.

However approximately another 35 sections had nothing to do with violent crime. The one I always use as an example of these sections that we were not going to be able to consider conditional sentencing for was falsifying a testamentary document such as a will or trust document. That was going to be excluded from consideration of the use of conditional sentence. And we could go through the list. There were some forgery sections that are clearly nothing to do with a violent crime. At the end of the day, the opposition parties stripped that bill of those 35-odd sections, dealt with the serious ones and passed it, and it is now law.

There is one other point we have to make about Bill C-9, because to some degree, not as severely, it is going to be repeated if Bill C-16 goes through. Early on in the committee process of Bill C-9, I asked the Department of Justice to tell me and the committee how many more people were going to go into custody. At the time, and it was not much smaller then, there were about 12,000 people in custody. If Bill C-9 had gone through as originally proposed by the government, there would have been an additional 5,000 people incarcerated in our provincial institutions every year.

The point I want to make, and we are seeing this again when we see the Minister of Justice and the Minister of Public Safety come before their respective committees, is that they do not know, and if they do know, they are obfuscating what is in fact the reality. At that period of time, both those ministers were in front of the justice committee and neither one of them knew, until we dug that information out of the Department of Justice, how many people were going to be incarcerated. But they were quite prepared to go ahead and pass that kind of legislation for charges that clearly fit exactly into the rationale of why we started with conditional sentences. They were going to exclude them from use and had no idea of how many people were going to go into custody.

We are seeing the same thing repeated this time. Maybe not with the report that is going to be coming out this week from the Parliamentary Budget Office on how much it is going to cost for one of the other bills that has gone through this House and is now law, but I am still expecting the Minister of Justice to show up at the justice committee, assuming this gets there, and say to us, “Do not worry. Be happy. There is enough room in our custodial settings to take care of all the additional people who are going to end up there.”

If he says that, he is going to be saying it from a complete base of ignorance, because we know, and we heard it from my colleague from the Bloc, that in all of the provincial institutions, without exception, right across all 10 provinces and all 3 territories, their facilities are bulging.

We have an international responsibility. We have signed protocols at the international level to not double-bunk. We have signed those. That is a treaty that this country has committed itself to, and there is not one province in the country that is abiding by it.

We are double-bunking and in a lot of cases triple-bunking, and we are beginning to do it more and more in the federal institutions. Therefore, we are breaching the international commitments we made to other countries.

I want to make one more point about the use of this device, again referring to my colleague who raised the revolving door issue. It is about recidivism. The statistics show and have shown for at least the last 10 years that if someone is put under control under conditional sentencing, within the first year, since that is the comparison we are doing, there is an 11% rate of recidivism where another crime is committed. Oftentimes, I have to say, the vast majority of that 11% is not actually a new crime but a breach of the conditions the person is under. The other 89% live up to the conditions. They are law abiding and do not commit any other crimes.

[Stephen Woodworth]

They don't get caught.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

The member says they do not get caught. Let us take a look at who does get caught.

Taking the same population base but looking at those who have been incarcerated and what happens in their first year out, 30% are caught and charged with additional crimes. Again, a number of them are clearly breaches of their parole but others are new crimes. That is the reality. If we look at the longer term, the rate of recidivism is even worse for those who were incarcerated. The rate spreads even more than that 11% to 30%. It has been an effective tool.

There is no question that there are certain crimes for which this should not be used and a couple of them, in fact, are in this bill. It is for that reason and that reason alone that we will be supporting it going to committee. We have every intention of taking out the offensive parts.

Let me deal with those offensive parts. I know there was a question earlier today about the disrespect that the government consistently shows to the judiciary, and this bill is another example of it.

There are a couple of clauses in the bill that would shift discretion from the judiciary to the prosecutory. The way that works is that a prosecutor would decide that a person was going to be charged with a certain offence but would have a choice as to whether he or she were going to proceed by indictment, which is the more serious way to do it, versus summary conviction. If the prosecutor decided that it would be by way of indictment, the judge then would have the use of this tool removed from his or her tool kit. He or she could no longer use it, simply by that decision. Even though the judge at the end of the day might say he or she would not be sending a person to a federal penitentiary and not committing him or her to custody for more than two years, the judge still would not be able to use the conditional sentence simply because of the decision by the prosecutor.

Our system should not function that way. It historically has not functioned that way. We have trusted our judges. I will repeat, as I have so many other times in the House, that we have the absolute right to be proud as legislators and citizens of Canada in knowing that we have one of the best judiciaries in the world. I do not think there are any in the world that are better. I might argue that one or two are peers of ours. But we would be taking away that discretion if we passed this bill, in those two clauses in particular.

There are other clauses in here where clearly conditional sentences, given the right set of facts, I would say in the majority of cases, should apply. If the judge says he or she is not sentencing someone to more than two years, conditional sentencing should still be available to the judiciary in those cases. I will get into that more in committee.

