Thank you. I will do so in the future.
I really want to respond to some of the points Mr. Daubney raised.
Certainly, having spent time with the person who helped draft this, I don't have any intention of changing the criteria. The government used the terms, “if the circumstances justify it”, and I put it as “if it is justified by the circumstances”. My intent is the same as the government's.
Flowing from that, and in terms of that intent, my reading of the proposed subsection, as it is, was that it was in fact going to impose on prosecutors a much greater burden to call evidence. Again, I don't see my wording as changing that.
If the amendment presented by the government passes, courts are going to have to take more evidence in order to justify that the circumstances exist to move it up to something close to or at 1.5. I don't think that's going to change.
On the final point about my personalizing this, it's part of the basic principles of sentencing that all criminal sentencing has to be done on a personal basis. So I'm not changing anything in terms of standard sentencing principles in this regard.