Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I'll begin by thanking you for your presence here, Ms. O'Sullivan.
I want to say that I've been on this committee only about 15 or 16 months, but during that time I have pondered some of the recurring issues we face. In my opinion, one of them is that sometimes the needs of victims are not consistent with the needs of offenders.
I'll step back a bit and say that I suppose in a grand general philosophical way, every offender we can rehabilitate helps victims. So in that grand general way, the needs of victims and the needs of offenders converge on the issue of rehabilitation. But in other specific ways, victims have needs that are not always consistent with the needs of offenders. So I was very pleased to hear your earlier evidence, because you articulated that very well when you categorized these needs as accountability, transparency, and compassion. I couldn't agree with you more, although I would have elaborated on that by saying that victims need closure, certainty, protection from further victimization, and a sense of equitable treatment weighed against the treatment of the offenders. And of course sometimes they also have some interest in denunciation.
Time and again we sit at this committee, and we always hear the voice of the offenders. You have to read between the lines, and not every member seems to have caught the same message that I have. So I was very grateful for your evidence here today.
I understand that sometime in the early 2000s the former government amended the faint hope provision so as to exclude multiple murderers from it. After listening to my colleague's comments earlier about how that party always insists on having evidence, I wondered if perhaps your search might have found any evidence from around 2003, when the former government, that party, made this change, I suppose somehow in support of victims, that they generated to support that change?