Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague from Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing for the question, because I did want to spend more time on this in my speech, but I ran out of time. There are potentials here, and I have said this in the House before, but this is another example of it. We are increasing mandatory minimums and in a number of cases introducing a few new ones. The risk, especially with judges who are upset with the number of mandatory minimums both the current government and the Liberals before it introduced to restrict them, as the judiciary in this country sees it, comes where we have a serious offence for which there is a mandatory minimum. Let me use the example where there is no mandatory minimum and now one is being imposed.
The tendency on the part of members of the judiciary, both because they are upset with mandatory minimums that are taking that discretion away from them and on the other hand, being deferential to the legislature in our decision making to do this, is that they might say if that is the mandatory minimum and this is a first offence, that is all they are going to impose. If this had been up to the judge, he or she would have imposed a sentence much greater, on the basis that this is a much more serious offence than six months or one year calls for. That is the real risk that we have, especially with the detail of the number of sections we have gone into here where we are increasing sentences from very small amounts in some cases to not much larger amounts in others.
As much as the Conservatives want us to believe otherwise, members of our judiciary are very deferential to the legislature when we make these kind of decisions. I actually wish they were less so and would simply say they were going to impose a more severe penalty because of the facts and scenario in front of them and the limited ability of the person to rehabilitate himself or herself, so they would impose a more severe penalty in order to protect society. They may in fact not do that.
