You see me coming. That's my problem, in the sense that I don't know if we're just giving us, as a society, a sense of comfort, and in a sense a sad sense of comfort. Because if we're sending the message to society that by doing this you can feel more secure and that your kids are now safe, there's a problem, because they're not. There are still predators out there. There are still sick people out there. By doing so sometimes I think we avoid taking the real bull by the horns and addressing the real problem. So that's one of my problems, because I don't, in my heart, even though I'd love the sentence to be even bigger, I say to myself that it will not make somebody stop doing that.
What I do get comfort from is not looking at the bottom and the minimum sentence but looking at the top. I review the jurisprudence and I try to see if there's a problem. Normally if we try to fix something, it's because there is a problem. Otherwise, I don't know what we're doing. I'm looking, and I don't see a problem because I don't see the court being lenient with that type of infraction.
I don't know if the witnesses have read section 279 as it is. The bill is trying to amend section 279. When you read that section.... Being a lawyer, I can tell you that it's mind-boggling. You have section 279 talking about kidnapping, and as Judge Major was saying, it's for commercial purposes. It's kidnapping with intent. So when you say there's nothing attached to it, to be guilty of section 279 there always needs to be something attached to it. So you can't just say it's simple. They kidnapped, and thank God, the police arrived fast enough, grabbed the kid, and so on. They still could be guilty of section 279 if there was intent. We'd have to see what the motivation was, and it would be hard to prove that. But then it might not be a section 279 but another infraction.
Then you go to all the others in that section, which are hard to understand. You have section 280, which is on abduction of a person under 16, and then you have a maximum that is less than life imprisonment. So when you put all these together, I don't know what putting a five-year minimum on section 279—and the private member's bill says it's for that specific section, and we can't change what the private member's bill is saying—will add to the situations we are looking at every day, all the dramatic, specific cases that we hear about, or your case, Mr. Surprenant, which has moved the whole province.
The entire province went through it with you, clearly not in the same way, however. As I said earlier, we can't know what it was like for you to live through a parent's worst nightmare or imagine what Ms. Dunahee went through. But, as elected representatives, as members of Parliament, we must stop trying to convince society that including a few words in the law is going to solve the problem, when we aren't solving a thing, in my opinion.