Well, we're all....
Here's the issue. When I look at the bill, I see that we're talking about drugs that are being sold just outside the school doors, and that could be the person who just grows one plant for the purposes of raising $30 to do something. You know, criminals start small. They don't all start with big grow-ops. They start with the small stuff, and if you leave them alone....
Do you want to talk about treatments in prisons? I have Canada's largest prison in my riding, Warkworth. There's a very good drug and alcohol treatment plan there, but do you know something about drug and alcohol treatment? AA has it down straight: number one, you've got to recognize you have a problem, and number two, you've got to want help. You can have all the programs in the world and you can jam it down some drug-addicted person's face and down their throat, but it won't help them get cured, because they don't want to be cured.
Minister, my question is supposed to be dealing with mandatory minimums, and that's what this all has to do with. People are tired of reading in the newspaper about the sentences some provincial court judge or some judge somewhere gave to somebody who sold drugs: if you spent the last three or four weeks or months in jail, it's time served, boom, out the door, or you go to jail for six or seven or eight weeks. That's what the mandatory minimums are about.
We need to send a signal not necessarily just to the criminals, Minister, and I'd like you to respond to this. We need to send a message not just to the criminals who are doing these things, but to the people who want us, the politicians, to pass laws that make sense to them that the people who are committing the offences suffer the appropriate consequences.
You've been asked about mandatory minimums. I'd like you to talk about mandatory minimums--not what they mean to the criminals, not what they mean to the defence counsel, but what they mean to the average person on the street, to the mother and the father out there.