Thank you very much.
I'd like to go to David, please.
In the last Parliament it was never debated, never got as far, but there was Bill C-70. The intention of that bill--I'm not sure if you're familiar with it; I think the other witnesses are.
That was a presumption. It narrowed it down that the presumption was no conditional sentencing would apply in a certain list of offences. Those offences were terrorism offences, and that is defined in the Criminal Code, and actually would, I believe, go further than the delineated crimes here in the terrorism area; the criminal organization offence; serious personal injury offence, as defined in section 752; and any offence--and I picked this up from your evidence today--in respect of which, on the basis of the nature and the circumstances of the offence, the expression of society's denunciation should take precedence over any other sentencing objective. It also gave an extra clause that said if a judge wanted not to utilize that--in other words, to go against the presumption--the judge would have to put in writing before the court and justify why he took that away.
That seems very close to the testimony you've given here today. It certainly would stay within the principles of sentencing that I think are going to be very difficult under the current paragraph we have.
But before I ask you to comment on that, I will also say that the way...and the minister has come before committee, and I take him at his word that he's allowing us to figure out other ways to do this catchment if we so find an appropriate way. He's basically admitted this is a fairly arbitrary way. Short of listing things, as you actually go through the way it's set up in this bill, many of the offences would be captured. They're just listed differently. Then, because of the way the current bill is set up, it excludes the hybrids, so you take out a whole other set of potential things.
So to a certain extent they're similar, but they don't have the same quality of rationale, if I can put it that way, and I would think the Bill C-70 approach, or the approach you've come up with, would be one that would be more able to still leave the discretion with the sentencing judge. I believe your interpretation that we will have the prosecutors doing the discretionary work behind closed doors, not in a transparent manner, and there have been numerous studies to show that, despite the minister's own evidence saying no, no prosecutor would do that. They do it all the time, and the empirical data is there in the studies showing that it happens. It happens in every courtroom.
On that, I'd like David and maybe Lorraine's group to comment on those two things. We're only two to three weeks away from having to sit down seriously in this committee and work on some amendments to this, because I think there is some appetite for closing the door somewhat. Even though I'm a great believer in conditional sentencing, I'm saying we have to come up with something that's workable, not arbitrary.