Bail and Sentencing Reform Bill

Honourable senators, I rise today as the opposition critic to speak to the third reading of Bill C-14, the bail and sentencing reform act.

Let me begin by saying that it’s somewhat unfortunate that the sponsor of the bill, Senator Dalphond, delivered his third reading speech only today. I had understood that he was slated to deliver it yesterday. Since the Liberal government has been insistent that the Senate concludes our third reading debate this week, I also must deliver my lengthy critic’s speech today. It is not generally a good idea for the sponsor and the critic to deliver speeches on a bill on the same day because it significantly diminishes our ability to have thoughtful, responsive debate about legislation. It’s not good Parliament, which I don’t think is fair to Canadians. But here we are, so let’s turn our attention to Bill C-14.

This bill is the Carney Liberal government’s attempt to address some of the mistakes made by its predecessor, the Trudeau Liberal government, in the criminal law justice system. Over the last decade, we have all seen the devastating consequences of the Liberal government’s soft-on-crime legislation. We hear daily media reports of more violent crimes committed by repeat criminal offenders who were on bail at the time of their arrest. Many of these offenders were released because of changes brought in by the Liberals under Bill C-5 and Bill C-75.

Not surprisingly, these lax Liberal laws have resulted in chaos. Canadians now feel much less secure than they used to in their homes, streets and communities, and with good reason. Since 2015, violent crimes have increased 55%, firearm crime is up 130% and extortion has increased by an eye-popping 330%. Sexual assaults are up by 76% and homicides have increased by 29%.

It is beyond high time that this Liberal government reverses the dangerous criminal justice policies it has put in place over the last 10 years.

Bill C-14 is one step in the government’s attempt to do that. While I appreciate any movement to strengthen criminal justice laws, I still maintain that the reform in Bill C-14 is not comprehensive enough. It fails to make public safety a paramount consideration in bail decisions, and the legislation barely touches on meaningful sentencing reform. Canadians must be able to have confidence that the justice system is fair, balanced and effective, and while Bill C-14 is an improvement in that regard, it still falls short of that goal.

The legislation attempts to strengthen the bail system by clarifying the “principle of restraint,” which is the guiding principle the Liberals introduced in Bill C-75 that an accused should be released at the earliest opportunity possible and be subject to the least onerous conditions necessary. Even the Liberal government has realized that this principle was sometimes misinterpreted by judges and justices of the peace to mean an accused should be released on bail, resulting in some inappropriate and even dangerous releases.

In Bill C-14, the government clarifies the principle’s meaning, so that’s an improvement. But the government refused to accept Conservative amendments at the House of Commons Justice Committee that proposed that the principle of public safety must also be paramount in bail release decisions. It’s logical. It’s what Canadians expect and what they deserve. But this Liberal government said no.

There are some popular misconceptions about our Canadian justice system, particularly due to the consumption of American news and entertainment in Canada. Our bail system is very different than that of our neighbours to the south. First, the U.S. has no principle of restraint. By comparison, Canada has relatively lenient bail requirements, and in this country, we mete out lighter sentences than do our American neighbours. Furthermore, in Canada, offenders rarely serve their full custodial sentences. Many are released after serving only one third of their actual and already light sentence, and virtually all are released after serving two-thirds of their sentence. The context in both countries is completely different.

Of course, balancing the rights of an accused with the rights of crime victims and the best interests of the public is delicate. We heard compelling stories at our Senate Legal Committee that illustrated this.

One witness, Mr. Paul Wilson of Saskatchewan, told us of his experience as someone accused of a crime and held on remand for 18 months, then convicted and sentenced to eight years in prison. Mr. Wilson served three of those years in prison before having his conviction overturned in court. I asked him about the impact of that on his life. He told us about missing the funerals of his father and brother while he was held in custody.

Our conversation went as follows:

Mr. Wilson: . . . I spent three years inside: 18 months on remand, and then I was sentenced and did another 18 months until my appeal went through. What bothers me the most about it is the loss of my kids’ lives and the loss of my family. I missed out on a lot.

Senator Batters: Yes. How old were your kids when this first happened and then later when it was finally over for you?

Mr. Wilson: My boy was nine years old. I got out when he was 12 or 13 years old. My girl was around five years old.

Senator Batters: Was she just a little girl?

Mr. Wilson: Yes. I lost three years of her life.

Senator Batters: Those are years in which they change so much.

