Justice Committee on March 25th, 2010

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

I call the meeting to order.

This is the fourth meeting of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human rights on March 25, 2010. We are continuing our study on organized crime.

For the record, we've travelled across Canada soliciting the thoughts of Canadians. We've already been to Halifax, Montreal, and Vancouver. Today, we want to hear from the good people of Toronto, Ontario. We have a number of witnesses with us in our morning session.

First of all, we have with us the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, represented by Graeme Norton.

Welcome back.

We also have with us the Canadian Council of Criminal Defence Lawyers, represented by William Trudell.

We also welcome you back to our meeting.

We'll wait for Mr. Henry of the Hoodlinc Youth Organization to come later.

In the meantime, we'll start. I think most of you know what the process is. Each of you has 10 minutes for your presentation and then we'll open the floor to questions from our members. Who would like to start?

Mr. Norton.

[Graeme Norton, Director, Public Safety Project, Canadian Civil Liberties Association]

Good morning, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. On behalf on the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, I thank you very much for inviting us here today to share our thoughts with you.

For those of you not familiar with the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, let me say that we're a national, non-profit civil liberties watchdog and advocacy organization that was founded in 1964. Our core mandate is to promote respect for and observance of fundamental civil liberties and human rights and to ensure the protection and full exercise of those rights and liberties in Canada. Our work involves research, advocacy, litigation, and public education. Our membership consists of several thousand paid supporters from many walks of life.

The CCLA recognizes that organized crime can do great harm to society. Such crime can disrupt the social fabric of our communities and cause threats to our economic and personal security. It can lead to proliferation of violence and take a tremendous and tragic toll on those who are affected, both directly and indirectly.

The CCLA does not have an expressed position on organized crime per se. We do, however, believe that any steps taken to address this phenomenon must, like all laws, be necessary and effective and infringe as little as possible upon the rights and freedoms of Canadians.

It is from this perspective that we have considered several of the specific proposals and tools this committee has looked at for combatting organized crime. I'm going to briefly address three of those proposals in my presentation this morning, and hopefully I'll be able to do my best to answer questions you have on any other tools for fighting organized crime that you've looked at in the course of your review.

First, I'd like to address the issue of mandatory minimum sentences, which I know this committee has considered in some detail, both within and beyond the organized crime context. The recent passage of Bill C-2 and Bill C-14 have introduced more mandatory minimum penalties in Canada, some of which have been directly targeted at organized crime offences. Also, the forthcoming reintroduction of what was previously Bill C-15, the government's drug crime legislation, will bring further attention to the mandatory minimum issue in the coming months.

With regard to mandatory minimum jail sentences, it is the CCLA's position that such sentences are not an appropriate tool for fighting crime in Canada. This is our position irrespective of the crime for which the sentence may be imposed, and we base this position on three primary observations.

First, mandatory minimums create the possibility that the court will be forced to impose a predetermined sentence in a case where that sentence is unduly harsh. This could result in an offender receiving an excessive sentence, leading to an injustice in that particular case.

Second, mandatory minimums are not effective. Indeed, the majority of studies that have looked at this issue have found that few people are even aware of mandatory minimum sentences, and that where they do exist, they have not proven to be a successful deterrent to crime.

Third, mandatory minimum sentences can distort the justice system by transferring discretion from judges to police and prosecutors. Where a judge has no choice but to impose a certain sentence, the real determination about the level of punishment an offender receives will be made through decisions that occur before a trial even begins, such as whether to charge at all or whether to proceed summarily or by way of indictment.

Given these realities, the CCLA urges the committee to recommend against the further use of mandatory minimums as a crime-fighting tool for organized crime.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

Mr. Norton, I'm going to ask you to slow down in your presentation. The interpreters are having trouble following you. We want to make sure that we can get you on the record properly.

[Graeme Norton]

I apologize for not being able to speak in both official languages, and will do my best to speak in one at a sufficient pace.

The second issue I want to address is lawful access legislation. Proposals to increase lawful access have been circulating in Canada for close to a decade, and the government has indicated an intention to re-table lawful access legislation in the current session of Parliament. While we take no issue with the notion that law enforcement powers should keep pace with technological realities, we're concerned about the proposed legislation and how it seeks to achieve this objective.

