Thank you, monsieur le président.
To continue along those lines, I think it is even clearer in the French version. The more I look at the text of Bill C-10, the more I see that there will be polishing to be done to the translation. Perhaps this type of consideration is not the aim of the committee, but if I had a recommendation to make to the government and its legal experts, it would be to clean it up a little. Subsection 109(1) of the French version reads: "La définition de « réhabilitation », au paragraphe 2(1) de la même loi, est abrogée." The English version reads as follows:
The definition “pardon” in subsection 2(1) of the Act is repealed.
We can clearly see that the whole system was devised around the concept of rehabilitation. What strikes me in this bill—and we will have an opportunity to come back to it again in the context of other sections and I am sure my colleagues will also have things to say about it—is that we are talking amply about criminality, minimum sentences and so on, but when someone has served his or her sentence—and in many cases, the sentence will be increased once the bill has been adopted—access to the provisions under what was previously called the Criminal Records Act will be complicated.
We are talking about rehabilitation. A number of legal experts are here around this table. Many of them have practised in this field. All kinds of cases have been seen, including extreme cases where people have received pardons that they did not deserve. The statistics that Mr. Harris mentioned indicate that 96% of people who have obtained a pardon never saw this pardon revoked. That means that only 4% of them have had their pardons revoked. Sometimes we amend legislation because of small percentages, but I would like it if these small percentages didn't exist. So we need to find good solutions to ensure that these situations do not happen.
Having said that, I am not convinced that the amendments we are making to the criminal record provisions of Bill C-10 are going to help us achieve what we are trying to do, which should be our aim. We want to ensure that these people have paid their debt to society and that their subsequent reintegration into society goes well. I am not convinced that the pardon, which will not be called the suspension of the criminal record, will help them in that regard. It wasn't easy to obtain one previously. I don't know if any of you have recently helped someone eligible for a pardon. If you have, you know how long it takes. We are going to talk about how long it takes before going into the right to the suspension of the criminal record. It is not clear that this is going to have the desired effect and that it is not instead going to create hardened criminals who, normally, would have deserved a second chance at this stage. I repeat: by repealing what these provisions are based on, meaning the very definition of rehabilitation…
I just have one minute left, Mr. Jean.