Mr. Wilson: I can’t get that back.

Honourable senators, when considering legislation like this, we often get caught up in statistics, legal arguments and philosophical or academic debates, but it is also important for us to hear from people like Paul Wilson, whose lives are so directly affected by the legislative choices we make.

Similarly, it is vital that we seek out the voices of victims of crime in this debate, for they poignantly remind us of the devastating consequences of failed criminal policies.

Our Senate Legal Committee heard from Jackie Beisel-Cobb, the mother of 23-year-old Madisson Cobb. Maddy was gunned down in a parkade by her offender, who was out on bail at the time. Even though she had a restraining order against him, even though there was an outstanding warrant for his arrest, and even though Maddy’s offender was known to be in possession of a firearm, he had still been released on bail on June 17, 2025. Just one month later, on July 19, 2025, he killed Maddy in that parkade.

Ms. Beisel-Cobb told our committee:

Take a moment and picture your own daughter, sister or friend. Picture them walking into that parkade, not knowing that that was going to be the last breath she would ever take. Picture your own daughter’s fear. Picture her left to bleed to death with no one there to help her. Imagine how your life would change if you got the same call I did.

My life has changed forever. I will never see my daughter walk through that front door with an incredible smile, knowing she is safe. I cannot kiss her goodnight or say I love you or call her when something is exciting.

I will not have the joy of seeing her walk down the aisle or having kids of her own. All I have left are photos and videos to help remember every detail of her appearance and listen to her voice on tape so I can hear how she spoke my name. Now I have to look at an empty chair at my dining room table where she sat when we ate.

Our committee also heard from Brett Broadfoot, whose teenage daughter Breanna was severely beaten and strangled by her ex-boyfriend. He was released the same day he was arrested. Four months later, the perpetrator attacked Breanna again, this time stabbing her. She died of her injuries two days later.

Mr. Broadfoot told us:

Breanna passed away from her injuries on July 18, 2024. We lost our baby girl, and our worlds have changed forever. Anyone who has suddenly lost a loved one will wonder if the path of destruction that led to it could have been avoided. It is an entirely different and far more powerful thing to know that it should have been avoided.

There is no doubt in my mind that Breanna would still be alive if her abuser had not been immediately released after the first attack. Why was he given the freedom to commit a second crime instantly, easily and without prejudice?

Honourable senators, as parliamentarians, we have the incredible responsibility to create laws that could save lives like Breanna’s or Madisson’s. What we do in this chamber matters. It is fairly simple. If these perpetrators had not been released and if their previous violent attacks had been considered by the courts, they could not have extinguished the lives of these two beautiful, vibrant, promising young women. We need to keep that foremost in our minds as we consider Bill C-14.

This legislation attempts to tighten bail in three ways. First, it stipulates that a judge considering the release of an accused on bail must consider whether an alleged offence involved random and unprovoked violence. Second, it creates additional release conditions for certain offences, including organized crime, extortion, motor vehicle theft and breaking and entering a dwelling house. Third, for more serious offences, the prosecution can propose a more restrictive level of release, rather than having to justify why a less onerous level of release is inadequate.

Bill C-14 also expands the offences to which a reverse onus would apply in the bail process, meaning that the accused would bear the balance of probabilities to justify why they should not be detained. This would expand to include certain violent situations — for example, where strangling, choking or suffocation is alleged — as well as human trafficking, aggravated motor vehicle theft, extortion with violence, breaking and entering a dwelling house and certain immigration-related offences.

Furthermore, Bill C-14 restricts the availability of house arrest, or conditional sentence orders, for certain sexual offences, including those involving bodily harm, assault or exploitation of a person with a disability and sexual offences against a minor.

For a small number of offences, Bill C-14 would allow consecutive sentencing in cases of aggravated motor vehicle theft and for extortion committed in the same event as arson.

The bill also expands aggravating factors for sentencing, including whether the victim of the offence was a first responder; whether the offence disrupts essential infrastructure; whether an offence involved the use, attempted use or threatened use of violence; and whether an offender had a violent conviction in the last five years.

Bill C-14 also amends the definition of “violent offence” in the Youth Criminal Justice Act and allows police to publish identifying information about a young person without a court order in emergency cases where there is an imminent risk of serious harm or to facilitate arrest.

Many of the best parts of Bill C-14 came from the efforts of Conservative members of Parliament, both through their past criminal justice legislative initiatives and through amendments they brought to the House of Commons Justice Committee during the study of Bill C-14.

