We could look at the provisions of the bill. In particular, we are creating four categories in clause 2 of the bill. The first category, with respect to the order of priority, deals with support orders made by a court. I said in my comments that we could potentially make an argument under the authority of the federal Parliament on marriage and divorce: the federal Parliament could grant priority to this kind of support order.
The proposed paragraphs 78.1(1)(b) and (c) deal with restitution orders and victim fine surcharges. These two types of order have been deemed constitutional by the Supreme Court of Canada in one case—in another case, it was the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal, if I'm not mistaken—and have been deemed to come under the authority of Parliament under criminal law, since they are related to the sentence.
I was saying in my remarks that, once more, we could make the argument that it falls to the justice system to set a kind of precedent so that offenders pay their penalty, by which I mean pay the victim fine surcharge, in the amount of the restitution order that was made.
Finally, the last category states that the money that remains goes to the offender. Obviously, the offender will have other obligations that will have to be honoured with those amounts and his or her other assets.
I compared this bill with the first version of Bill C-292. I noted one difference, among others, in the previous version of Bill C-292: the balance of the money was being distributed to a victims' group. Regardless of whether there was a complaint or an action of some kind, offenders did not have the money that was rightfully theirs, and that money was quite simply transferred to a victims' group. So this is not in the new version of the bill.
