Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I can't quite understand how it is that although we hear all the time that crime statistics are going down, when we actually see evidence that they're going up, the response is “Oh, well, they fluctuate up and down. It doesn't matter.” I don't see how we can ignore the evidence we've heard today that apparently around the time the mandatory minimum was removed, there was a jump in motor vehicle thefts reported to the police, and I notice that it almost doubled in the ten years following that. While we've wrestled it down again, probably with great devotion of police resources, it has still never returned to where it was in the mid-1980s. We just can't ignore that evidence.
Second, this is a commercial offence at the point that you're getting to the third conviction. We are not talking about young offenders. We're talking about adults, and the evidence we've heard is that the number of adult charges for taking a motor vehicle without consent has gone up since the year 2001. It was previously below 2,000 and now it's over 2,000. As well, the evidence we have heard is that for adults, the total number of charges for property obtained by crime has gone up since 2001. It was 28,444 in 2009 and it is now 30,183, so we're not talking about young offenders here; we're talking about adults.
Nor are we talking about committing joyriding, as Monsieur Ménard mentioned. Nothing in this statute removes the offence of joyriding. If someone is charged with joyriding, that person is not going to be subject to a minimum penalty. If they are convicted of theft of a motor vehicle--it is entirely different from joyriding--three times, at that point they will be subject, at the prosecution's discretion, to a mandatory minimum penalty.
For those reasons I hope we won't take an ideological approach, and that in this particular case, because of the evidence before us that he was good enough to draw to our attention, perhaps Monsieur Ménard can see his way clear to agreeing with the mandatory minimum.
Thank you.