For example, my former Conservative Senate colleague Mr. Bob Runciman proposed and passed Bill S-221, which made the assault on a public transit operator an aggravating factor for sentencing. My current Conservative MP colleague Roman Baber proposed an amendment to Bill C-14 that expanded that category to include public transit employees.

My Conservative MP colleague Todd Doherty advocated tirelessly for his bill, Bill C-321, which added as an aggravating factor for sentencing whether the victim of an offence is a first responder. Senator Housakos resurrected that bill in the form of Bill S-233, and it is currently before the House of Commons and, hopefully, will pass there.

Conservative MP Arpan Khanna proposed Bill C-242, the “Jail Not Bail Act,” which would have replaced the principle of restraint with public safety as the primary consideration for release decisions. That bill would also have prohibited criminals with a recent conviction from serving as the surety for the release of an accused. Further, Bill C-242 proposed that the Minister of Justice table an annual report on judicial interim release. This was the genesis of a similar requirement passed in an amendment on Bill C-14 at the House of Commons Justice Committee.

Of course, there is also my Conservative colleague MP Frank Caputo’s private member’s bill, Bill C-225, which proposed measures to strengthen the prosecution of crimes involving intimate partner violence, including by making the murder of an intimate partner a murder in the first degree, regardless of premeditation. The bill also prohibits release if an accused was at large on a release order regarding an intimate partner offence or if the accused was convicted of an intimate partner offence in the five years preceding the arrest. This bill is now before the Senate.

Some of these Conservative proposals were brought forward as Conservative amendments during the House of Commons Justice Committee study of the bill. Several have been included in the version of the bill we have before us today, as they were passed by a majority of members of the House of Commons. These amendments have improved Bill C-14 significantly, but as I have said, the bill still has a ways to go. Regrettably, the House of Commons committee did not pass the Conservative amendment asking that the principle of restraint be replaced with a consideration for public safety in bail decisions. Until public safety is considered first and foremost in judicial release decisions, Liberal crime legislation will continue to fail to meet the mark.

Canadians want to have faith in their justice system. A recent poll conducted on behalf of the Police Association of Ontario shows that a majority of Canadians want meaningful bail reform. Of Canadians polled, 71% indicated support for a system of cash bail for violent and repeat offenders, and 72% agreed with placing limitations on sureties for bail, namely by prohibiting those with a recent criminal record from serving as the surety for an accused. Two-thirds of Ontarians polled think Canada’s bail system is not strict enough.

Canadians know in their gut what is right, and they know the kind of society they want: a society that is free, compassionate, safe and secure.

Canadian musician Paul Brandt, founder of #NotInMyCity and Chair of the Governing Board of the Alberta Centre to End Trafficking in Persons, told our committee:

The lack of consistent denunciation, deterrence and accountability is not merely a debate about balancing the rights of victims versus offenders; it is about the health and safety of Canadian society as a whole. When crimes go undeterred and undenounced, criminals are emboldened, victims are denied justice, and society, as a whole, loses faith in the Canadian justice system. We are not winning this fight when the justice system treats documented child rape as discretionary.

Judicial discretion has its place, but Canada’s track record shows it has not delivered on public safety or confidence. When the system fails to impose proportionate consequences, it undermines the governability of society. Parliament has both the authority and the duty to set a clear floor for the worst crimes against children.

Prominent criminal defence lawyer Ari Goldkind testified at our committee that Bill C-14 doesn’t go far enough to address the crisis in public confidence in Canada’s criminal justice system. He said:

Public confidence is foundational to the legitimacy of the criminal justice system. Bill C-14 does not restore that balance.

Yes, judicial discretion is essential, but it must operate within clear and consistently applied boundaries. Like cases should produce like outcomes. That principle is becoming weakened. When that happens, not only does the system become less predictable, but public confidence erodes.

Bill C-14 allows Parliament to say, “We’ve acted.” But it will not meaningfully change outcomes in bail courts or sentencing courts across Canada. . . . If the objective is to improve public safety and restore confidence, the focus has to shift from legislative signalling to actionable judicial accountability. That is the conversation that has not yet been had.