Our overriding concern relates to the reduced legal requirements for the accessing of otherwise private information that have been included in recent lawful access bills. In some cases warrant requirements have been reduced from reasonable grounds to believe, to reasonable grounds to suspect. On others there are no prior judicial authorization requirements at all. These powers apply irrespective of the offence being investigated or the level of urgency attached to that investigation. They make it considerably easier for law enforcement to access private information that can reveal highly personal details about those to whom it relates.

The CCLA is deeply troubled by this downward pressure on privacy protections. Privacy is a critical and increasingly complex right that is at the core of our constitutional democracy. It must be subject to robust protection, and any exception to this rule should be clearly necessary and subject to robust judicial oversight.

In the CCLA's view, the lawful access powers that have been proposed are overly invasive and overly broad. They are not properly tailored to address legitimate concerns that have been raised by law enforcement, and they go far beyond what is necessary to modernize Canada's lawful access regime. As such, the CCLA urges the committee to recommend against implementing this legislation until it has been adjusted to appropriately balance the needs of both law enforcement and personal privacy.

Finally I'd like to address the issue of creating a list of criminal organizations, which I know has been proposed in some of the committee's earlier hearings on organized crime. We're not aware of a specific proposal having been put forward that would set out exactly how such a list would work; however, we do have some concerns about any form that we can envision such a list taking.

From our experience, and generally speaking, lists of this nature have proven to be cumbersome to administer and difficult to maintain. They frequently impose consequences or sanctions on the basis of an executive decision rather than a judicial finding, raising concerns about the opacity of the process that results in a listing decision.

As we have seen with no-fly lists, such endeavours can quickly spiral out of control, creating significant problems for those who might find themselves wrongly included on a particular list. Wrongly affected persons often have great difficulty getting their names off such a list, and until they can do so, they must endure significant interference with their personal liberty.

As such, it is the CCLA's position that it would be inadvisable to create a list of criminal organizations. If, however, the committee suggests that such a list be created, the CCLA would recommend, at a minimum, the following measures be put in place to ensure that its potential negative impact is as limited as possible.

First, we recommend that any organization added to the list should only be included following a judicial finding that it meets the Criminal Code definition of criminal organization.

Second, we recommend that the list should be regularly reviewed to ensure that all of the groups on it continue to meet the definition.

Third, a procedure should be established through which any group that is on the list and feels it should not be can apply to have its name removed. Where such an application is made, the members of the group applying should have access to the evidence upon which the listing determination was made.

Finally, the list should be usable only for the sole purpose that has been advanced for its justification: reducing redundancies in the prosecution of criminal organization offences.

I'll conclude with that and thank you again for the invitation to be here today. I look forward to taking your questions.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

Thank you.

We'll move on to Mr. Trudell.

[William Trudell, Chair, Canadian Council of Criminal Defence Lawyers]

Thank you very much, Chair and members of the committee. I appreciate being invited back on behalf of the Canadian Council of Criminal Defence Lawyers, and I welcome you to Toronto for a change.

I want to talk today about a central theme in confronting criminal organizations, changing legislation, and how the criminal justice system deals with these issues, as opposed to specific comments in relation to some of the issues. For instance, on minimum sentences reducing judges' discretion, we are on the record and have talked about it on many other occasions.

I think the key here is collaboration. In reading some of the helpful testimony that you've experienced across the country, I note that a theme seems to run through it. I want to suggest to you that in the last year, collaboration among police, crown, defence, community, and government has really moved to the forefront in terms of looking at issues, better management of the criminal justice system, and better management in the identification of causes of crime and in the involvement of the community.

I want to use the word “collaboration” and suggest that there needs to be collaboration among many different partners in the criminal justice system and outside it. There must be collaboration between governments. There must be collaboration among the federal, provincial, and municipal governments in terms of funding, policing, and sharing information, and in terms of identifying some of the problems in the community, such as, for instance, community involvement, which is very important.

All levels of government have an interest in community involvement, because it is very important. There must be collaboration with the community. We must have the community involved in understanding. I really was impressed by the evidence you received in Halifax from Chief Beazley about the involvement of the police in the community.

