Thank you, Chair.
Thank you, Minister, for being here today. It's much appreciated.
I too was getting a little excited when I heard my colleagues across the way indicating their forthcoming support for all of our legislative agenda when it comes to criminal justice.
I do want to remind Mr. Marston and others that it's not just about the incident that happened in Trinity—Spadina in Toronto. These kinds of issues, when it comes to self-defence and to protecting one's property, have happened all across the country. You may recall that I have spoken to you about incidents that happened in my constituency when a citizen was awakened in the middle of the night and went out to defend his property and ended up being charged and had higher penalties than the three people who came onto his property and attempted to deprive him of his property. He used some force to try to prevent that and to secure his property again and initially ended up facing higher penalties. I'm glad that it was appealed and some common sense was applied and a semblance of justice was brought back. I want to thank you on behalf of that family and all of the constituents who raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for his legal defence fund in order to bring a sense of justice and to make it clearer for the police and the courts to better interpret what self-defence and the defence of one's property actually are. It's absolutely wonderful. Thank you for your leadership on that.
You mentioned you heard of some issues in Edmonton and so on. One of the things I like about our government is how proactive we are at engaging people, whether in budget consultations or other types of round tables.
I had a number of round tables in my riding dealing with justice issues. Up in Lindale and in remote rural areas we have a lot of cases of breaking and entering. Folks are very frustrated with the years of neglect by our justice system in actually addressing some of the serious consequences of property crime and so on. We heard loud and clear from there that a lot of crimes are even going unreported simply because they're so frustrated with the weak penalties that people used to get traditionally and the revolving door and so on.
I wonder what other things, notwithstanding the agenda you've laid out for us with your three initiatives, you have been hearing at the round tables you've conducted throughout Canada as our Minister of Justice.