The Blueprint: Canada's Conservative Podcast - May 18, 2017


Michael Cooper on the Liberal gutting of Wynn’s Law

Topics
Winn's Law Winslaw bill debate
Hosted by
Jamie Schmal
Mentioned
Constable David Winn Michael Cooper Tony Clement Bob Runciman Albert Edmonton Winslow Shelley McInnis Winn RCMP Constable Bill S-233 Speaker Paulson
Full Episode： May 9, 2017 Conservative Leadership Weekend

Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

154.45

Word count

1,736

Sentence count

115

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of Blueprint: Canada's Conservative Podcast, Deputy Critic Michael Cooper and Tony Clement discuss Winn's Law, a bill that would require prosecutors to provide evidence of the criminal history of a bail applicant at a bail hearing.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 You're listening to The Blueprint, Canada's Conservative Podcast.
00:00:08.960 Well, they thought they were going to have an easy day over there today, but not so fast, Mr. Speaker.
00:00:16.600 What is it going to take for the Prime Minister to have any respect for any laws in this country that may curb his out-of-control behaviour?
00:00:25.320 And now, here's your host, Tony Clement.
00:00:31.200 You're listening to Blueprint, Canada's Conservative Podcast.
00:00:34.580 I'm your host, Tony Clement, Member of Parliament for Paris Saint-Maskocca.
00:00:38.320 And with me today, we have Michael Cooper, the Member of Parliament for St. Albert Edmonton.
00:00:43.800 And he's also our Deputy Critic for the Conservative Party for Justice.
00:00:47.860 Michael, welcome to the program.
00:00:49.300 Good to be here, Tony.
00:00:50.120 We're going to talk a little bit about Winn's Law, which is something that you have championed in the House of Commons
00:00:55.140 and was named after the late RCMP Constable David Winn.
00:00:58.940 So maybe talk a little bit about Constable Winn and then talk about how that created the movement for Winn's Law.
00:01:05.580 Sure.
00:01:05.900 Well, back in January 2015, Constable David Winn, as well as Auxiliary Constable Derek Bond,
00:01:14.700 were attempting to arrest an individual on a series of outstanding charges.
00:01:21.020 And Constable Winn was fatally shot and killed.
00:01:25.340 And Auxiliary Constable Bond was shot but survived.
00:01:29.520 But frankly, I've talked to him and his life will obviously be never the same.
00:01:33.280 And the individual who murdered Constable Winn and shot Auxiliary Constable Bond was a career criminal.
00:01:43.760 He was out on bail at the time, notwithstanding the fact that he had more than 50 prior criminal convictions,
00:01:51.400 38 outstanding charges, numerous failures to appear.
00:01:55.400 And it prompted RCMP Commissioner Paulson to ask,
00:02:00.360 how was it possible that such an individual was walking amongst us in our community?
00:02:05.800 Right.
00:02:06.100 And one of the reasons why is because of a loophole in the criminal code.
00:02:11.580 And that is that it is discretionary whether the criminal history of a bail applicant
00:02:16.620 is brought to the attention of a judge or justice of the peace at a bail hearing.
00:02:21.220 In the case of Constable Winn's killer, that information was not brought forward.
00:02:26.840 And there's no doubt, in my mind, that had that information been brought forward
00:02:31.800 with this individual's extensive criminal history,
00:02:34.780 he would have been kept behind bars where he belonged.
00:02:38.060 And Constable Winn would be alive today.
00:02:40.920 So in that case, the judge or the justice of the peace who was presiding over the bail hearing
00:02:48.500 had no evidence of priors or no evidence of this criminal history,
00:02:54.120 this likelihood that he was going to re-offend if he was on bail.
00:02:57.500 That's right.
00:02:58.120 He had none of that information.
00:02:59.760 She didn't have any of that information before her.
00:03:02.680 And so what Winn's law would do is close the loophole in the criminal code
00:03:09.060 by simply requiring prosecutors to lead evidence of the criminal history of bail applicants.
00:03:16.400 I mean, that's something that is always relevant and material at a bail hearing.
00:03:21.540 In fact, it's about the only thing that is often relevant and material
