Category: Harm Reduction

Today’s testimony focused on part 4 of Bill C-10, which would amend the Youth Criminal Justice Act. Specifically, these amendments would allow a judge to lift the publication ban on cases involving defendants as young as 12 years old, introduce dissuasion and deterrence as principals of Canadian youth justice, and make it easier to incarcerate youth convicted of violent crimes.

The committee heard from a number of lawyers and children’s advocates, including Marvin Bernstein of UNICEF Canada, Mary-Ellen Turpel-Lafond, President, and Sylvie Godin, Vice-President of the Canadian Council of Child and Youth Advocates, and Judge Barry Stuart, former Chief Justice of the Yukon.

These witnesses unanimously protested nearly all of the proposed amendments to the Youth Criminal Justice Act. They claimed that allowing judges to lift publication bans would have disastrous long-term consequences for young people.

They also argued that, in the case of young offenders, a violent crime can mean throwing a snowball, throwing water on someone, or threatening a classmate. Bernstein, Turpel-Lafond and Godin also told the committee that, in their opinion, the proposed amendments were in contravention with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Canada is a signatory.

Judge Barry Stuart, a pioneer in restorative justice, had particularly severe warnings for the committee, claiming that if they went down this road, and further criminalized young people, that they would never attain the goals of improving victims’ rights and engaging communities in offender rehabilitation. Rather, the “tail-end” of the criminal justice system would suck up all resources that could have far greater impact on justice and public safety if spent elsewhere.

Many Conservative senators repeated standard responses to the testimony of these witnesses. Rather than asking questions, their cross-examination seemed more an attempt to discredit their testimony. This behaviour has seemed most often on display when the committee is hearing from academic experts and legal professionals, whereas it changes to a more conciliatory tone in the presence of law enforcement officials.

In response to the very real problems outlined in regards to Bill C-10, Senator Wallace once again repeated his favourite line: “But when Ministers Toews and Nicholson appeared before this committee, they assured us that the bill will only target violent, repeat offenders, organized criminals, and child abusers.”

Senator Wallace seems to believe that simply repeating this mantra will make it true, despite the mountains of evidence given by representatives of children’s advocacy groups, the Canadian Bar Association, the Assembly of First Nations, as well as independent academics and many others. Unfortunately, the CDPC was not permitted to add its voice to this overwhelming chorus.

The comportment of these Conservative Senators—Boisvenu, Lang, Frum, Dagenais, and Wallace—seems to indicate that they don’t understand the fundamental purpose of their own position: to give a sober second thought to proposed legislation one step removed from the dictates of electoral politics. Indeed, during hearings today Senator Lang went so far as to claim that “one might argue the nuances or the details, but it’s the spirit of the law that matters.” Perhaps no one told Senator Lang that the nuances and the details of the law are precisely what a senate committee is meant to discuss.

Perhaps this disdain for evidence is what prompted Judge Barry Stuart’s remark that the Senate, “probably spends more time weighing evidence on which military aircraft to purchase than on weighing evidence on what is best for our youth.”

Today’s Senate committee hearings into Bill C-10 focused on testimony from three lawyers regarding amendments to the International Transfer of Prisoners Act: Nathalie Des Rosiers, General Counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, Fannie Lafontaine, a law professor at the University of Laval, and John Conroy, a lawyer in the Fraser Valley.

These lawyers were very concerned with the expansion of ministerial discretion over the repatriation of Canadian prisoners. They argued that the bill would make it easier for a minister to deny the transfer of prisoners for what amounts to arbitrary reasons.

Mr. Conroy brought up the example of the Goulet case, where Minister Toews’ decision not to repatriate a prisoner convicted of a drug crime was deemed unreasonable by a federal judge. The decision cited twelve previous ministerial decisions since 2008 that were also deemed unreasonable, showing a problematic pattern in politicized decision-making over prisoner transfer. In these cases, the minister ignored the evidence put forward by officials at the Ministry of Public Safety; as Mr. Conroy put it, “It’s as if the minister doesn’t trust his own ministry.”

The three lawyers made it clear that there were many good reasons to repatriate prisoners. Chief among them was that in serving a sentence elsewhere, and returning to Canada upon release, the offender neither has a criminal record in Canada, nor is required to check in with correctional authorities.

Lawyers argued that public safety is far better served when prisoners are repatriated, since, in the words of Mr. Conroy, it allows Correctional Service Canada to “get to know” the offender through risk evaluations, follow ups, and the increasingly long leash of parole prior to full release. Furthermore, Canadian prison objectives prioritize the rehabilitation and reintegration of offenders, which is not the case in many other jurisdictions including the United States, the source country of 85% of transfers to Canadian prisons.

But for Conservative members of the committee such as Senators Lang, Runciman, Boisvenu, Dagenais, and Wallace, these arguments are akin to “hug-a-thug” rhetoric that privileges offenders over victims.

As Senator Lang argued, these offenders “knew the consequences of the crimes they were committing” and should therefore serve out their sentences in the jurisdiction where they committed the crime.

These senators claim that Canadian prisons are too lax, and it is only for this reason that Canadian offenders would want to return home. For instance, according to Senator Lang, prisoners in the US must serve 85% of their sentence before being eligible for parole, and in many cases the sentences are harsher than those for the same offences in Canada. Lang ignored the fact that the length of a prisoner’s sentence does not change once he or she is repatriated to Canada. From these comments, it seems that what these Conservative senators are really saying is Canada should not only have harsher sentences, but the Canadian Criminal Code’s principal objectives of rehabilitation and reintegration are not to be respected.

But Lang does have a point: the United States has very harsh sentences. As I mentioned in a previous post, California’s “3 strikes and you’re out” law has put thousands of drug offenders behind bars for life. And in the US federal system as a whole, over half of inmates are serving time for drug offences.

In watching the committee hearings unfold, I am struck by the way the bill’s proponents seem to desire that our system of justice should do nothing but dole out retributive punishment. Supporters of Bill-C10 consistently show contempt for the Canadian justice system, and a preference for policies that we know do not work. For this reason, they want ministerial discretion over prisoner transfers to be greater, at the expense of judges and officials at Correctional Services Canada whose job it is to determine the likelihood that a criminal will reoffend.

The real question seems to be who should be in charge of passing judgment on Canadians: elected officials, whose jobs depend on being popular, or the judiciary, who are meant to use objective criteria? We must remember that democracy requires the rule of law to be respected and applied equally to all.

As the Goulet case shows, ministerial discretion in the case of prisoner transfer is a threat to Canadian democratic values.