I think Mr. Thompson and I approach this from different premises, because what we've heard today is that when you give individuals in the community all the information and then ask them what sentence they would impose, they come pretty close to the sentence imposed by the judge. So if we're going to establish the laws in Canada based on the sensational details people read in the newspaper, we want a well-informed community. We've been told over and over again deterrence isn't what keeps people from committing crime. Most of my clients aren't thinking. A lot of them are young people who do foolish things and now they have to pay the price through the conviction and sentence process.
I echo what my friend from the native community has said. In the north, these individuals stay within their communities. They work with the elders. They are given an education, they're given drug treatment, and they're taught proper respect for women, which is a big problem in the north, as the men don't respect the women. They do all of that within the context of a CSO. If they're sent to jail, they're out of the community. They don't face the situation; they don't face their problems. They're not working with the elders and they're not learning. They come back probably as bad as they left.
When we're dealing with these orders, it's not a matter of what the community might like. I'd like the community to be informed and then hear what they say, because these are a relatively small percentage of sentences based on the statistics in front of this committee. I understand the sentences we're talking about in Bill C-9 are approximately 3% of the sentences imposed every year in Canada. Five percent equal conditional sentence orders or something like that, or 8%, and of the longer sentences in the offence categories, we're talking about perhaps 3%.
The wheel isn't broken, as I've said before. I think it's working very well. We've got a good judiciary in Canada. Day in and day out, they try as hard as they can to get it right, to do the right thing in that individual case. They sometimes make mistakes. That's where I come in. I go on the appeal. But they're working very hard to get it right. They read the papers. They have neighbours who complain to them. It's in the newspaper all the time about the easy sentence someone got. They're aware of that. But they are trying to do justice in a specific case based on the best information they're given.