[David Tilson, Conservative, Dufferin—Caledon, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I always enjoy the remarks made by the member for Windsor—Tecumseh. He has talked about a whole bunch of things, some of which apply to this bill and some of which do not.

The real issue is very narrow. The government is not eliminating conditional sentencing. What it is suggesting in this bill is eliminating conditional sentencing for serious and violent crimes. Some of them are listed: aggravated assault, human trafficking, luring a child, street racing causing death, arson, fraud, counterfeiting, most auto thefts and extortions. I cannot believe that anyone in the House would say that those particular offences should be subject to conditional sentencing. I do not know why we are even getting into that.

My question to the member is on this very narrow issue. Does he agree that those particular charges should or should not apply to conditional sentencing, if someone is found guilty?

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for the question because it lets me get into some of the specific sections that I had not been able to in my speech.

Let us look at these. It would pertain to any sentence that the prosecutor elicits that has caused bodily harm, notice I said bodily harm, not serious bodily harm. If somebody gets a scratch on their finger, the way our code works, that is a bodily injury and that falls under this section. If somebody gets a cut hand in an altercation, they would not be eligible for a conditional sentence. That is one of the examples. That is a specific one.

Let us look at some of the other ones. There is one that always gets me. I practised a significant time in criminal law, but I also did a lot in family law. As a result, I had a number of cases where one parent abducted the children of the relationship. This section precludes, under any circumstances, the use of conditional sentences for that. There may be an abduction that lasts a day, two days or three days, where a parent has taken the child before the child is recovered and taken back to the legal custodial parent. There cannot be a conditional sentence.

It works. It is an ideal tool for that kind of situation. I can go through any number of other sections where the same thing would be true and where it should be available. It is a tool our judges need. They should have it available to them. We should not be taking it away from them.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Mr. Speaker, when someone commits a crime, obviously someone has to take action, sentence some punishment and rehabilitation. Hopefully, it is someone who has listened to all the evidence, someone who has years of experience in the criminal system, someone who learns the background of the case and the person, and of course that person would be a judge.

I would like to ask the member, and this bill is just the tip of the iceberg, how has the government eroded the tools available to judges to make the most appropriate decisions that would make Canadians safer?

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Mr. Speaker, again, I thank my colleague from Yukon who worked on the justice committee with me for a period of time.

I thank him for that question because it is another point I wanted to raise that I did not have time to raise. There is a provision in this bill, and it is along the lines of what the member has asked, that says if any offence has a mandatory minimum sentence, conditional sentences cannot be used.

I have to say, first, I do not think the section is necessary. I think there are enough court decisions that say if there is a mandatory minimum, there is no discretion on the part of the judge. The history of this section is that the judge cannot use it subsequent to incarcerating someone. That has been the history of the section.

The effect of it, then, is that we see the government moving more and more toward, and in some areas, really silly mandatory minimums. We are going to see it shortly if the news over the weekend is the same. The government is going to bring back the drug bill, and for five marijuana plants there is going to be a mandatory minimum of six months or 30 days, whatever it is. I think it is six months. The judges are not going to be able to use conditional sentencing for that.

There is a provision in conditional sentencing that cannot be used in probation, that requires a person to take treatment. We know, with regard to drug offences, so much of that is related to a health issue rather than a criminal justice or criminal law issue. That is a great tool to have available with regard to drug offences.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague, the member for Windsor—Tecumseh. It is obvious to all listening in the House why he is so often nominated the most knowledgeable member in this place.

The question I have for him is on two fronts. The first is with respect to this almost aggressive attitude from the government toward the judiciary that we see time and time again. The stories the government is willing to relate to describe its tough on crime agenda is via way of almost a verbal assault on the reputation of judges in this country. The government is interested in tough on crime but not so much in being smart on crime. That is worrisome to me. Why that bias?

The second piece is around this broad stroke that is contained within this bill. He gave a couple of examples of what happens when it is removed as an option for a whole suite of crimes. Is it not true that New Democrats actually support some of the conditions, some of the sentencing provisions within this bill but are seeking to remove the most draconian, the ones that will not effectively make society a safer place to live in?

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Mr. Speaker, there are some sections in here, and as I said, we will be supporting the bill to go to committee so we can include these. One of the sections where we would preclude the use of this section is luring a child. I think everyone agrees with that. Again, I can think of one or two situations where we may say maybe we should leave that as a judicial discretion, and I will explore that at committee. However, overall, on the surface, it would appear that, yes, absolutely, we should not be using conditional sentences for that.

There is one on arson, where it is based on planning a fraudulent act. Again, it is almost in the line of organized crime and should not be used. There are several more. One is on kidnapping.

