My understanding is exactly as you said. Seven provinces and territories have fine option programs, and three—British Columbia, Ontario, and Newfoundland—do not. Basically, my understanding is that if you're unable to pay a fine under a fine option program, there are still other mechanisms in place for that.
I would hope, as I said in my other comments, that the Department of Justice would have the conversation with British Columbia, Ontario, and Newfoundland and Labrador about how they might go about doing that. At the end of the day, what we're trying to say here is that the end result is that victims should have better access to services to help them cope with the crime that has been committed against them. In order to do that, this is one area where we can start to bring about some consistency in terms of how we're dealing with this.
In British Columbia, they can make application to a judge, as you say, to serve time to satisfy a fine and also to have the fine converted to community service. That's from some of the research we did. In Ontario, licence suspension, civil enforcement, automatic demand letters, federal payment set-offs....
Again, if we take a longer-term lens, if a person can't pay at the time of sentencing, the person can go to the fine option program or to those other mechanisms. If somebody is incarcerated in a federal institution, for example—we deal with federal offenders—they make some wages, and they can also have an income account. We're talking about $100 and $200, if it's not a fine that has been imposed. Is there any reason they can't be paying reasonable amounts throughout their incarceration to again meet those sentencing principles? It is not just reparation for harm to the victim; it's about accountability and a responsibility to pay that debt.