Honourable senators, I rise today to speak in opposition to Bill C-5, the Trudeau government’s proposed legislation to repeal some mandatory minimum penalties and to offer conditional sentences for certain offences. This bill will not fulfill its intended purpose as established by the Trudeau government: to decrease Black and Indigenous overrepresentation in the prison system. Instead, this legislation will place victims of crime at risk — especially female victims of domestic abuse — by returning abusers through conditional sentences into the very communities where their victims live in fear. Bill C-5 is just one more example of the Trudeau government’s propensity for talk over action.

When Justice Minister Lametti appeared before our Senate Legal Affairs Committee, he presented Bill C-5 as a bill meant to address, as an example, “. . . an Indigenous mother who was caught in very low-level trafficking in order to put bread on the table.” The idea was, of course, that Bill C-5 would allow conditional sentencing for certain offences and remove mandatory minimum penalties from others so that judges would have more discretion at the lower end of sentencing in cases like these. However, just two weeks ago, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the constitutionality of Parliament’s limitations on conditional sentencing from 2012 and found that while an offender’s personal circumstances should be taken into account, they do not reduce the severity of that offender’s crime.

It is unfortunate that the Senate Legal Committee didn’t have the opportunity to hear from more witnesses representing victims of crime during our study on this issue. We couldn’t even hear testimony from the Trudeau government’s new Federal Ombudsperson for Victims of Crime, Mr. Benjamin Roebuck. Even though Mr. Roebuck was appointed on October 24, he was not yet officially installed by the time we needed him to appear, so he was not made available to us. Given that the victims ombudperson position had sat vacant for more than one year, this situation speaks volumes about this Trudeau government’s utter lack of regard for victims of crime.

This fake feminist Trudeau government betrays Canadian women with this legislation. Its own Gender-based Analysis Plus of Bill C-5 is, frankly, a joke. The government’s analysis only mentions women in passing and doesn’t mention women who are the victims of intimate-partner violence at all or how this legislation will affect them.

We heard Senator Klyne’s speech in this chamber on Tuesday night, extolling the virtues of Gender-based Analysis Plus evaluations. He said they “ . . . enhance federal legislation’s value for women, including Indigenous women.” Well, the GBA Plus analysis for Bill C-5 certainly doesn’t. It only even mentions Indigenous women twice, saying that Indigenous women have triple the violent victimization rate of non-Indigenous women. Even at that, the analysis fails to mention violence against Indigenous women in the context of intimate partner violence. For example, we know that almost twice as many Indigenous women experience sexual and physical violence at the hands of an intimate partner or family member than non-Indigenous women do. We know that Indigenous women also more frequently suffer more severe forms of spousal abuse, including sexual abuse, abuse involving a weapon, beating and choking.

And yet, in Bill C-5, the Trudeau government is making conditional sentences available to offenders convicted of offences common in intimate-partner violence scenarios, including sexual assault, criminal harassment and being unlawfully in a dwelling house. If women — especially Indigenous women — are supposedly one of the motivations for this legislation, the Trudeau government’s gender-based analysis should examine how this legislation will actually impact that group. Unless, of course, they know it cannot be justified. I suspect that it is the case with Bill C-5.

Removing mandatory minimum sentences and making serious offences eligible for conditional sentences will only create more vulnerable female victims by returning abusers and criminals into the communities where their victims live and work. This bill is absolutely going in the wrong direction.

Conditional sentence orders are not infallible. Offenders can and often do breach these arrangements. In one study of conditional sentencing in B.C., researcher Dawn North found the overall breach rate of three communities was 37.6%.

Professor Isabel Grant of the University of British Columbia’s law school has published research showing that male intimate partners who criminally harass their female partners often find ways of getting around non-contact orders with their victims. She said:

. . . orders are often resorted to in criminal harassment cases, but they often fail to stop the harassment and can be counterproductive in some cases.

Perpetrators become quite skilled at learning how to manipulate the limits of the criminal justice system by finding ways to harass which do not violate the terms of the legislation.

It is noteworthy that Bill C-5 allows for a conditional sentence to be served as the penalty for a conviction of prison breach — ironically, serving house arrest for breaking out of prison. Does this inspire clear confidence that an offender will adhere to the restraints of their conditional sentence? No way. And the devastating result in cases of domestic violence is that the results could be catastrophic and even deadly.

London Abused Women’s Centre Executive Director Jennifer Dunn put it this way:

A conditional sentence does nothing to stop an offender from continuing to commit violence. Women need the courts to see this. Yes, there are strict conditions imposed when it comes to a conditional sentence, but that does not mean that they will be followed and a woman’s life could be at risk.

Victims of crime, particularly vulnerable female victims of domestic abuse, already live a life of fear. Bill C-5 would only make that worse, because it will dramatically increase the possibility that a woman’s abuser could be returned to her community, or even to her own neighbourhood.

Penny McVicar, Executive Director at Victim Services of Brant, told the House of Commons Justice Committee how women victimized by abuse live in constant fear:

I see too many victims who are now not reporting to police because of the fact that they feel like it’s a revolving door. They report to the police, the suspect is arrested, and then they’re back out on the streets before the victim even has time to get a good safety plan in place.

I write priority housing letters on an almost daily basis for victims trying to relocate, hoping to find someplace safe that they can live where their abuser won’t be able to find them. The shelters are overflowing because we don’t have enough shelter space for women trying to get away from violent offenders.

Removing mandatory minimum penalties from some serious offences and making conditional sentences available for others will further undermine victims’ — and Canadians’ — trust in the justice system. Bill C-5 will also make victims of intimate partner violence less likely to report abuse if it happens again.

