Thankfully and fortunately, this is the only experience during my career that I've had to deal with such a horrific investigation. This has been the worst that all of us have experienced in our careers, and I'm talking about the 1,000 police officers who shared in this investigation from 14 police services across the province.
You're absolutely correct that usually a kidnapping is accompanied by other offences that will generally take the severity of the penalty to another level.
In our particular case, this started off as a kidnapping. If it had turned out differently and we had somehow.... We had absolutely no chance of recovering Victoria alive, now that we know what the evidence is. It all came out in trial. Our police service had absolutely zero chance of recovering Victoria alive. This was always an investigation, as it turned out, to hold her murderers accountable.
But say, for example, we had caught them before they hit Highway 401 and we had simply had a kidnapping offence. Currently there is no minimum sentence for kidnapping. The offenders could get six months or whatever is meted out.
What we are hoping to establish is that, at a minimum for that lone charge of kidnapping, there be a minimum standard sentence of five years in penitentiary.
An offender has all the other opportunities for parole and so on to get out before a five-year period. But we're looking for that sentence of five years so that the offender is taken off our streets, rehabilitated if possible, but certainly facing a stiff punishment for that offence—while recognizing that kidnappings in the past, and I'm sure into the future, will always involve more than one offence.