I certainly believe this will be a big step towards doing that.
I've heard the same types of commentary. I've gone on ride-alongs with the Regina Police Service, and they will tell you the person they're on their way to pick up or the person whose home we just went into is a guy they've seen 12 times this year already for various types of offences, and especially for stealing vehicles. As I mentioned, it is a phenomenon in which people are doing it for a living—stealing them to deliver to organized crime or to commit other crimes. They steal an awful lot of them, they get caught an awful lot of times, and they get put right back out on the street, where the police are rearresting the same people. That's a large underlying theme that I've heard from police, not just on auto theft but on a lot of things.
On the providing of guidelines to the courts, I couldn't agree with you more. We've all read stories. For example—this has to do with young offenders—there was a murder, I believe in Winnipeg, by a young offender who killed someone with a pool ball in a sock and was sentenced to one day in jail. The sentencing judge said, “There's no provision in the Criminal Code for general deterrence with young offenders, so I can't take into account what kind of message this sends to the community at large, because Parliament hasn't put that into the Criminal Code.”
The justice minister has, I believe, tabled legislation to address that point, but you're right, in a lot of different areas of the Criminal Code, judges have been asking for the guidelines, for direction from Parliament. As you mentioned, there are some situations where there tend to be some sentences handed out that a lot of Canadians scratch their heads at. If we can provide clear parameters to sentencing judges, we would go a long way toward ameliorating that.