We first need collaboration between levels of government. Who is responsible for what and who will fund what? We need collaboration between government sectors. There's no sense in operating in a silo, because criminal justice is not able to solve health problems, those addictions and mental health problems that may be the offshoot of organized crime, especially in regard to the proliferation of drugs in the communities. We need to have mental health, social services, and those other portfolios working together with you in terms of justice issues.

We can't operate as a society in an isolated way. We need collaboration among the various disciplines. There's a good example of that. I think many police officers would tell you that much time is wasted by having four or five police officers escort a chronic offender to a hospital, as opposed to those officers being back on the street. There's the interaction of mental health, social services, and different portfolios, so health is important to consider when we're talking about collaboration.

We need collaboration within communities. We need to have people in the communities involved with their police forces, crowns, defence, and judiciary. The public needs to understand. If we look at different types of organized crime, there are the street gangs, and what they are is turf organizations within communities. They're different in some respects from, historically, the Hells Angels. These are turf wars. They're in their communities. Oftentimes we have a problem in this city in terms of certain neighbourhoods. In many of those neighbourhoods, there are single parents, and the gangs are involved in turf wars. We need that community involvement, the collaboration within that.

We need collaboration among the crown, the defence, the judiciary, and the police. One of the most remarkable things that has happened within the last year, through the workings of the national Steering Committee on Justice Efficiencies and Access to the Justice System, and also through the national symposium, which was prompted by the national association of chiefs of police, is that people have come together to identify some of the problems in combatting crime and running a better system, and we are finding that we have more in common here than we have in relation to different issues.

There has to be collaboration in thinking, in my respectful submission. You've had some fantastically interesting people come before you, so you have a collaborative view about the causes of criminal activity and organized crime. I remember someone talking about piracy--and all the way through. Organized crime is a response to people who don't like the law--or needs.

So I would ask you to take all of the information you're receiving from the learned academics who have testified before you and take a collaborative approach in relation to solving or addressing the issues of organized crime and the criminal justice system.

We need a collaborative approach to education. We don't do a very good job as stakeholders, defence, crown, and police, in making sure we all understand where we're coming from. For example, you have heard on many occasions that there seems to be a problem with disclosure. Disclosure is not the problem; it's getting disclosure, organizing disclosure, and disseminating it. So we need to have a collaborative educational approach for police officers, young lawyers, and crown attorneys on why disclosure is necessary. It's sanctified by the law, so let's deal with it and manage the system better. The only way you do that is through a collaborative approach.

It's not enough, with great respect, to talk about minimum sentences and how we deal with the problem at the end. We're probably never going to solve the historical evolution of criminal activity and organized crime by just making it tougher at the end. To understand and collaboratively work on the problems, the reasons, and how the system deals with them is one of the magical solutions you may get from these expanded hearings.

I really commend you for getting into the communities. I'm sure that some of the things you've heard about--the ideas that the police are offering and moving forward so we don't have a rigid system.... Because a rigid system doesn't solve the cause problem. That's the message I would like to discuss with you today, on behalf of the Canadian Council of Criminal Defence Lawyers. We need a collaborative approach to solving and addressing organized crime, and the use of the criminal justice system to deal with it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

Thank you very much.

I notice that Mr. Henry has appeared on behalf of Hoodlinc. You' have 10 minutes to present, and then we'll let our members ask you questions.

[Brian Henry, Executive Director, Hoodlinc Youth Organization]

Thank you once again, and good morning to everyone. I appreciate the opportunity to be here. I think it's very seldom that someone like me gets to speak to a committee like this, so I certainly appreciate the privilege of being here this morning.

As stated before, I am the executive director of Hoodlinc Youth Organization, which is a grassroots, not-for-profit organization in the east Scarborough area of Toronto. I will speak strictly from a community perspective. I'm not an expert on crime, or organized crime for that matter, but during my work I find myself interacting quite frequently with the criminal justice system, specifically the youth criminal justice system.

There's a perception within our communities, especially in Scarborough, that there are a lot of gangs and organized crime there. I'm here to tell you that there aren't.

While at some level members of the community, especially youth, do end up supporting organized crime in terms of everything from drugs to guns that find their way into the communities, and through our community hubs are then disseminated throughout the larger community, what we do see in our community are mostly young people who are involved in these street-level crimes and supporting organized crime. These are young people who have been disengaged from anything mainstream, who have been marginalized, and, to put it in a nutshell, who are struggling within our communities and commit acts of desperation in getting involved in crime to support their lifestyle and to live.

