Thank you for the question.
Mr. Chairman, when I show this graph, that's the issue on chronic offenders, so if I didn't emphasize that sufficiently, I apologize. The main purpose of our mission is to highlight the issue of chronic offenders, and we're asking for escalating sentences.
We don't have the exact prescription for how you do that. Minimum sentences and so on would be up to folks in Parliament to debate and come up with something that's going to work, based on experience. We'll be happy to look at that, but what we're saying is that if somebody appears before a judge and they have 30 convictions and they're appearing again on similar or even other convictions that might be more serious, or violent convictions, there should be a requirement for those sentences to escalate and a reverse onus put on the criminal to demonstrate why they should not get a higher sentence.
Judges in British Columbia tell us it doesn't do any good. Going back to this 1971 policy, it doesn't do any good to put people in prison because they still come out as thieves and criminals and they assault people, they continue to do that, and it's usually based on having a problem with drugs or a mental illness. Therefore, it's a medical problem, and they refuse to treat it as a legal problem.
The only problem is that a whole bunch of victims are going to be created as a result of that decision. There seems to be a disconnect in terms of accountability between that decision and what's going to happen next, and our members and their families are getting pretty upset with that.
Perhaps Dave could answer with a little bit more detail on how we might do this.