Where Bill C-5 does affect women — especially Indigenous women — it only serves to impact them negatively. The Trudeau government has based this entire legislation on the ideological underpinning that it will reduce the overincarceration of Black and Indigenous offenders.

However, two of the only witnesses at the Senate Legal Committee who actually gave us statistical evidence — University of Ottawa Department of Criminology Professor Cheryl Webster and doctoral candidate Dawn North — testified the measures in Bill C-5 would barely touch overincarceration of indigenous offenders. Professor Webster said:

. . . Indigenous offenders generally — and especially Indigenous female offenders — are, relatively speaking, left behind. Specifically, the government’s own data from the Correctional Service of Canada suggests that a smaller proportion of Indigenous Canadians overall — and an even smaller proportion of Indigenous female Canadians — have the possibility of benefiting from this bill. . . .

Witness Dawn North agreed, stating:

. . . the populations targeted by Bill C-5 will not experience a proportionate benefit, in part due to concerns around their ability to comply with the onerous conditions of the typical conditional sentence, and partly because appropriate community supports are not consistently available. . . .

Ms. North also testified about the link between breach of conditional sentences and Indigenous offenders:

The research does suggest that even when conditional sentences were broadly available, Indigenous populations or offenders didn’t proportionately benefit from them. There were instances when they were benefiting, but it wasn’t in the same proportion as other offenders. There’s also data suggesting Indigenous offenders tend to have higher breach rates even when they are granted conditional sentences. This becomes, of course, a problem for overall incarceration rates when they’re imprisoned upon breach. . . .

Shockingly, several of the witnesses we heard from at committee opposed all mandatory minimum penalties on ideological grounds, without providing evidence to back up their assertions. Some witnesses wanted to eliminate mandatory minimum penalties completely, regardless of the severity of the crime.

Some witnesses and some senators in this chamber even advocated for the repeal of mandatory minimum penalties in the case of murder convictions as, again, we saw with Senator Clement’s amendment this week. Wisely, we voted not to implement that. It would have been a huge mistake, honourable senators.

Because of the influence of American news and American entertainment, a lot of people have the impression that our justice system is much harsher than it actually is. Canadian sentences are already much lower than U.S. sentences. Even the current sentences for murder in Canada do not compare to the heavy sentences we see in the United States.

In Canada, first-degree murder carries a sentence of life with a chance of parole in 25 years, and for second-degree murder the automatic sentence is life with a chance of parole in 10 years.

Another key difference between the Canadian and American systems is that of time actually served in jail. Many Canadian offenders are released after serving only one third of their sentences; because of statutory release, almost all are released from incarceration after serving two thirds of their sentences.

Mandatory minimum penalties offer certainty and predictability in sentencing. At a time when half of Canadians have expressed a lack of faith in the fairness of the criminal justice system, we need to give Canadians more confidence in the sentencing for serious crimes, not less.

We need to give victims of crime the security they need to rebuild their lives, free from fear of encountering their perpetrator who has been released into that victim’s community on a conditional sentence.

The Trudeau government has missed the mark on this legislation, as they so often do. They are so caught up in performative virtue signalling that they have completely missed the point.

Minister Lametti says his aim with this bill is to lower the overincarceration of Black and Indigenous offenders. However, the evidence shows Bill C-5 will do little for Black offenders and won’t do anything for Indigenous offenders.

This kind of behaviour is a pattern with this Trudeau government. I’ve seen it when I tried to get the government to keep the peremptory juror challenge process in Bill C-75.

Many defence lawyers told our Senate Legal Committee they used peremptory challenges to weed out potentially racist or biased jurors to assist their racialized defendants. Still, this government stubbornly insisted on removing it.

Similarly, in Bill C-46, the Trudeau government’s impaired driving bill, the government allowed the police to conduct random mandatory alcohol tests without any basis of reasonable suspicion. I opposed the measure and moved an amendment to remove the clause, given warnings that mandatory random testing could increase racial profiling by police. My amendment passed at the Senate Legal Committee and in the Senate. Still, the Liberal government forced it back in.

However, just last month, the Quebec Superior Court ruled that police motor vehicle stops without cause are, in fact, a violation of Charter rights.

When it comes to actually acting in the real and best interests of Black, Indigenous and racialized Canadians, this Trudeau government never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity. The same can be said of its empty, fake feminist platitudes on issues that actually matter to women.

Time after time when this federal government has the chance to make a difference, they opt instead for the superficial solution that might sound good but is, at best, completely ineffective and, at worst, devastatingly harmful. Bill C-5 is a prime example.

This bill will do precious little to address the issue of Black overincarceration. It won’t even touch the issue of Indigenous overincarceration and, paradoxically, this bill could very well make it worse.

Bill C-5 puts at risk victims of crime, vulnerable victims of domestic violence — most of them women — and pulls them back into a web of danger. If you care about these issues, honourable senators — if you care about women, if you care about safety, if you care about actual justice — I implore you, please vote against this bill. Thank you.

Honourable senators, before we move on, we had a vote at 6:11 p.m. There was an understanding not to see the clock. I didn’t ask the question. For procedural reasons, I am now asking: Do senators want to see the clock?

Thank you. We shall resume debate.

Are senators ready for the question?

It was moved by the Honourable Senator Gold, seconded by the Honourable Senator Gagné, that the bill be read the third time.

Is it your pleasure, honourable senators, to adopt the motion?

Those in favour of the motion will please say “yea.”

Those opposed to the motion will please say “nay.”

I believe the “yeas” have it.

Do we have agreement on a 30-minute bell?

Call in the senators for a vote at 7:17 p.m.