Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Ms. Morency and Mr. Villetorte, for being here today.
You have probably heard people talk about mandatory minimum sentences and how they would add to the cost of our prison system and our correctional services system. Of course, that's a policy issue that we as MPs are dealing with.
You may have heard that when we last met the committee heard from Mr. Brian Rushfeldt of the Canada Family Action organization. I asked him what he thought of the increased cost of incarcerating people as a result of these mandatory minimum penalties in this bill and how he would react to them. He said:
I think it's money well spent, because if we can prevent one more child from being abused, we have made that investment worth while.
I'm not going to ask you to comment on that, because that's a policy issue, and those of us who are elected here are the ones who should be dealing with those kinds of policy issues. All of my colleagues on the government side believe this is money well spent.
Here is the question I wanted to ask you. You mentioned something earlier about U.S. mandatory minimum penalties that are comparable to the offences we are talking about here. I wonder whether you could tell us what you know about those U.S. mandatory minimum penalties and how they compare to the penalties we're proposing in this legislation.