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Dear friends,

The Omnibus Crime Bill has moved from a small Senate committee into a final debate in front of the whole Senate.

If Bill C-10 passes in its present form, it will fundamentally shift Canada’s justice system away from prevention and rehabilitation, and towards punishment and exclusion for our most vulnerable.

Since the Senate committee has not provided the “sober second thought” Canadians deserve, our only option is to ask key Senators to vote against Bill C-10, forcing our Parliament to go back to the drawing board.

Together, our community has already sent 30,000 messages to the Senate and helped persuade the Liberals, and some Conservatives, in the Senate to oppose the Crime Bill. Now, we urgently need to encourage more moderate Conservative Senators to take a stand for Canadian justice by voting against Bill-C10.

The Senate committee has made some amendments, but they have ignored the evidence and regional concerns. Texas Republicans have warned us that the Crime Bill’s fill-the-prisons approach to justice has been an expensive failure everywhere it has been tried.¹ Independent Canadian researchers have calculated that the bill could cost tens of billions of dollars. Yet, we still do not know the full social and fiscal costs this bill will impose on our communities, provinces and territories, even though they pay for most of the justice system.²

Mandatory sentences and prison expansion backfired in the United States, a country with only 5% of the global population and 25% of all the world’s prisoners. Today, state after state is in crisis and is repealing those laws.¹ Experience shows that we should focus on proven strategies to prevent crime, rehabilitate people and reintegrate them into society.^3,4

Many of the moderate Conservative Senators know that, and they can still do the right thing.

Thank you so much for taking action. Let’s start ringing their phones off the hooks.