One of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's new Conservative Senators has questioned the way all four parties in the House of Commons bypassed normal Parliamentary screening and hastily passed a criminal pardon bill dubbed the "Karla Homolka Act" in a few seconds before taking off for Parliament's summer recess.

The Criminal Lawyers Association and a national group established to help women offenders return to society also criticize the way MPs passed the bill on June 17 with the unstated but clear aim of ruling out any chance the National Parole Board might have been able to grant Ms. Homolka a pardon when she qualifies to apply for one in two weeks.

Despite opposition misgivings about the legislation—which among other things doubles the waiting time before an offender who has been released from prison for a major crime may apply for a pardon—all four parties held secret negotiations and agreed to pass the bill through the Commons with no House debate or committee hearings to gather evidence about its implications.

Yukon Conservative Senator Daniel Lang, a veteran territorial lawmaker who Mr. Harper named to the Senate last year and who is now a member of the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee, surprised Liberals and some observers when he drew attention to the fact that the House of Commons deal means there will be no public record of why MPs wanted to pass the bill so quickly or what they intended when they drafted it. The information could be crucial if the bill is ever challenged and the Supreme Court of Canada must rule whether it complies with the Charter of Rights.

"When the bill was presented in the Senate, I was surprised to learn that there was minimum debate in the House of Commons on the bill itself for the public record," Senator Lang told Public Safety Minister Vic Toews (Provencher, Man.) when Mr. Toews appeared last week at the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee during the only day of evidence and testimony about the bill as it flew through both Chambers.

The Senate committee approved the bill without amendment the following day and it was expected to pass and receive royal assent before Ms. Homolka could qualify under existing provisions of the Criminal Records Act to apply for a pardon on July 5. Five years to the day prior to that date, Ms. Homolka was released from a Quebec prison after serving the 12-year sentence for manslaughter she received in 1993 after striking a deal to give evidence against Paul Bernardo in the sex slayings of two teenage girls.

Liberal Senators who oppose elements of the bill and the way it was rushed through the Commons bit their tongues and abstained in the committee vote to send it back to the Senate Chamber without amendments, seemingly under orders from party leader Michael Ignatieff (Etobicoke-Lakeshore, Ont.) not to rock the boat with a possible fall election on the horizon.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper (Calgary Southwest, Alta.) set the stage last April for the political environment in which the bill was handled.

He raised the topic of Ms. Homolka's impending chance to apply for a pardon at a conference of lobbyists for victims' rights. His comments followed earlier public outcries over disclosure that serial killer Clifford Olson was receiving a federal pension while still serving his life sentence and that former hockey coach Graham James received a pardon for sexual abuse convictions several years ago. Mr. Harper claimed "99 per cent" of pardon applications are granted, and said "the law will allow Karla Homolka to apply for a pardon this year."

But the figure appears to be an incomplete presentation of pardon statistics.

The chair of the National Parole Board, Harvey Cenaiko, told the Senate committee that only 10 per cent of the 3.3 million Canadians with a criminal record have been pardoned and that of the 32,000 pardon applications received in 2009, 25,000 were accepted for consideration and the rest of the applications were either rejected "out of hand" or withdrawn.

Sen. Lang said immediately after the committee hearing that the Commons decision to bypass committee hearings or debate will leave no record available in the future if the legislation, Bill C-23a, is challenged in court.

"The point I was making is that I was surprised first of all that a piece of legislation could go through so quickly as it did in the House of Commons with virtually no debate," he elaborated in a subsequent interview. "Once again, it reaffirms the importance of the Upper House, because there has been a second pause to review the legislation and clearly outline what the implications are, what are the costs of the pending legislation and how does it affect those offenders and victims."

The Liberal chair of the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee defended the way her Liberal colleagues and the other parties handled the bill in the Commons, noting there were backroom discussions and "it's not as if it wasn't examined by all four parties, it just wasn't examined on the floor of the House or in committee."

Asked if Mr. Ignatieff or senior House of Commons Liberals had instructed the Senators to also pass the bill speedily, Senator Fraser replied: "I remember being asked 'when do you think you can get this done?' and I remember it being known in discussions, though I can't remember who raised it, because it was just a known fact that there was a desire on the other side, in the other place (the Commons) to move the bill quickly. Nobody had to tell me that, but it did come up in discussion."

The president of the Criminal Lawyers Association, Paul Burstein, said rushing such important legislation through Parliament because of concern over one case inevitably creates other problems afterward. He noted Ms. Homolka was not guaranteed to receive a pardon.

"I call it the Karla Homolka Act," he said. "That's the problem when you legislate based on the moral panic approach. It's easy to dispense with normal democratic procedures, normal parliamentary procedures which are designed to prevent unfairness and unconstitutional implications at the margins of legislation."

The bill was welcomed in committee testimony from Heidi Illingworth, executive director of the Canadian Resource Centre for Victims of Crime, but criticized by Kim Pate, executive director of the Canadian Associations of Elizabeth Fry Societies.

"The question that is begged is what is the purpose of this legislation other than to make it more difficult, for people who already have difficulty obtaining pardons, to get those pardons?" she told the committee. "It seemed very clear to be something aimed at gathering support and perhaps even inflaming public opinion against certain individuals at a time when it was hard to discern what exactly the issue was with respect to pardons," she said.

The Hill Times