Monsieur Paquette, you mentioned Bill C-48. That is the bill that is directed against multiple murderers, meaning individuals who kill more than one person. Instead of their being eligible for parole after 25 years, regardless of the number of people they have murdered, we are now giving judges the discretion to increase that to 50 or 75 years if there's a second or a third murder.
When you ask what the cost is, the public servants, whom I'm sure you respect, have come to the conclusion that no detailed cost information is available because the provision is discretionary. It only applies to multiple murderers, and any impact would only be apparent in future years. That means there will be no apparent cost to this for 25 years, because the individual who was convicted of first-degree murder will be there for 25 years. They're saying that since it's discretionary, it is impossible to guess what the incremental costs will be in 25 or 50 years. That's all I'm asking you to do.
You may disagree and say we shouldn't be coming down hard on multiple murderers. That's your business. You can do that, and we can have these points of disagreement, but if you're asking what costs there will be 25 or 50 years from now, the public servants who have helped put these together say it is virtually impossible to determine. You're talking about something discretionary and something that won't happen for 25 years.