In terms of the deterrent issue, he focused largely on Steven Levitt's work. Steven Levitt is, as I said, in large part because of the book Freakonomics, a very well-known person. There are very serious concerns above and beyond this particular study that Professors Webster and Zimring and I did. There are very serious problems that have been raised about a number of different things that Steven Levitt has done, including things like simply not presenting the results of analyses, which are in fact the ones that he describes. Conveniently, certain variables are left out of the equation, which changes dramatically what his findings are.
Mr. Lee, in terms of deterrence, depended largely on two things. One was Steven Levitt's assessment, which I'm saying is fundamentally flawed in large part because of the rather cavalier fashion in which he deals with data, and the second one is the issue of Florida. I couldn't tell from the PowerPoint when it was, and I wasn't able to find on the web the transcription of this committee, so I wasn't able to see when it was Mr. Lee indicated that the change in the law in Florida happened.
The two figures I have here are from a much more detailed study than Mr. Lee's study, because what it did is not only just plot the crime during the 1990s, but it also did quite a sophisticated statistical analysis on overall crime, on violent crime, on homicides, on homicides with firearms, and, again, found no evidence whatsoever.
To answer your question, I go back to Mr. Lee's testimony before you, and I wonder what it was he was saying. These are all public domain articles in refereed journals that are available on the web. These are not in obscure places; they are in the major journals in criminology. He presented information to you that was accurate in the sense that he and I are talking about the same overall trend in Florida crime. The figure I presented from a research piece happened to have in it when the law changed, and it also went back further. My feeling is that what you have to do is look at the overall figure. I think when you do that you see very different things.
Similarly, for example, saying crime is higher than it was in 1962, we do know that. There is no question of that. The question is, what's the relevance of that to Bill C-10? It seems to me that one has to say not whether crime is going up or crime is going down. I would be making exactly the same arguments to you about mandatory minimums whether crime was going up or down. That's not relevant. They either work or they don't. It doesn't matter whether crime is going up. If it's going up or down, we should be doing something.
To go back to the earlier question that was put to me, it does seem to me that when we have 600-and-something murders a year in Canada, that's too many. I don't care if it's already going down; I'd argue it's too many. So we can have fewer maybe in 2006 than we did in 2005, but that doesn't make me feel any better. We should be looking for effective ways of dealing with crime whichever direction it's going.
Mr. Lee was dependent on, in a sense, saying crime is out of control and we've got to do something. We've got to do something, but let's do it effectively.