Mr. Speaker, first, I want to mention that I look forward to hearing the speech of my colleague from Red Deer—Mountain View, with whom I will be sharing my time. In the meantime, he is the one who will be listening to what I have to say about Bill C-83. Hon. members will notice that our opinions are quite similar. That goes without saying.
I am pleased to rise today to speak to Bill C-83, an act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and another act.
It will make a few rather major changes since it will, among other things: eliminate the use of administrative segregation and disciplinary segregation; authorize the Commissioner to designate a penitentiary or an area in a penitentiary as a structured intervention unit for the confinement of inmates who cannot be maintained in the mainstream inmate population for security or other reasons; provide less invasive alternatives to physical body cavity searches; affirm that the Correctional Service of Canada has the obligation to support the autonomy and clinical independence of registered health care professionals.
It will make other amendments that I unfortunately do not have time to talk about. It is impossible to address every aspect of the bill in just 10 minutes. However, I will focus on a few aspects, including the government's desire to eliminate the use of administrative and disciplinary segregation. The government made that decision as a result of two cases that are currently before the courts. Although the government is appealing the rulings in those cases, it decided to legislate an extreme solution. It is recommending eliminating the use of administrative and disciplinary segregation to address an issue I believe could have been addressed differently. Unfortunately, like most of this government's initiatives, even if this bill passes, it is destined to fail. Doing away with administrative and disciplinary segregation will create a lot more problems in Canada's correctional facilities than it will solve.
To back up my prediction about how the government's plan to eliminate administrative segregation will end in failure, I would like to talk about some of the other ways this government has failed since it took office in 2015.
The government tried to resolve a number of issues, and every time it made those situations worse.
On the economic front, it raised taxes. It scared off billions of dollars' worth of investments by making Canada less attractive to foreign investors. Those billions have been invested elsewhere. On the border security front, everyone here knows that Quebec in particular is still grappling with an unacceptable situation. Thousands of asylum seekers have entered and continue to enter Canada illegally, yet the government has failed to find a solution, do something, or take action.
On international trade, there have been no new trade agreements with other trading partners anywhere in the world. The government has also jeopardized existing agreements. Who can forget the Prime Minister's failure to show up for a trans-Pacific partnership signing ceremony, thereby making Canada the laughingstock of the countries who were there at the appointed time?
What about the recent free trade agreement between the United States, Mexico and Canada? Canada ended up with more tariffs than it had before. That is a first, and it is a dismal failure on the government's part.
On justice, the government refused to put Tori Stafford's murderer back behind bars. The government also allowed a cop killer who never served in the armed forces to keep receiving benefits from Veterans Affairs Canada. Every time we ask the government to do something about this, we get a vague, evasive response and nothing gets done.
No account of the Liberal government's failures would be complete without an account of its failure on the ethics front. This Prime Minister is the first Canadian leader ever found guilty of violating ethics laws. Four of his ministers have also been the subject of federal investigations over the last three years.
These failures have real consequences for Canadians. They have increased the cost of living, made Canadians less safe, and, by essentially slamming the door on foreign investment, as I said earlier, made it impossible for Canadians to do business and prosper. In addition, Canadians now have less confidence in the government, sadly.
I may have discovered why the Liberal government is having this problem. Digging through the archives and looking through books for some explanation of why a government would choose to fail on so many fronts, I found a book written a few years ago by Paul Watzlawick entitled Ultra-Solutions, or, How to Fail Most Successfully. I truly believe this book is on every Liberal's nightstand.
I will read a few comments from the postscript:
How to fail most successfully? It's simple. For each problem, just find the ultra-solution. What's the ultra-solution? “Such a solution not only does away with the problem, but also with just about everything else, somewhat in the vein of the old medical joke—Operation successful, patient dead”.
The problem with the Liberals is that they always find the ultra-solution. There was a cannabis problem, so they found the ultra-solution: they legalized it with total disregard for all the problems, all the dissenting opinions they heard from police forces, psychiatrists, and municipal and provincial officials. The ultra-solution was chosen to solve a very real problem in Canada. They decided that the ultra-solution was to legalize it across the board. We could apply this logic to every decision this government has made from the beginning.
Getting back to Bill C-83, yes, there are problems with segregation, as we have seen. There are problems with respect to the various groups or different communities, such as indigenous peoples, who are placed in segregation, for preventive purposes or for security. Rather than trying to come up with solutions to specific problems, the government chose the ultra-solution and decided to simply eliminate administrative segregation.
I have an article here dated September 28, 2017. It talks about Ivan Zinger, who was the correctional investigator of Canada and who conducted an investigation into segregation. To his great surprise, “[the] new strategy to limit prolonged segregation has had the unintended consequences of more violent attacks behind bars”. That is what he himself acknowledged. This is what is happening because, indeed, since 2014, the penitentiaries have tried to send fewer people to segregation.
According to the data compiled by Mr. Zinger, the number of inmates kept in segregation at any given point in the year has gone from 800 to fewer than 300 since 2014. However, over the same period, the number of assaults committed by inmates against other inmates spiked by 32%: there were 719 incidents last year versus 543 incidents in 2013-14. The number of incidents involving prison guards remained stable.
That is exactly what I am trying to explain and get across to the government By wanting to pass a bill seeking to eliminate the problem and everything that goes with it, the government is creating other problems that are sometimes worse than the ones they are trying to fix. That is why I cannot support Bill C-83.