Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Because my colleague was talking about lists, and for those who don't know, I'll put on the record part of the advice received from the legislative clerk to the senior levels, and verified by me personally, that it would have been an illegal amendment to this bill to have done an exemption list, because that would have been ruled out of order. Well, I know she gave me that advice, so I'll simply state it here.
The other point I want to make is that I think there are some lessons learned here. The Minister of Justice came before us in the first bill meeting saying he was prepared to say that if we came up with another way of dealing with this as opposed to the arbitrary way of simply going the 10 years, he was open to that. So we have done something that is inside of those concepts. We had to work inside of those concepts. As I said, there were only two legal ways to amend this bill.
The other thing that might be a lesson from this activity comes, again, from that first meeting when I asked the Minister of Justice for access to the bureaucrats inside the Department of Justice to help work on some amendments. There was a reason for that. It was about going through these offences having their expertise. That was refused to me. Thankfully, we have a very good researcher here in Robin, and I went to him to put together an idea of the starting lists that would have been included in this amendment.
In case anybody on the opposition benches feels this is a short list, there are three pages of serious offences that would have been captured here. There would be subjectivity. I mean, it will always be up to the judge to determine terrorist activity, or criminal organization activity, or what a serious personal injury activity is, but the bottom line is that this is not an irrational amendment, this is a factual amendment.
I think for the working of the committee, when there are bona fide approaches to working with a bill to create good policy and asking for access to complete briefings or access to people who have the best knowledge, those people should be made available to us. We got to the same result probably, but at the same time, it could have been done in a better manner and making it a situation where the committee could work more collegially, at least from the government to the opposition.
With that, I'm very happy that my colleagues from the other two parties are prepared to join in this amendment, because I think it is appropriate. My personal preference would have been that discretion be there, but that was not available to us. Because we believed that the public was concerned and wanting some tightening, I made it very clear from the first speech last spring and my first meeting with the government representatives that we would be working toward some movement to tighten the range of conditional sentencing.
Thank you very much.