Okay, thank you.
This committee and various committees on justice have heard from many witnesses on both sides of the coin on this issue. We've heard testimony that has stated that when a person has a conviction, on many occasions that has not been their only offence. Someone mentioned an average. I could not be quoted as being deadly accurate on this, but it might be 10 to 15 offences that an offender might commit during the course of getting a conviction. That varied, naturally, depending upon the offence, and I would certainly understand that.
Taking that into the context, we have a conviction. We finally have a difficult conviction through the diligence of defence counsel doing their job adequately. We have a conviction for a violent crime. This is the Violent Crime Act we're talking about here. Who knows how many victims, but obviously we have a victim at a bare minimum here. We go through that and the person does their time, and that's our system; we all respect the legalities. Now we have it happen again and we have a repeat of the entire situation. Once again, who knows how many victims there have been through all of this, but we have another conviction for the same situation, or similar. Now we have a situation where that person goes ahead and serves their sentence and has gone through our system and hopefully would have been rehabilitated and hopefully would have got the attention needed to rehabilitate, but nonetheless comes out and now is alleged to have committed another offence.
Upon conviction, do you not think it is reasonable...? Our job is to provide a reasonable balance. Putting the human side on you, rather than the defence lawyer side of this particular case, because, as you said, we're all citizens here, is it not reasonable to expect, after all of these offences, the hurt, the heartache, the trauma, the victims, that the offender should have some sense of responsibility to act in a responsible manner for himself? Is it not reasonable to affirm how and why that person should be designated as such after that many offences? Is that not a set of reasonable balances?