Testimony at Senate committee hearings on Bill C-14. Watch full testimony here
Remarks
This bill addresses problems that are well documented and of clear concern to Canadians: the increase in violent crime and other tangible forms of crime, including property and retail crime; the prevalence of repeat violent offenders; and high-profile offences committed by those on bail.
Overall, many amendments in this bill are sensible and move in the right direction. My concern is not that the bill is misguided, but that it may not go far enough in addressing the broader factors driving these problems, including sentencing consistency and predictability, and the upstream role of organized crime.
Dangerous, repeat, and violent offenders should not be released where they pose a clear risk to public safety. But if bail is made more restrictive without meaningfully changing the sentencing framework, we will need to monitor the consequences carefully.
Already, in many provinces, most people in provincial jails are on remand. In some jurisdictions, the balance is 70/30 or 80/20 between remanded and sentenced inmates. These facilities are marked by high turnover, limited programming, and vulnerability to contraband, violence, and organized crime infiltration. People do not typically emerge from short stays in these conditions rehabilitated. And when they are ultimately sentenced, their sentences are often reduced through credit for time served.
This is not to say the bail amendments are wrongheaded, but that they can do little more than limit reoffence while on bail.
Some of the most important deterrents to crime are not in fact sentence severity, but the predictability and consistency of enforcement, prosecution, and sentencing. These depend on police and prosecution capacity, judicial discretion, offence design, and the sentencing principles Parliament emphasizes.
For that reason, Bill C-14 should be seen as a useful step, but we should not expect it to fully address organized crime or deliver the deterrence needed for violent crime reduction.
The following reforms could be considered in the future.
First, section 718’s sentencing principles could be amended for a broader class of serious offences to make clear that courts give primary consideration to denunciation and deterrence. This could apply where repeat conduct, violence, coercion, or organized criminal activity pose serious public safety risks, going beyond the bill’s prioritization of this principle for secondary and subsequent convictions of a limited set of offences.
Specific offence types to which this apply could include robbery, extortion, intimidation, serious property crime, retail theft connected to organized crime, and repeat assaults or other violent offences.
Second, Parliament could consider reforming the middle tier of sentencing. Conditional sentence orders (CSOs) – which are typically forms of house arrest or curfew – are capped at two years, but that could be revisited. We currently have flexibility at the low end and strong tools at the extreme high end, but few structured options in the middle, where much repeat offending occurs. It’s safer and more cost effective to provide for community supervision under conditions of house arrest or curfew with the advent of GPS ankle monitoring technology. These conditions have the benefit of ensuring supervision and therefore public safety, clearly emphasizing denunciation and deterrence, all while allowing a person to work, and slowly reintegrate back into society, in a way that is less costly, to boot.
Finally, Parliament should treat organized crime as the upstream public safety priority, and often driver of the violent and tangible forms of crime we’re concerned with here. As I’ve said before, amending the definition of organized crime to include patterns of behaviour rather than proof of organization structure, would make organized crime prosecution easier.
Bill C-14 is therefore best understood as a constructive but partial response. The test will be whether it reduces violent crime and other visible forms of crime without worsening pressures in provincial remand facilities, and whether Parliament follows them with deeper reforms that I think are needed to sentencing, enforcement and prosecution capacity, and organized crime.
Peter Copeland 