There is a consensus among Canada’s provincial and territorial governments that bail reform is welcome and long overdue. The provinces and territories — and, of course, their citizens — largely bear the burden of the failures of Canada’s bail system, both socially and financially. While many provinces have tried to implement their own plans for dealing with this crisis within their own regions, they also require major action at the federal level to address the problem. For this reason, many regions support the aims of Bill C-14, but they worry it might not go far enough to actually fix the problems it’s meant to target.

The Attorneys General of Manitoba and British Columbia appeared before our committee to express their support for Bill C-14. Manitoba Attorney General Matt Wiebe told us:

In Winnipeg alone, approximately 82% of arrests involve individuals who are already under some form of supervision. This is not a marginal issue; it is a clear sign that the system is not effectively managing those repeat offenders.

I am encouraged that Bill C-14 brings forward the urgent need for bail and sentencing reform, and includes stronger measures for repeat violent offenders.

He continued:

. . . we recognize that bail reform is not a standalone solution but a necessary part of a broader strategy that includes policing, prevention, mental health supports and the treatment of addictions . . . .

He concluded:

We are committed to collaborating with the federal government and with all levels of government to implement these reforms effectively.

British Columbia Attorney General Niki Sharma also appeared before our committee. She spoke of a need for tougher discipline to reinforce court orders. Deputy Premier Sharma said:

Not only is justice important but also people’s idea of justice, and that the justice system is working is important. I’ve heard from many people that there is a class of people who will repeatedly breach orders or repeatedly breach court orders. If a court order is to be meaningful, it has to be respected. If individuals come before the system and repeatedly do not respect the court order, shouldn’t the level of sentencing be commensurate with that and shouldn’t the court consider that?

We didn’t get as far as we might have wanted to when it came to that aspect of it in this bill, but we certainly had that discussion related to that with the federal government. . . .

Saskatchewan Justice Minister Tim McLeod submitted a substantial brief to our committee that detailed Saskatchewan’s position on the bill. In essence, the Saskatchewan government supports Bill C-14 but feels it doesn’t go far enough. Minister McLeod wrote:

Saskatchewan takes the position . . . that it is necessary to amend the Criminal Code to introduce a reverse onus for anyone accused of a new violent offence, introduce a reverse onus for all firearms offences, and introduce stricter bail conditions for those charged with offences related to drug trafficking and organized crime.

Saskatchewan also objected to the continued availability of conditional sentence orders, or “house arrest,” for serious offences, especially those involving violence, because public confidence is undermined by failing to impose meaningful consequences. My province would like to see the reinstatement of certain mandatory minimum penalties, many of which were upheld as constitutional by the courts, especially for drug trafficking offences.

Minister McLeod wrote that Saskatchewan supported the removal of house arrest for serious sexual assaults and sexual assaults against children, but he explained that the other proposed sentencing reforms in the bill missed the mark for Saskatchewan. He wrote:

. . . many of the proposed sentencing reforms contained in Bill C-14 appear directed at issues that are more prevalent in other jurisdictions . . . and do not adequately respond to Saskatchewan’s primary public safety challenges.

Minister McLeod urged the federal government to:

. . . consider further amendments to ensure the legislation meaningfully addresses repeat violent offending, organized crime and gang activity, and serious drug offending.

Yet when it came time for the clause-by-clause study of Bill C-14, many of the independent senators on the Legal Committee were not at all inclined in this direction. In fact, repeatedly they tried to completely remove certain fundamental pillars of the bill, including the major parts of the reverse onus and consecutive sentencing provisions — measures which would have essentially gutted the bill. This is not the proper way to oppose legislation, in my view, by gutting it like this. If you oppose it, you must give a speech in the chamber about why you oppose it and then stand and vote against it in the chamber.

In any case, the Senate Legal Committee passed four amendments in total, three of which I did not support. The first, brought by Senator Prosper, effectively neutered the limitation on who could serve as a surety, or guarantor, for an accused in a bail proceeding. The original much-needed limitation, which stated that no one convicted of an indictable offence in the last 10 years could stand as a surety, was brought by Conservative MPs at the House of Commons committee. Senator Prosper’s amendment essentially reversed that limitation, instead leaving the issue up to judicial discretion, thereby creating an “escape valve” for a criminal to act as a surety.

Let’s remember, honourable senators, that the original limitation would only have applied to those convicted of a recent indictable offence. These are the most serious crimes. It would not prohibit a huge number of people from acting as sureties. Senator Prosper’s amendment passed by only one vote. It was opposed by me, by the sponsor of the bill and — actually, I looked it up — by the government.