There is another one. It is a dual one and I am not sure how we are going to handle this. The section is the theft over $5,000. That is what has been put in the bill. What was not put in the bill is another section that is included in that of a testamentary document. So, one can be convicted of that, either by stealing a testamentary document or stealing more than $5,000. There is any number of factual situations I can think of where the theft of a testamentary document should not preclude the use of this. And is $5,000 the right figure? Should it perhaps be higher, given inflation and the rest of it?

However, there are a number of sections that we will be supporting because they make sense. And I have to say what we are going to find, when we look at this, is that judges have hardly ever used those in those circumstances anyway. They are by far the exception. As were those other sections that we passed the last time. We have good judges in this country. They are not going to use this section and they have not.

What the current government has done, what this political party has done, consistently, is use those rare exceptions where a judge has gone offside and it uses those as an example to justify this wholesale change for this very valuable and useful tool.

[Kevin Sorenson, Conservative, Crowfoot, AB]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak in support of Bill C-16. This bill would end house arrest for property and other serious crimes by serious and violent offenders.

It is good to hear that the NDP is going to vote in favour of this to move it to committee. I am sure our committee, chaired by the member for Abbotsford, will do good work on this bill.

Bill C-16 addresses the issue of conditional sentences or house arrest as it is often described. The issue is not a new one and has been considered by this chamber in recent years. While that debate is relatively fresh in our minds, there does not seem to be an appreciation for the operation and principles of sentencing in criminal cases in Canada, and within that, the proper role for any sentencing option, including conditional sentences. This is what I will use my time to address.

It has become clear to me over the years here, as illustrated by the nature of the debate over various aspects of this government's tackling crime agenda, that the sentencing regime, while widely criticized, is understood by relatively few people.

Criticisms based upon misperceptions or misunderstandings contribute little to a serious discussion about a serious issue. In fairness, I recognize that part of this has to do with the sheer complexity of modern criminal law, which must deal with everything from single assault through complex commercial crime, all the way to terrorism and to cybercrime that uses the most advanced technologies.

Part of it has also to do with the nature of the Criminal Code sentencing regime itself, which contains a lengthy list of purposes, objectives, and principles that have often been supplemented by complex legal rulings from different levels of courts all across this country.

It is not hard to see why those who are not formally trained in law, as I am not, may find it challenging to understand immediately the specifics of particular reform proposals, such as those before the House today.

Yet, our role as lawmakers is to work through these complexities and through these challenges to ensure that we understand the current shortcomings of the law and how the proposed reforms we are discussing would effectively address those shortcomings within the overall sentencing regime.

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Lethbridge.

To really understand the current shortcomings of the conditional sentencing regime and the central problem that Bill C-16 intends to rectify, we must understand the original rationale for the creation of conditional sentences.

Shortly stated, conditional sentence is a sentence of less than two years that a judge allows offenders to serve in the community subject to a number of conditions whose breach could send them directly to prison.

I can readily acknowledge that for the average Canadian the notion of a conditional sentence seems somewhat confusing and even contradictory at times.

While the conditional sentence is a form of punishment, it is not easily categorized because it straddles the line between prison, probation, and even in some cases has the markings of the hallmarks of parole.

For instance, it is not actual jail time because if the offenders satisfy all the conditions that are imposed upon them, they will never spend a single day in prison despite the nature of the offence for which those individuals were convicted. Nor is it probation, for a probation order is typically made in the case of a suspended sentence and is enforced quite differently with greater difficulty than a conditional sentence.

As the name implies, a conditional sentence takes the form of a sentence. By the same token, a conditional sentence is not parole since the offender is not released after having served an appropriate period of time in a prison or a penitentiary under the authority of our Canadian correctional system. It is the sentencing court, not a Parole Board, that exercises the discretion to order a conditional sentence in lieu of jail time.

In hindsight, it is clear from the statements of the original sponsoring minister back in 1994, as well as from subsequent court judgments, such as the Supreme Court of Canada's decision in R. v. Proulx, that the conditional sentence was conceived as an alternative to imprisonment and as one way to reduce Canada's rate of incarceration. We heard the NDP bring that forward here this afternoon.

While this is a laudable objective, it cannot be allowed to detract from the protection of society as the guiding principle or to diminish the right of that society to denounce particularly heinous conduct and to punish those responsible for that conduct.

This brings me to the central issue that I want to raise with regard to conditional sentences. Prior to this government's most recent conditional sentencing amendments in 2006, there were four criteria for a conditional sentence order. First, the sentence had to be less than two years. Second, the person had to show that he or she was not deemed to be a danger to society or to the community. Third, there was no mandatory minimum term of imprisonment. Fourth, there had to be consistency with the fundamental purpose and principles of sentencing.