For many of our young people, getting involved in crime and selling drugs is quite simply a measure that they use to survive. So I'm here to say that there are no gangs or organized crime within our community, even though we supported.... What we have are simply groups of young people who have grown up together, who have from time to time slept in the same bed and eaten from the same plate, who have come to support each other, and who, because opportunities are so few and far between, end up being involved in criminal activity.

For the past seven years, our organization has been engaging our community to try to find solutions to the issues. We've implemented a number of programs that have been very successful, especially in the Malvern area of east Scarborough.

In 2005, when the City of the Toronto and United Way were identifying high needs communities--I think they have been labelled the 13 priority communities, with Malvern, where I reside, being one of them--Malvern was among the worst of those communities in terms of youth crime, youth vandalism, and higher dropout rates among the youth in high school. I'm pleased to say that after four years--going on five years now--we've turned that around, for the most part. Malvern has gone from being the very worst to the best in terms of the priority communities.

The solution for us was active and intense engagements of the youth populations and the communities. It was not only engagement, but also empowering those communities to take responsibility for themselves. We've been able to get into communities and engage the young people to act as mentors and leaders for other young people. We've been able to mobilize local resources, school boards specifically; local police departments; and local agencies, in order to collaboratively engage and bring resources to these young people, especially in the area of education.

When I started, only four in ten youth from my community would make it to high school graduation; one in ten would make it into a post-secondary school institution. This was an issue that needed to be addressed. We had way too many young people being disengaged from anything mainstream in terms of schooling and being left to their own devices within the community.

We've been able to form partnerships with the Catholic board and creating alternative schools for these young people to go to. And we've had successes. We've been able to create nutrition programs to feed kids and social and cultural programs to engage their imaginations and interests. Collaboratively being delivered by a number of agencies within the Scarborough community, all these programs have had a very significant impact.

I don't want to leave you with the impression today that everything is okay in our community. It simply isn't. But what we don't have is gangs, and I don't want my community to be labelled as gang-riddled, because it implies to folks who are forming policy that it's quite simply a policing issue. While there's a small segment of the community that needs to be incarcerated in order for them to embrace any real change, what it comes down to is a two-tiered approach: one being policing, to create a deterrent to crime, but also understanding that the vast majority of the young people within these at-risk, high-risk communities within Toronto are anywhere from 12 to 21 years of age, in all likelihood coming from a single-parent family.

As a matter of fact, we've stopped referring to families within our neighbourhoods as “families”. We refer to them as survival units, because that's essentially what they are, a mother and a number of children trying their utter best to survive in these communities.

While part of the problem is policing and deterrence through incarceration, the bulk of the solution lies in pointing resources toward creating opportunities for young people in the areas of education, employment, and social change.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

Thank you.

We'll open the floor to questions from our members.

Mr. Murphy, why don't you start?

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to thank the witnesses for coming. I'm very interested in Mr. Henry's statements. I think we should all take a turn at that. I'll save the second round of questioning from our team for that very interesting stuff.

But in the first round, I'd like to ask both Mr. Trudell and Mr. Norton the same questions. I'd summarize it by saying that in their realm of charter protection and civil liberties protections, balanced with society's need to have public safety—which is something that every member of this committee would agree with, the need to have public safety, security—there seem to be some themes coming from these hearings that I think everybody could agree with. Mr. Trudell's comments on collaboration and the working of the forces together—community forces, police forces, prosecutorial, etc.—hits home very much. It's a way to make things more effective.

I think what we're also hearing from law enforcement officials is the need to be more surgical in the tooling up of how to combat needs. It's no longer the idea, as a municipal council might think, of having a policeman walking the beat. It's all marketplace politics. But what we hear is that we need the resources directed to specific problem-oriented policing types of deals, and that's how we can help as a parliament.

In that regard I want to ask about three areas. One is any legislation that might compel telecommunications companies, ISP providers, and device manufacturers to use devices that are susceptible to interception. I take very seriously what you both say about the need to have judicial oversight and protection of privacy rights, but right now there are devices used in organized crime that can't even be intercepted. The judge can make an order, but it's an order that goes into the ether. So I want to know your opinion on whether you think that's safeguarded if there are judicial protections.

