Thank you, Mr. Chair.
First of all, Mr. Chair, I'm a little confused by Mr. Ménard's position at this point in raising this objection and putting forward this amendment. I was in the House on October 6 when this bill was debated. I listened very intently to what he had to say. With respect to the mandatory minimum sentence he said the following:
We've seen this in the United States, where there are many minimum sentences. Moreover, this is one of the problems with minimum sentences. In this case, there is no such problem. I feel that a six-month sentence for a third offence is reasonable. It can certainly act as a deterrent. As honourable members can see, the Bloc's objections are not ideological, but are based on rational knowledge, experience, and criminology.
All I can say is that I agreed with Mr. Ménard then; I thought he made a good point. I think many people in the House of Commons who heard that did.
Secondly, we heard from a number of witnesses, when we were traveling in Winnipeg and other cities during our study of organized crime, about the large number of auto thefts that are committed by a small number of repeat offenders. During the debate in the House, we heard about some of the tragic cases that have come out of some of these auto thefts in which innocent people have been killed by the stolen cars driven by repeat offenders.
For example, there is a very famous case, which Mr. Ménard will remember, that we heard about in Winnipeg, in which a young woman was jogging. She was struck and killed by a stolen car driven by a repeat offender who in fact was out with the intent of seeing how many joggers he could hit. It is a very famous case there. In the case that I believe in part the Nunn commission was responding to, my recollection of the facts—and Mr. Murphy can perhaps correct me, if I'm incorrect about it—is that a young repeat offender who was driving a stolen car killed a victim with that stolen car.
There is a lot of evidence to suggest that many of the worst crimes committed with stolen vehicles are committed by repeat offenders. A mandatory minimum penalty will not only send them a message that this is not tolerable behaviour; they will have to think a long time, while they're in that jail sentence of six months, thinking about what they have done and the danger they cause to the public.
And obviously, while they're in incarceration they can't be committing another auto theft and putting the public in danger, as the individual did in the case that led to the Nunn commission.
Thirdly, I would point out that under this legislation the prosecutor has a discretion to decide whether to proceed by way of summary conviction or indictment. If he proceeds by way of summary conviction, there is no mandatory minimum; the mandatory minimum only applies when he chooses to proceed by way of indictment. Obviously the prosecutor will look at each case, and when he has a serious repeat offender who he thinks poses a threat to the public, that's when he will proceed by way of indictment, which would result in the mandatory minimum penalty.
For all those reasons, Mr. Chair, it's my view that a mandatory minimum penalty of six months after the third offence of this sort is very reasonable and actually quite limited. For those reasons, I would ask all the members of this committee to vote against this amendment and support the bill as drafted.