Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, witnesses, for attending today.
Mr. Gottardi, I belive you have been in front of me before. As I mentioned, I was a member of the CBA for many years. I practised criminal law in Fort McMurray, which obviously has been a very busy place for over a decade, so I have some ability to know.... I've done literally hundreds and hundreds of trials, and frankly, I don't agree with your analysis, with respect. I have seen many success stories after people have been incarcerated, and I believe that re-education, retraining, and pride in one's life could certainly turn those people about.
I have to say that as a defence attorney I always envied British Columbia, because of the size of penalties that were received by, for instance, drug dealers, where many times I saw cases that had 30 days or 60 days for cocaine trafficking. In Alberta, you would receive 18 months or two years for the same quantity and the same circumstances. I looked at B.C. as quite an anomaly in Canada.
But I would have to say that there are startling statistics in relation to the number of people who reoffend and continue to reoffend. I have seen many people with three or four pages of records, which would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 or 50 prior offences.
So I frankly don't agree that people who go to jail for minimum mandatory times cannot have a success story, and certainly I believe they keep people safe.
On that note, I also noticed the Supreme Court of Canada suggested in R. v. Morrisey that it can't be disputed that the need for general deterrence is necessary, and indeed that a mandatory minimum sentence to shape behaviour is and can be utilized successfully. I would suggest that lawyers are somewhat.... If there are 10 lawyers in this room, you're going to receive 30 opinions. I think it's no different in this particular case.
Just to clear the record in relation to that, Mr. Doob, I wanted to talk a little bit to you. I noticed that you have a PhD from Stanford and an AB from Harvard. I apologize for my ignorance, but what is an AB?