Certainly, Parliament is able to do what it wishes because much of this is a value statement. The principle, or the way that criminal law has evolved, preferred criminal law, is to have it more principle-driven so that lots of things fit into the same category. I have no difficulty with distinguishing categories of theft, as in a serious theft and a less-serious theft.
You have summary, and indictable, and there are ways to proceed. But if you start going down that road, and you have the theft of an automobile takes this, the theft of a Ski-Doo takes that, and the theft of a boat takes something else, you start to get a complexity that renders your criminal law difficult to understand. You will start to have comparisons between the various offences, and people will not.... It will not command the same kind of respect, as a rational principle, that theft of a certain category is treated more seriously than that of a lesser category.
Many have criticized our criminal laws for being overly baroque and overly particular. I think we do need a thorough pruning of some of the material in there that is no longer relevant to Canadian society in order to get back to those basic, clear principles of what is an offence, what should be an offence, and what shouldn't be an offence.