QUESTION PERIOD — Ministry of Justice
Overrepresentation of Indigenous People in Prisons
November 19, 2025
Welcome, minister.
The types of approaches proposed in Bill C-14 make bail more difficult to access, which, as we know, often encourages people in those situations to plead guilty when they may have defences, thereby increasing the risk of miscarriages of justice and exacerbating mass incarceration, in particular, of Indigenous Peoples.
Through commitments to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Calls to Action, Canada committed to eliminate the overrepresentation of Indigenous Peoples by this year. Instead, as documented this week by the Office of the Correctional Investigator, Indigenous women now represent 55% of federally sentenced women.
The approaches taken so far have not worked. What urgent steps will the government be taking to eliminate this overrepresentation, and will they include the type of criminal record expiry proposed in Bill S-207, An Act to amend the Criminal Records Act, to make consequential amendments to other Acts and to repeal a regulation as a means of preventing recidivism and supporting people in moving on and contributing positively to communities?
Thank you. There’s a lot to unpack in a limited amount of time with that question.
Overrepresentation is a real problem, and we need to address it. We also see that the challenge of repeat offenders is a real problem, and we want to address that.
Sometimes, when you have different priorities, they can butt up against one another, and we have to figure out how we can accomplish two things at the same time.
My sense is that there are tools available outside of the strict laws that appear in the Criminal Code when it comes to bail reform that will help address that, both over the short term and over the long term. Some of that is going to be developing expertise within the courts, and some of it will be addressing some of the challenges that you referenced around records. There is a process that plays out for governments to take positions on specific bills. I want to protect the ability to have that full conversation.
As we move forward with measures that are certainly going to toughen bail rules for people who are charged repeatedly and who have a lengthy criminal history, we also need to ensure that courts are properly informed. We need to do a better job of enforcing Indigenous laws and embracing Indigenous legal systems. We have the benefit of experts in this space who are providing advice to me and my department on how we can reform legal systems to implement generational change that will start helping people in the shorter term but solve this problem in the longer term. It is a conversation that I would welcome your continued participation in and extensive expertise on.
Thank you. I look forward to that as well and am happy to participate.
I’m also interested in what specific and concrete evidence you and your department used to assess the potential impacts of Bill C-14 on overrepresentation of Indigenous and other racialized folks in federal and provincial prisons, what strategies and resources will be applied to monitor these impacts in practice, and what steps you have taken with the Minister of Public Safety to ensure that adequate decarceration strategies are in place, including measures like record expiry.
Again, responding in 45 seconds will be very difficult. Clearly, we will have a follow-up conversation.
What we’re trying to do in terms of the solutions and the perspective that we were relying upon was largely informed by those who work within, and those who administer, the justice system. The problems that we tried to address often relied upon feedback from an area in which, I will acknowledge, there is a paucity of good data. One of the challenges that we have when we’re dealing with a federal criminal law, which can be a blunt instrument, is that, though we are in control of the words in the code, we don’t necessarily administer the systems that are better positioned to capture that data. We need to work collaboratively not just with Indigenous governments but with provincial governments and municipalities that may be better able to collect the data. I do not have time to address the other issues that you referenced, but in the follow-up conversation —