At committee, Senator Simons said that an inability to find a surety without a recent indictable offence may sound ridiculous to those “sitting here in Ottawa.” I assured her that this would also sound ridiculous to the Canadian public in Regina, Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto — all across this country.

We heard testimony from Mr. Clayton Campbell of the Toronto Police Association that the surety system in Toronto is a “joke.”

He said:

Sureties are such a problem. I’ll be frank, the system is kind of a joke, and sureties do not take it serious, period.

It is unfortunate that the majority of the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee voted to effectively nullify this prohibition, because it will have serious repercussions, not the least of which will be making Canadians lose even more faith in the integrity of their justice system.

Another amendment, submitted by Senator Prosper, was also passed at committee stage, with a subamendment by Senator Tannas. This amendment states that the minister must consult individuals and organizations with “specific” expertise in data collection and the criminal justice system, in the preparation of the annual report to Parliament, and that the collection of data should be coordinated with Statistics Canada.

As I stated at committee, I believe this amendment to be wholly redundant. I would hope that the Minister of Justice would already consult with experts with “specific expertise” in their areas. I don’t think the minister requires direction from the Senate in that regard.

Furthermore, independent senators on the Senate Legal Committee often raise concerns in their observations in our reports on legislation that the Criminal Code is already too complex. In fact, it was one of their observations in the committee report on Bill C-14. It is puzzling that they then also vote for amendments like this, which add to the code unnecessarily.

Another amendment passed at the Legal Committee by only one vote was proposed by Senator Clement. It stipulates that, at a bail proceeding, if an accused or any other party does not raise whether the accused is an Indigenous person or from an overrepresented or a vulnerable group, the judge must ask. This could lead to a sizable increase in applications, not to mention confusion and delays in the bail process.

It also potentially leads to some absurdity, as the bill’s sponsor and former judge, Senator Dalphond, pointed out at committee. For example, if a judge is presented with a consent order because the defence counsel and Crown prosecutor have come to a deal — and that happens frequently — the judge would then have to stop the process and second-guess the lawyers’ evaluation, asking the accused if they are a member of a vulnerable group and if the relevant section was adequately considered in the making of the order. Again, this is unnecessary. Furthermore, I’m not convinced it will have the positive effect that Senator Clement intends.

The fourth amendment passed, brought forward by Senator Dalphond, the bill’s sponsor, is a more technical amendment which delays the coming into force of two sections of the bill. This has to do with information sharing of the files of adolescents under investigation. Clause 72 dictates the files must be destroyed after two years. The provinces, namely Ontario, expressed the opinion that such timing would prove difficult and that more time may be required to make adjustments in their record management systems to accommodate these changes. Rather than coming into force 30 days after Royal Assent, those sections will be enacted through order-in-council when the provinces are ready. This was the only amendment I supported at committee.

It is interesting that the government brought this amendment forward, as it so often does, at this late stage in the legislative process and that, regardless of any other amendments that came forward at our Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee, Bill C-14 would have had to be amended and sent back to the House of Commons to accommodate this change anyway.

Our committee received some media attention during our study on this bill because an “anonymous senior government source” accused our committee of trying to delay the bill with our study. Of course, that wasn’t true. We completed the study according to our original timeline, and although I am the critic of the legislation, I did not even introduce any amendments.

But clearly, the government itself needed more time and sober second thought to review the bill and fix this problem with this additional government amendment.

Much has been made of the increase of the number of legislative amendments brought forward by senators and accepted by the government since the era of the new “independent” Senate à la Justin Trudeau. Some flaunt this as evidence that the Senate is more “effective” or working harder than before. But here’s the thing: Almost all of the amendments the government actually accepts are the government’s own amendments. Other significant amendments are often rejected by the government and kicked back immediately to the Senate.

Because senators politically aligned with the Liberal government are ostensibly “independent,” they no longer sit inside the Liberal government caucus. This is a considerable disadvantage to senators, who miss being informed about the activities in the House of Commons, and it is a decided disadvantage to the governing party. They miss out on good legislative and political advice coming from senators who have the benefit of a long-term view and tenure.

When the Conservative Party is in government, there is less need for government amendments to bills at late stages because our caucus’s senators give input during the policy and early legislative development stages of bills, not just at the very end of Senate review. Many of these caucus discussions can help shape a bill before it is even tabled, making the process quicker and more efficient in Parliament.

