Skip to content

Government must continue to help protect law-abiding citizens

As you know, our government is working hard to keep our streets and communities safe across Canada.

Dear Editor,

As you know, our government is working hard to keep our streets and communities safe across Canada. We continue to take concrete steps to strengthen the public’s confidence in the criminal justice system and to provide better tools to help protect Canadian families through strong and needed reforms.

Recently our government announced that we are moving forward with much-needed legislation to better protect Canadians from serious repeat violent criminals – serious criminals who are released into communities across the country after serving only two-thirds of their sentence under the current system of “Statutory Release.”

We have all heard stories of criminals who go on to reoffend, sometimes violently. There are too many criminals who commit serious offences while on Statutory Release. Canadians cannot accept this.

This is why we will soon introduce legislation to ensure that repeat violent criminals will no longer be automatically granted statutory release after serving two-thirds of their sentence. We will propose amendments to the Corrections and Conditional Release Act to seriously restrict statutory release for repeat federal criminals who have previously received a prison sentence of five years or more that includes a serious violent offence. Our goal is to see that the most serious criminals are kept off our streets and away from Canadian families for as long as possible.

These changes complement other tough-on-crime actions that our government has introduced, such as:

● Tougher prison sentences for sexual offences against children, serious gun crimes, impaired driving and selling drugs to children;

● Providing the courts with the discretion to end sentence discounts for multiple murders; and,

● Repealing the Faint Hope Clause, which allowed offenders serving a life sentence with a parole ineligibility period of more than 15 years to apply for parole after serving 15 years in prison.

I am proud of our government’s strong action to keep our streets and communities safe while ensuring that the rights of victims are placed over those of criminals. We make no apologies for our tough-on-crime stance because we know that law-abiding citizens look to their government to help protect them from violent individuals, from dangerous criminals and terrorist threats.  This is what our government has done and what we will continue to do.

Blaine Calkins,

MP Wetaskiwin