Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I thank all of you for being here today.
Our committee has been here in Vancouver all day. We've heard a lot of testimony. Our chair, Mr. Fast, took me for a walk. You certainly have a beautiful region here and a lot to be thankful for, and we want to partner with you on this crime issue, not just because this has been in the national news and it's a high-profile issue right now. We hope there is a downturn in the gang-related violence and we want to work with you on that to make sure that happens.
I want to talk a bit about sentencing, because that's one of the things that we as a government have been quite seized with. You've all made excellent comments. Ms. Renault mentioned the revolving door. We've heard that a lot. I'm from New Brunswick, and I hear the same thing in my community, the revolving door of the justice system, and ensuring that the penalties fit the crime.
I did want to mention some of our initiatives. One is on house arrest. We know that, certainly in my community, people don't want to see somebody who's committed a serious crime serving their sentence from the comfort of their own home. The other is on mandatory minimum penalties for gun crimes. This has been mentioned by many of you, the gun violence and the recidivism we see where someone commits multiple offences but we don't see an increase in the penalty.
So in the last Parliament we brought in mandatory minimum penalties. If someone commits a crime with a firearm, it will be a minimum of five years, and that escalates. That's our way of saying we take this very seriously, and when the police make the effort to catch someone and there's a successful prosecution, we want to see that person serve time in prison.
The other thing, as was mentioned, is the onus on bail--people are out on the street, on bail, for a gun crime. In the last Parliament we introduced in our Tackling Violent Crime Act, a reverse-onus component whereby a person who has committed a crime with a firearm has to prove why they should be out on bail, rather than the crown having to prove why they shouldn't be out on bail. We've switched that.
In this Parliament we're dealing with legislation dealing with gang crime, including drive-by shootings, amendments to the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, and bringing in tougher penalties for grow-ops. That's one thing we didn't touch on a lot today. I look forward to hearing a bit about the grow-ops in your communities.
Also, one of the things we heard coming out of British Columbia is the issue of credit for time served whereby someone in pre-trial custody for a certain period of time is finally sentenced and the judge says they'll be given two or even up to three days for the time they've been in remand.
I know I don't have time for all of you to answer these questions, but let's go to the issue of closing the revolving door and making sure those few people in your communities who are recidivists get the message and are taken off the street and have access to help in dealing with their issues in correctional facilities. Perhaps, Ms. Renault, you could comment--in your community, your area, the sense that we need to have the recidivists off the street and whether you think these initiatives might play a role in that increased sentencing.
We haven't heard from you, Dr. Plecas. I would like to hear a bit from you about disrupting the criminal enterprise, because when someone is not committing crimes on the street when they're off the street, in an institution. How important is it that we disrupt the criminal enterprise?