I can tell you one thing, though: What was not quick and efficient was the clause-by-clause study of this bill. In fact, I think it’s fair to say it was even a bit of a hot mess, particularly regarding the observations some committee members appended to the report.

Unfortunately, our Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee, in recent years, has developed some poor practices in how it creates reports arising out of committee study. Much of this has to do with the drafting of observations.

Traditionally, observations were to be succinct, directive and usually arrived at by consensus. They were also relatively infrequent. Now, members routinely submit long, unwieldy, repetitive observations that often stretch into multi-page documents, sometimes rivalling the length of the legislation we’re studying. They are often padded with meaningless reflections, sometimes far outside of the scope of the bill that is being studied. This is not the proper way to create a committee report.

If senators really have this much to say on a bill, they should stand in the chamber and deliver a speech about it and enter into debate about it, instead of writing pages and pages of observations for us to wade through at committee.

Some members seem to use the observations as an opportunity to write a summary of facts — as a committee would do to write the actual report — except they pick and choose only the facts that bolster their argument, according to their particular ideological point of view.

At least if the committee collectively writes a summary of facts in a report, it is mediated by requiring agreement on all sides. Instead, individual senators write their own observations and then begin them with, “The committee recognizes . . .” or “The committee is concerned that . . .,” even though that view may be far from unanimous. For example, the observations in the committee report on Bill C-14 begin with this:

The committee recognizes the seriousness of repeat violent offending, intimate partner violence, human trafficking, organized crime, violence against children and offences against first responders.

What is the purpose of recognizing the seriousness of these crimes in particular? It leaves some significant crimes out: murder and sexual assault, to name only two. And it begs the question: If you recognize the seriousness of these crimes, then why repeatedly vote for bills that remove tougher bail provisions and sentences?

If, as the next sentence states:

The committee calls for stronger, immediate action to address violence against women and to support victims and survivors of intimate partner violence —

— then why routinely vote against their best interests in criminal law legislation?

Victims of crime would likely support toughening bail provisions and sentencing. In many cases, such changes would have meant their perpetrator would not be free to commit a crime against them in the first place.

Another observation calls on the government to create a national framework to address organized crime. How much good is a framework going to do? If we instead focused on creating and voting for laws that actually fought organized crime, we wouldn’t need to create a framework so we can all talk about it some more. Furthermore, this observation wasn’t based on a substantial amount of evidence we heard during committee study, which is supposed to be the point of observations.

But after having a five-and-a-half-hour clause-by-clause meeting, our committee ran out of time to debate this further because of pressure from the government to report the bill back to the chamber.

Another problem we ran into, as we often do, is that members of the same Senate group didn’t coordinate their proposals. In this Bill C-14 report, the only observations submitted were from four different Independent Senators Group senators. Had these senators met and streamlined their submissions beforehand, they would have taken a lot less time for the committee and the steering committee to review and fix.

Furthermore, another poor practice the committee has developed is continuing to include the same observations in bill after bill at the Legal Committee, things we have asked the government for time and again and to which we have received no response or action. This includes asking the Law Commission of Canada to review the Criminal Code.

The Legal Committee even went so far as to write a letter to the President of the Law Commission of Canada a couple of years ago, asking that this be done. It seems to have been summarily dismissed and ignored because our committee did not even receive a response. Yet, the practice persists.

Senator Simons said this at clause-by-clause consideration of Bill C-14:

We’ve talked about this. Senator Batters is correct; we keep putting it in, and it is performative and absurd, but I think that’s why we should do it as a form of recognition of the absurdity of the exercise.

To which I replied:

Just on that, if the Senate Legal Committee becomes part of a performative exercise that has existed now for several years, we used to be more than that, so I don’t think we should continue to put it in. . . .

Unfortunately, this Carney Liberal government is not above a little performative absurdity of its own. The practice of conducting a Gender-based Analysis Plus review of legislation was something which started under the Trudeau government — largely, I am convinced, as a way to try and demonstrate its so-called feminist credentials.

The Gender-based Analysis Plus document for Bill C-14 is still not posted on the government website. This shouldn’t be a secret document, hidden away from the public. Sometimes ministers have tried to claim the GBA Plus can’t be made public because it is a matter of “cabinet confidentiality,” but that’s ridiculous. The GBA Plus, which I received from departmental officials, should address the detrimental effects that the bill will have on women and vulnerable, marginalized populations. But in the GBA Plus analysis on Bill C-14, there is almost no mention of female victims, despite the bill dealing specifically with choking or strangulation and sexual offences against a minor.