The second aspect is forfeiture of the proceeds of crime. Many provinces are doing great work in that, and we learned in Vancouver that if you take the money out of the system, sometimes that's what organized crime is all about. It's very much about taking the money out of the system. In 2005, the Liberal government reversed the onus on the balance of probabilities to show why something shouldn't be forfeited. I wonder how far you think is too far in going after proceeds of crime, before a finding of guilt, pending or during a trial.

The final aspect, if you have time, is that as Bill C-4 rears its head, regarding amendments to the Youth Criminal Justice Act, we're talking about youth being—and I'm in agreement—the pawns in many organized crime activities. Yet they are being used, and some of the provisions are carefully drafted to attack the organized crime units that are using these pawns, by the lifting of publication bans on the names of some of these youths and by doing extrajudicial measures to get at the problem.

I want to know the civil liberties and charter implications of those three areas.

[William Trudell]

First let me respond generally to a concern you've heard time and time again, and that is resources. There is no question about it that one of the things the committee has to be concerned about is the demand for resources so that the police in this country can try to keep up or be one step ahead, especially as we move into areas of identity theft and the use of the Internet, which is a new era for us, a new time. It seems to me that in the first instance you have to make sure the police are resourced properly so they can be up to speed on the technology necessary to combat this new type of crime.

As an aside, it's very important when I use the word “collaboration” that police forces collaborate. In one of the reports I read there were three paragraphs indicating that different police organizations or units are looking for funding. So there has to be that amalgamated approach to resourcing and making sure the police get the resources they need.

However, you can't take these three examples you have suggested and then try to find a solution that covers all the possibilities. I don't want to use the word “inappropriately”, but we don't want a rigid response to what we think may be perceived problems.

Let's talk about compelling telecommunications companies to make it easier. I would respectfully submit that there has to be some movement in that area, but how do you do it? The balance, who is the gatekeeper, is really important. So there is no question about it that in this area of throwaway phones, etc., there is a new type of criminal conduct that's not provincial, not federal, but international. Probably that's something that really needs to be looked at. How do we best get the providers to pay attention to this problem, as a community, which they are, right? So I think there's room to look at this.

In relation to forfeiture, in my respectful submission it depends on what you're talking about here. There are different forms of what I'll call organized crime. My friend, Mr. Henry, so articulately talked about there being no organized crime in these communities. And there are a number of people who gather together to find a sort of culture or identification. There is another type of organized crime that we probably started talking about 15 years ago, and that is the bikers, the organized crime organizations that are motivated by money. That's what it is; it's a business they stepped into because the government regulates it. In my respectful submission, that's a different sort of group we may want to target.

But forfeiture raises all kinds of issues of privacy rights. Whose interests are being attacked here? So you have to have a stakeholder, you have to have a balance here. And I have great concern about a general response to forfeiture before a finding of guilt, because often it's the person who is the innocent third party who suffers.

These are good ideas, these are interesting ideas, but they have to be looked at in a global sense. And make sure that whoever is targeted, there is a balance in terms of the presumption of innocence and whose property it is, because the people who are affected by immediate forfeiture and by some of these responses are not the people we're targeting. It's the flow; it's the people who are, in effect, in some respects, victimized in the community.

What was the third one, Mr. Murphy?

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

The Youth Criminal Justice Act.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

Actually--

[William Trudell]

I'm out of time.

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Next round.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

You're out of time, but you can get in the next round, exactly.

We'll move on to Monsieur Ménard. You've got seven minutes.

[Serge Ménard, Bloc, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

There are people here from two organizations that have long understood not only that minimum sentences have no deterrent effect, but more than that, that they sometimes compel judges to do what they consider to be injustices. To justify minimum sentences, we are often given the example of cases for which the sentence was apparently grossly inadequate.

I know that minimum sentences result in a lot of plea bargaining and that as a result these things are not public. However, judges sometimes say their hands are tied by the minimum sentence even when they consider it unjust.

Do you keep a record of these cases, at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the Canadian Council of Criminal Defence Lawyers? If not, would you be able to do that in future?

[Graeme Norton]

I can respond to that. We haven't done a comprehensive study of looking at mandatory minimum sentences writ large. We've done examinations in particular contexts when looking at particular bills. In the case of Bill C-15, we made a submission before this committee last spring, almost a year ago.

