My short question is this, and I think Mr. Sauvé hit the nail on the head when he said, “My sentence is...forever”. I would suggest that people convicted of first-degree murder do have a sentence forever. We've heard today that they're on parole for the rest of their natural life. But the reason they are on parole for the rest of their life is that the person or persons they murdered are sentenced forever. They don't have a panel sitting here worrying about how long they should be dead. They're dead forever.
But we have to think of the living, I'm told. And the whole psychology behind that is that the person who is dead is dead. It's the living we have to worry about. But when we talk about the victims, the other side will say, “Well, you guys talk about them, but you really don't care”, and then we say, “Well, if you really cared you'd....”
My conundrum is this. I believed in the death penalty at one time. I do not any more. So here we have people who have committed murder. We don't hang them any more. So we have this worry now about what to do with the people we used to hang. At one point our society said we were going to put them in jail forever because the person they murdered is dead forever. And then we said, “No, that's not fair. We need to give them some hope, and we need to show them that they're not going to be punished forever.”
Mr. Sauvé, what this government is dealing with, along with the families of victims and society as a whole--because we are all getting the message, but it's just that we have different philosophical outlooks--is the question of when it is appropriate to begin the system for reintegration into society for a person who has committed that grave act of murder. We've heard it should be eight years, because in Europe it's eight years. I would say that no one can really answer that. I think Mr. Sauvé answered it best. He doesn't think there is a specific date.