Thank you.
And my thanks to all of the witnesses here today. The members of Parliament are here on an almost daily basis, and it's easy for us, but I much appreciate the effort and the care with which you've delivered your submissions today.
I want to urge you to keep making your voices heard. Time and again, we hear witnesses come to us with a totally different message. The message we often hear from witnesses is that crime rates are going down, so why do we have to do anything about crime? Your evidence today establishes that the government accurately perceives a need and that targeted and balanced improvements to our criminal justice system are necessary.
Mr. Rushfeldt mentioned appeal courts, and I want to quote from something that the Alberta Court of Appeal was reported to have said sometime in December. They said the vast sentencing discretion currently enjoyed by trial judges “makes the search for just sanctions at best a lottery, and at worst, a myth”. They also said that the present system “inevitably causes prosecutors and defence lawyers to 'judge shop' for jurists they hope will impose the sort of sentence they are seeking”.
So it's those kinds of challenges that the government is trying to meet when we deal with mandatory minimum sentences.
Ms. Campbell, does your organization have any members from the province of Quebec?