I might briefly add some information from both the U.S. context and from Vancouver.
When you look at the experience in the U.S., studies have shown that just over 5% of federal prisoners who are in prison for offences involving crack cocaine and 11% of federal drug defendants are high-level dealers, but it's mostly low-level dealers who have been spending time in prisons in the U.S. In fact, to answer your specific question on the differential impacts on different populations, what we've seen with the introduction of mandatory minimum sentences in the U.S. is that the federal incarceration of women of colour, and specifically black women, has increased by 888%. They are the people who have borne the brunt of mandatory minimum sentences: poor people, black people.
In Vancouver, we have some data from the Vancouver injection drug user study, which samples some of those who are the most vulnerable and most street-involved people who use illegal drugs. Of those, 20% reported having dealt drugs, and it was usually small-scale dealing. In fact, it was people who reported factors associated with the highest levels of addiction, such as high-intensity drug use, who were most associated with drug dealing.
The activities they engage in as dealers are direct street-level selling, 82% of them; middling or carrying drugs, 35% of them; and steering or sending addicts toward dealers, 19% of them. The most common reasons they gave for engaging in this drug-dealing behaviour were to support their own drug addiction or to pay off debts related to drug use.
These are the people who are most easily targeted for the enforcement of mandatory minimum sentences. These are the people who are the most vulnerable. We're got lots of experience from the U.S. We've got data from Canada that says the same kinds of patterns would play out here.