00:03:25.480 is to know what that history is so that a judge or JP can properly exercise for discretion
00:03:32.980 in determining whether someone should be kept behind bars or let out into the community.
00:03:37.180 So your bill currently before Parliament does that?
00:03:39.960 It closes that loophole in the criminal code?
00:03:41.640 The bill that had been introduced by Senator Runciman and that I've sponsored in the House
00:03:45.620 does exactly that.
00:03:46.980 Yeah, so it's co-sponsored, Senator Bob Runciman in the Canadian Senate, Bill S-217.
00:03:53.420 And you've got, you're partnering with Senator Runciman to make sure that this is also debated
00:03:59.020 in the House of Commons.
00:03:59.860 Exactly.
00:04:00.660 And Senator Runciman was able to get it through the Senate last year.
00:04:05.420 It passed the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee unanimously.
00:04:10.000 It got through the Senate with the support of every single conservative and liberal senator.
00:04:16.080 And it wasn't until it got to the House of Commons that I guess the government to some
00:04:21.360 degree started to pay attention and decided to put politics ahead of public safety and
00:04:26.420 coming out against the bill.
00:04:27.700 So tell me a bit about that.
00:04:29.160 There's obviously some procedural wrangling that has gone on and some stonewalling by the
00:04:34.100 Liberals.
00:04:34.680 But bizarrely, they're laying up these barriers for this bill being passed.
00:04:41.420 Yeah.
00:04:41.780 Well, it's just incredible.
00:04:42.880 The government opposed the bill at second reading.
00:04:48.260 Nonetheless, I was able to convince 27 liberal MPs to do the right thing, to put public safety
00:04:54.860 first and vote for Winslaw. 0.75
00:04:58.180 And so we were able to get it through second reading.
00:05:00.120 That was an extraordinary moment, by the way, in the House of Commons for our listeners, because
00:05:04.220 basically, Michael, you did a lot of work behind the scenes and in the background, talked
00:05:10.420 to a lot of liberal MPs.
00:05:11.620 And we had a whole raft of these liberal backbenchers who basically defied their own justice minister
00:05:18.220 and the prime minister who spoke, we are told, spoke against this Winslaw in the liberal
00:05:24.600 caucus, and they were willing and able and were present in their seats to vote in favor
00:05:30.620 of Winslaw passing.
00:05:32.240 Right.
00:05:32.660 It really wasn't.
00:05:33.840 What made the moment all the more emotional was the presence of Shelley McInnis Winn, the 0.98
00:05:41.000 widow of Constable Winn, who was present in the gallery to witness that.
00:05:44.900 Right.
00:05:45.300 And frankly, I was not expecting it to pass.
00:05:47.920 I mean, we fought hard, but we were expecting the worst.
00:05:52.520 And so it was just incredible to see that moment, to get it through second reading, not
00:05:58.400 withstanding the very vigorous opposition of the government.
00:06:01.680 And then what happened, though?
00:06:02.860 Well, but then what happened is it went to committee, where effectively the liberals have
00:06:08.000 killed it in committee.
00:06:10.020 And that includes, in fairness, a few liberal MPs on the committee who did vote for it at
00:06:15.340 second reading.
00:06:16.040 One of the primary reasons members of the committee have opposed it is supposedly on the basis of
00:06:24.680 delay.
00:06:25.780 I say that argument makes absolutely no sense.
00:06:28.880 So the basis that it was going to delay proceedings?
00:06:31.560 It would somehow delay bail hearings.
00:06:35.220 Well, I would say a couple of things to that.
00:06:37.180 First of all, the bail hearing of Constable Winn's killer was an incredibly efficient bail hearing.
00:06:45.300 It had, however, fatal consequences.
00:06:48.680 I mean, quite frankly, if it's going to slow things down a little bit to make sure that this
00:06:53.600 kind of information is brought forward, well, then that needs to happen, quite frankly, to
00:06:58.380 prevent people like Constable Winn's killer from being let out.
00:07:02.060 But the other thing is, one of the things that we did here at the Justice Committee over