We often hear senators talk about the overrepresentation of marginalized and vulnerable groups in prisons, but rarely do we hear about the overrepresentation of these same groups among the victims of crime. For example, Indigenous women comprise roughly 4% to 5% of the overall female population in Canada, but they are far overrepresented as the victims of some of the most violent crimes committed in this country. They comprise 26% of all homicide victims, 26% of intimate partner violence-related homicides and roughly 21% of all gender-related homicides.

If we care about the welfare of Indigenous women in this country — and we must — we have a duty to protect them from falling prey to criminal perpetrators. And, yes, there are many complex factors that contribute to crime: economic and social realities, discrimination, poverty, homelessness, abuse, broken families, mental illness, addiction, family violence and institutional racism. All those things are important to address in preventing or reducing crime in the first place.

But let’s not kid ourselves either. If perpetrators of violence are not immediately released back into the streets and if they face true consequences for the harm they have caused, they will not have the opportunity to harm or kill additional victims. This will save the lives of so many Indigenous women, non-Indigenous women and vulnerable and marginalized people.

Paul Brandt said at the Standing Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs:

As Ontario Superior Court Justice Antonio Skarica recently stated in a powerful sentencing decision, the Canadian justice system is at an inflection point and must decide whether to prioritize the needs of vulnerable Canadians or the criminals who abuse them.

We need to address the root causes of crime 100%, but we also need to ensure that we are protecting vulnerable people from being harmed, abused and killed. One fundamental way to do that is to ensure violent and repeat criminals are held in custody and are off our streets when they should be.

Bill C-14 is a step in that direction, but it is only one step. Quite frankly, the Liberal government has made a mess of our criminal justice system with their decade-long legacy of soft-on-crime policies. The result is reflected in the statistics. The Crime Severity Index declined steadily from 1998 to 2014, but then it started to increase, and 10 years later, by 2024, it was 40% higher than it had been a decade earlier. Non-violent crime rose by 7% over the same period. And what government was implementing their criminal law policy over almost all of those years? That’s right: the Liberals. From 2019 to 2024, Statistics Canada reports that approximately one third of people accused of homicide were under some form of justice system supervision at the time of the incident. A soft-on-crime approach is simply not working.

We’re to the point where even the Liberal government realizes a different direction is needed. They have developed Bill C-14 to try to address part of the problem, but there are still several outstanding issues with the bill. For example, even for serious crimes like human trafficking and child sexual assault, an offender convicted of a summary offence could still receive house arrest for their crime. Consider that a driver in a human trafficking operation might only be convicted of a summary offence of human trafficking. Yet, as I had confirmed to me by experienced police officers that I know, a driver in those kinds of organizations often acts as a violent enforcer to physically control the victims of human trafficking. Is house arrest appropriate in that scenario?

Although it is entitled the bail and sentencing reform act, there is precious little sentencing reform in the bill. As for the bail reform part of the bill, it relies largely on reverse onus, and it remains to be seen how effective that will be here.

Of course, the government’s insistence on retaining the principle of restraint as a guiding principle for bail and its refusal to include public safety as a foremost consideration in bail decisions are still highly concerning. Applying the principle of restraint does not have to always result in an accused being granted full bail. In time, the government will likely find that a mere clarification of this principle is not enough.

Overall, Bill C-14 is a small step in the right direction. I would like to see it go further, and I know my Conservative caucus feels the same way. Important amendments made in the House of Commons, primarily by our Conservative members, made this version of the bill much stronger than it was originally. Their changes tightened bail, protected workers and increased accountability.

Those House of Commons amendments made Bill C-14 better, to the point where one could actually rationalize voting for the bill on the basis that something is better than nothing. But, unfortunately, with the amendments passed by the Senate Legal Committee, we’ve taken two steps back again. Most of the amendments undermine the aim of the bill, which is to restore public confidence in the justice system after years of disastrous soft-on-crime policies. Instead, these new amendments provide an escape hatch for perpetrators of crime and will create confusion, delay and inappropriate and potentially dangerous release, which ultimately threatens the safety of Canadians. I hope the Liberal government will do the right thing and reject most of these Senate amendments outright. Canadians deserve safe streets.

Thank you.