Sure.
Suppose you're dealing with a situation where you have a 19-year-old who is in a barroom brawl and all that's committed is an assault, but that's under the designated offences. And suppose you want to add to that that he had a weapon with him. He gets a two-year mandatory minimum. Then a couple of years later he's involved in some other business with his friends, when they all set out to do something. He's still only 21, and he still ends up with another mandatory minimum sentence. Then you find yourself in the position where those are both designated offences, so the burden is a little heavier on him.
But if you take that one step further and you look under primary designated offences, discharging a firearm with intent, put yourself in a first nations community, somewhere where you have some kind of big incident going on, discharging a firearm with intent. It doesn't take very long before somebody gets charged with something like that, discharging a firearm with intent. That now is a primary designated offence in this law, which brings--and I think the law also foresees--a higher mandatory minimum sentence for that. Take that same person, who, for argument's sake, might be 30 years old, who 20 years ago had some offence for which he had received a two-year sentence. That would then fall into this, even though it was so many years before.
So these are situations, but what you must remember, too, is that the constitutional challenge won't just come about because the facts of a particular case will permit it. When the Supreme Court of Canada heard Smith years ago on the mandatory minimum seven-year sentence for importation of narcotics, they upheld Mr. Smith's sentence. They said, “We're striking down this law. You're not going to benefit from it because we believe you deserved eight years, but we're striking down this law because we are going into hypothetical possibilities here. We're looking at it.”
So it won't even have to be that perfect fact situation before a challenge comes up.