00:07:07.320 and over and over again, including from people who opposed the bill, was the fact that prosecutors
00:07:13.800 almost always do it.
00:07:16.060 We were told that this is the first thing that prosecutors learn about bail hearings.
00:07:19.980 It's the bread and butter of what prosecutors do at bail hearings in terms of leading this
00:07:26.460 evidence of criminal history of bail applicants.
00:07:28.620 So if something is almost always done, and this legislation would simply close the loophole
00:07:34.740 to make sure that it's not almost always done, but always done, I don't think that one can
00:07:40.420 reasonably make the argument that this is going to create any kind of significant backlog in
00:07:45.220 terms of the courts. 0.55
00:07:46.840 And I also have to say that it's really the height of hypocrisy for the liberals to be
00:07:53.260 talking about delay when these liberal MPs on the committee have stood in silence.
00:08:00.700 As for Justice Minister, fails to do one of the easiest things to do in terms of reducing
00:08:06.880 the backlog, and that is to fill the historic number of judicial vacancies that this Minister
00:08:14.440 of Justice is responsible for in terms of failing to fill.
00:08:17.640 I think right now we've got 62 judicial vacancies.
00:08:20.500 It's just incredible.
00:08:21.220 Right, so that's creating the delay.
00:08:23.140 We're talking, by the way, to Michael Cooper.
00:08:25.380 He's the Member of Parliament for St. Albert Edmonton, the Deputy Critic for Justice for the
00:08:30.540 Conservative Party of Canada.
00:08:32.100 Michael, thank you for being on the program.
00:08:34.260 So where do we go from here with respect to Winslow?
00:08:36.800 I know you're continuing to lead the campaign both publicly and in the House of Commons.
00:08:41.060 Yeah.
00:08:41.220 Well, I think we're going to keep fighting, but for all intents and purposes now that the
00:08:46.500 Justice Committee has recommended that the bill not proceed, the Liberal-dominated Justice
00:08:51.900 Committee, I think it's very unlikely that Winslow will become the law in this Parliament.
00:08:57.720 But that doesn't mean that I'm not going to keep on fighting.
00:09:02.240 I know in my community in Edmonton there's a real sense of outrage over this.
00:09:09.700 So I think we'll keep fighting until the vote.
00:09:14.480 And assuming that the Liberals voted down, they're going to have to be held accountable.
00:09:18.540 There's still another vote in the House of Commons for the committee recommendation to
00:09:22.120 make it to the House.
00:09:22.800 That's right.
00:09:23.820 And, you know, it's obviously very disappointing.
00:09:26.920 But at the same time, I have to say, given the government's opposition, I was surprised
00:09:32.940 that it went as far as it did.
00:09:35.100 And it has brought attention to this important issue.
00:09:39.740 And you know as well as anyone that in the case of private members' bills, that sometimes
00:09:46.280 it takes more than one Parliament to get the right legislation passed.
00:09:50.400 Michael Cooper, what can the public do?
00:09:52.460 Is there a petition board or a comment board?
00:09:55.680 Or should they write a letter?
00:09:56.880 What should they do?
00:09:57.600 Well, I did have an e-petition, a Winslow Now petition that was signed by thousands of
00:10:04.840 Canadians.
00:10:05.400 So I will be tabling that petition in the House of Commons.
00:10:10.000 Excellent.
00:10:10.340 And what I would encourage your listeners to do is call their MP to tell them that this
00:10:17.220 law is important, that this loophole needs to be closed because it can save lives.
00:10:21.300 Well, Michael Cooper, thanks for being on the program and continue the great work on behalf
00:10:25.840 of Canadians for Winslow and generally in the causes of justice that you're championing.
00:10:30.300 Right.
00:10:30.560 Well, thanks, Tony.
00:10:31.380 Thank you.
00:10:31.700 Thank you for listening to The Blueprint, Canada's Conservative Podcast.
00:10:45.220 To find more episodes, interviews and in-depth discussions of politics in Canada, search for
00:10:49.960 The Blueprint on iTunes or visit podcast.conservative.ca.
00:11:01.960 podcast.conservative.ca.