I certainly will.
I'm just going to raise a couple of issues with respect, obviously, to the impact on the African Canadian community. It's going to take a couple of minutes, and then I'll conclude.
It's our submission that given the widespread acknowledgement of the ineffectiveness of mandatory minimums, the government should not move forward with these amendments. As rightly noted by Thomas Gabor and Nicole Crutcher in their research for the Department of Justice:
The severity and inflexibility of some mandatory sentencing policies is such as to place a special onus on proponents to demonstrate that their economic and human costs, as well as their incursion upon the judicial role in sentencing, is warranted by their preventative and other benefits.
We're particularly concerned about the human costs to the African Canadian community as well. As I have already stated, these are costs that are going to impact not only our community but communities across the country. There is ample research that highlights a disproportionate impact of mandatory minimum sentences on African Canadians and on aboriginal accused.
There is no doubt that racism affects our criminal justice system. We have numerous reports from jurisdictions across Canada. I won't mention them. They are mentioned in our report, and you can certainly take a look at them yourselves. A major factor in the overrepresentation of groups in the criminal justice system is the reliance on discriminatory stereotypes. Often these stereotypes come into play in discretionary decision-making. This is particularly important in a situation that involves mandatory minimums, because mandatory minimums remove the discretion from an accountable process before an impartial judge and place it with police and prosecutors who have no accountability, whose decisions cannot be reviewed, and who, because of that, have even greater leverage over accused persons.
This occurs because accused, in certain situations in which they are faced with mandatory minimums, are willing, whether or not they are culpable of a crime, to take a lesser sentence to avoid the possibility of a longer mandatory minimum term. For African Canadians and for all Canadians, it is vitally important that critically important criminal justice concerns such as sentencing occur in an open and transparent process that's open to challenge where necessary.
Mandatory minimums are also problematic because people have the idea that they will increase safety within the community. Our concern is that mandatory minimums do not have a long-term impact on safety in communities. While they certainly will help in having people incarcerated, there is a concern, particularly for marginalized communities into which many of these people will return, that they are invoked without other available options being considered, which might be more useful.
We know that in terms of some of the gun violence that's happened in Toronto over the past year and a half, a lot of the people involved in these issues were young males. Our concern is that there are other options available, whether they are community-based or whether they are extra-judicial sanctions, which should be considered to help prevent these people from becoming more involved in the criminal justice system through incarceration among more hardened offenders.