The discretion that was granted to judges by these criteria was quite wide. In fact, from the outset, critics have reasonably argued that the discretion accorded by Parliament in the early years of the conditional sentence regime itself was overly broad. For example, with regard to the first and second criteria, even now most sentences in Canada are less than two years and, among the large number of Criminal Code offences, there are still relatively few that call for mandatory minimums.

By the same token, the third criteria originally asked a sentencing judge to assess the danger of an offender to his or her community, but without offering any supporting criteria against which to make an assessment. The fourth criteria provided insufficient direction for the proper use of a conditional sentence. The purpose and principles of sentencing cover a lot of philosophical ground in that they require sentencing judges to balance denunciation, deterrence and separating an offender from society by methods of rehabilitation, restitution and the development of a sense of social responsibility by the offender. That responsibility was placed on the judiciary.

Criteria one and two illustrate what many believe was so radically wrong with the conditional sentence regime as originally enacted: the focus on the length of the sentence rather than on the nature of the offence, the character and criminal record of the offender and not so much the consequences for the victim of that criminal's action.

It was particularly notorious that the conditional sentencing regime as originally developed did not see fit to explicitly exclude particularly odious crimes such as child sex offences. In such cases, the repugnant nature of the offence, the character of the offender and the consequences for the victim should have been paramount considerations and should have automatically made such offences ineligible for conditional sentences.

It should not be surprising, therefore, that the courts had difficulty grappling with conditional sentences. This was especially so after the Supreme Court in R. v. Proulx appeared to endorse the notion that no offences were presumptively excluded from the conditional sentence regime. In fact, Proulx offered very little guidance to sentencing judges, nor did the Supreme Court itself appear to have a consistent approach to conditional sentences. Four conditional sentencing cases decided by the Supreme Court at the same time as Proulx highlighted the apparent lack of judicial consensus on these issues.

I see that my time for debate is up. I am very pleased that the government has moved forward with this. We have done this before in Bill C-9. We have done it at other times in the House. We have debated it recently in past Parliaments. I look forward to this bill being passed quickly, moved to the committee, studied, and brought back to the House. This is going to make Canada safer and a better place for all.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Mr. Speaker, I think the member's speech was well researched by the department and had some very good information in it. I would like to ask him a few questions, which I have asked before.

Court cases are in the papers. They become public once they are finished. Considering that the Bloc has announced that there are hundreds and probably thousands of successful conditional sentences, could the member give a few examples of unsuccessful ones that indicate the need for this particular bill?

Of course, society is made safer if a person is less likely to reoffend. The evidence is that under conditional sentences the offenders are less likely to reoffend. Has that been shown? Why would that not be safer for society in a number of cases? I am not saying in all cases but in a number of cases. Hopefully the researchers have come up with answers to those questions since I asked them about an hour ago.

[Kevin Sorenson, Conservative, Crowfoot, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I will tell the House what a lot of our constituents tell me.

We have sent out ten percenters into our own constituencies to judge some of the responses from our constituencies. A number of them have gone out asking a question regarding conditional sentences. Many constituents respond by asking, in the case where someone is an arsonist and burns down someone else's home, burns down someone else's property why would we then allow that person to complete the sentence in his or her own home?

Many times we read about people who have breached the conditions in a conditional sentence. With respect to drug crimes, many have continued to either traffic or to be involved in that culture.

I would say to the member for Yukon, it is correct that there is a difference between the former government and this government. We take the rights of victims very seriously. We look at the offenders. Protection of society is the guiding principle. In many severe cases we believe, my constituents believe and I believe that they need to be lived out. Offenders need to spend their time in prison doing time for their crime.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I listened intently to my friend's speech earlier.

The Conservatives at one point in their history used to be quite interested in the costs of various pieces of legislation. Whenever we would bring a bill forward, particularly on the environment, it seemed to be their constant obsession that they would ask about the costing of the program.

Many times we have asked that the same consistent approach be applied here. What are the expected costs of different pieces of legislation? Initially the minister projected one of the bills at $89 million. I believe that the Parliamentary Budget Officer will be coming out with costs later this week and the early estimates are that it is in the several billions of dollars. There is a cost associated with changing the law, changing the punishment and the amount of time people spend in jail.

This seems to me to be an important part of this debate. Has my colleague costed the bill or has his government done so and if not, why not?

[Kevin Sorenson, Conservative, Crowfoot, AB]

Mr. Speaker, again the member is asking about the cost of the program. Let me tell him about the cost to society.

The cost to society in putting some of these folks into their own home so that they can go out and reoffend is huge. There is the cost to the victim. There is the cost of the victim knowing that after going through the whole judicial process, the guy is being put back into his home rather than into prison. There is the frustration that the victim experiences seeing that the guy gets to live out his sentence in the luxury and confines of his home.

Therein lies the great distance between us and the New Democrat members: they look to the offender, to the criminal asking what is the cost; we look to the victim and ask what is the cost to society.