Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the witnesses for your presentation today.
There are always a couple of dangers when we look at these types of illustrations. I find them very useful, but on the other hand they're very sterile, and numbers don't tell the story, perhaps, of what we hear as members of Parliament in our constituencies, representing our constituents. This doesn't tell the story of the sense of injustice that someone feels about some of these crimes. You've enumerated sexual offences, sexual assault, serious property crimes, and major assault. When someone who commits that type of offence against someone else is given what people refer to as house arrest, there's a sense among the Canadian population that in that sense justice isn't being served.
One of the conclusions that I see members opposite reaching somehow from this data--and I don't know how anyone could ever reach that conclusion--is that giving people conditional sentences somehow makes them less likely to reoffend than would be the case if they were incarcerated. I don't think members opposite are comparing apples and oranges. For some of these offences, perhaps a judge will look at the most egregious offence on a scale of severity and maybe give the worst offenders some jail time, whereas on the other side of the spectrum, an individual may receive a conditional sentence.
In my view, maybe a conditional sentence is never appropriate for certain crimes, but to somehow look at a graph and reach the conclusion that a person is less likely to reoffend if the person receives a conditional sentence--you can't draw that conclusion, I don't believe, from the information you've provided, because no two situations are the same and they're not even looking at the same groups of people and the same types of offenders.
Could you comment on that briefly?