We've looked at some cases that recently came through the courts, cases where people did not receive the sentences they would otherwise have received. There were cases where judges did not give the sentences that they may now be forced to give. There were also cases where they gave sentences that were significantly more than they would be forced to impose as a result of the legislation.

My understanding of the academic work on the issue is that there has been a large amount of academic and social science work done on mandatory minimum sentences. I'm not sure what a new comprehensive study would add to that. I think the work has been quite conclusive over the past many years. I understand that some of the points I mentioned in my presentation are some of the points that arose out of the large body of social science work.

[William Trudell]

Mr. Ménard, on behalf of the CCCDL, as you know, we have representatives across the country and in the north. It's early to measure the impact of new legislation demanding mandatory minimums. We've decided that we will try to gather information to see what the impact will be and to see whether or not the negative aspects outweigh the positive aspects. We are unable to measure it yet because it's early.

I think it however goes without saying that we select judges with great fanfare. We select judges who are experienced. We applaud their appointments. We then restrict their ability to do the job. That's wrong. The evidence in this country that judges are not taking offences seriously is anecdotal.

I think the mandatory minimums may be a political statement. Are they going to change behaviour? Are they going to do anything other than warehouse people? Are they going to make the criminal justice system run more smoothly? They absolutely will not. Do they frustrate judges? Of course, they do. It's actually not fair, with great respect.

[Serge Ménard, Bloc, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

I was interested to read the study by Julian Roberts, commissioned by the Department of Justice in 2005, on minimum sentences in the Commonwealth countries. You may be familiar with it. I noted that these sentences are applied in all of the Commonwealth countries. In general, about 65% of people support them, but for the specific cases presented to them, they would not apply those sentences.

I am going to move on to my second question. If we decide to make a list, judicially, of criminal organizations, who will be able to declare themselves the defendant in that kind of judicial proceeding, in your opinion?

[Graeme Norton]

Sir, could you just clarify that question?

[Serge Ménard, Bloc, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

If we establish a judicial procedure for determining, for example, whether a criminal organization will appear in the list of criminal organizations, who will be able to declare themselves the defendant, in your opinion? If we later prosecute someone for being a member of a criminal organization, will evidence not then be submitted that was obtained in the absence of that person, who will not have been able to challenge it?

[Graeme Norton]

Yes, potentially. I think there are numerous problems that could be associated with the listing idea. I certainly understand why some people have suggested it, if it's creating redundancies and they're having to go through the same work over and over again. I can see why that would be troubling and problematic.

[Serge Ménard, Bloc, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

I don't have a lot of time. I will come back to that.

In the study I read, I noted that in nearly all the Commonwealth countries, except Canada, they used what is called in English a "saving clause" when the judge considered the minimum sentence unjust. That provision allows the judge not to apply the sentence, but the judge must explain, orally or in writing, so it is included in the record, the reasons why they are not applying the minimum sentence in this particular case.

If we had to apply minimum sentences, do you think we should proceed as the other Commonwealth countries do?

[William Trudell]

We actually proposed something like that at a previous hearing. I think there's no question about it. That gives a balance, sends the message out, but it allows a judge to exercise his or her discretion and explain why in the particular circumstances of that case, of that person, of that group, the minimum sentence that otherwise would have been applied is not going to be applied. Reviewable on appeal, of course...but it strikes a remarkably creative balance and it takes rigidity out of a situation that's not rigid.

There's nothing you hear here from the various witnesses that has all the answers. There's nothing rigid, so we have to be able to give parliamentarians the opportunity to say, “Wait a minute, maybe we should change the law in this regard.” You have to give judges an opportunity to say, “Okay, I got the message, but I'm now being asked to look at the protection of society, protection of the community, which may include the protection of this young person's family or the people who are affected by the minimum sentence.”

Let me just say one other thing so that you know this. A minimum sentence in Toronto is very different from a minimum sentence in Pond Inlet, because the community is totally disrupted and that person from Pond Inlet doesn't go to a jail locally. That person gets shipped way out of their community. So the collaborative impact of what happens is lost.

So I think, Monsieur Ménard, that's a fine balance, if I could use that phrase.