Thank you.
I made the point that courts will be more clogged. We're not dealing with the occasional gun crimes--really, they are occasional, believe it or not--or crimes associated with the use of firearms. Even impaired driving cases have gone down quite steadily in the last 10 years because of the social disapproval that's been attached. But the Provincial Court of British Columbia dealt with 50,000 cases between 2000 and 2005.
With that kind of volume, if we take away the guilty pleas...and that's what I'm saying will happen. People will be less likely to plead guilty because they want to avoid that minimum six months, one year, two years, or three years. They will plead not guilty. They will put everything on the table, what I might call a shotgun defence, and it will take a huge amount of court time to go through all of those cases while everything else waits--and all for no good reason, as everyone here has pointed out.
I have to add this: it occurs to me, after listening to everything I've listened to here this afternoon--I haven't heard these individuals speak before--that it's dispiriting that you're even considering this law.
Thank you.