What we have in the Criminal Code right now is, I guess, what one could call a partial scheme with respect to police officers and protection afforded to police officers. We have section 270, which is a simple assault of a peace officer acting in the course of their duties, and at the far end or the more serious end of the spectrum, we have an automatic first degree murder, where a police officer is killed while acting in the course of their duties.
What Bill C-14 proposes to do is plug the gap, so to speak, by creating two new offences, one that would deal with assaults against peace officers causing bodily harm, and one that would deal with the aggravated assault of a peace officer—the most serious assault. What this does is create a complete and separate scheme to respond to violence committed against police and other peace officers.