Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, for the opportunity to address this committee.
I'm legal counsel to the Kids' Internet Safety Alliance, which is a Canadian-based charity that operates globally to rescue children from sexual exploitation on the Internet. We recently expanded into the cyberbullying space as well. In my non-volunteer capacity, I am a former crown prosecutor who specialized in child exploitation cases for 13 years, and then I was in private practice for 13 years, as a criminal lawyer. My largest client groups are victims of sexual assault and police officers, so I have a bit of a 360-degree view of the justice system from the front lines.
I've reviewed the bill, and I'd like to take a couple of minutes to speak about a couple of things that flow from both my experience working with the Kids' Internet Safety Alliance and as a front-line prosecutor and victims advocate.
The first point I'd like to address is the issue of mandatory minimums and the proposed mandatory minimums in this bill. Obviously this is a return to mandatory minimums in this area, so we now have a body of experience with mandatory minimums since they were introduced. I'll say that from the perspective of a lawyer on the front lines, the sky has not fallen. Mandatory minimums were perhaps controversial when they were introduced; they certainly generated a lot of discussion. But as I said, the sky has not fallen, in the sense that we still have responsible sentences; we still have a realistic opportunity to present in a sentencing hearing where the appropriate sentence should fall in the range. This is not eviscerated judicial discretion; it has simply moved the floor.
We have to ask ourselves whether it is appropriate to move the floor. I would be the first one to say that in some crimes, it is not; it simply is not, and I'll give you a very easy example to make my point. Somebody who steals a loaf of bread because they're hungry should not face a mandatory minimum sentence. The reason for that—I'll unpack this a bit—is that there is a real moral debate about the culpability of that person. However, when we're talking about the intentional infliction of sexual violation on a child, there is no responsible moral debate about the culpability of the person who is proven to have done that. As long as that minimum appropriately reflects the minimum level of moral culpability, then the floor is not a problem.
I look at the numbers that are proposed in the table that's been released with the discussion of the bill, and I ask whether those numbers are so high that they overvalue the moral culpability of a child sex offender. I think the answer to the reasonable observer is, no, they don't. That floor, in my submission, is quite appropriate because it recognizes the inherent minimum level of moral opprobrium associated with sexually abusing a child.
It's the same thing with the maximums. Are they out of line with maximums that we see elsewhere? No, they're not. Are they consistent with our sentencing traditions? Yes, they are.
The second problem is that mandatory minimums can take away judicial discretion. I say they don't take it away; they simply adjust it. The judge is not left to be a trained monkey, rubber-stamping the minimum; the judges retain their entire panoply of discretionary judicial powers, but they start at a different place. It's appropriate that we value the sanctity and sexual integrity of children sufficiently that we say to judges, “You still have discretion; just start here instead of there.”
The mandatory minimums as proposed don't go too far; they recognize an appropriate level of moral opprobrium for the offence and they preserve judicial discretion.
For all those reasons I'm a supporter, and as I said, there are other circumstances where I would not support mandatory minimums. I want to make that very clear.
I'll move—