MMPs have shown to be a colossal failure in terms of helping victims and helping the justice system be more efficient. They simply clog up the system. They cost us money. Over half the challenges in the criminal justice system are challenging MMPs, and they're often successful, so it ends up clogging the justice system such that real perpetrators who ought to be punished severely end up getting their charges dropped under Jordan rulings.
With respect to indigenous and other racialized accused, I'll give you an example. We have Gladue reports, and we're going to invest more in those reports across Canada in the fall economic statement. This is precisely so that a sentencing judge can take into account intergenerational trauma caused, say, by residential schools. With a project we're going to have in major urban centres—IRCAs—the same will be true for Black communities. Having these sentencing reports will allow a judge to look at the context of the person who is in front of them.
If you have a mandatory minimum penalty and you don't have an option of a conditional sentencing order, and you have to put somebody away for a minimum period of time, you have reduced the ability greatly—sometimes eliminated the ability altogether—of the judge to take into account the particular circumstances of the person in front of them and to tailor the best sentence that fits the crime, allows society to be made safer, allows the person to be made whole and allows the victim to be made whole. Eliminating as many mandatory minimum penalties as we can and bringing back conditional sentencing orders are critically important to making the justice system work the way it's supposed to work in terms of protecting society and trying to make victims whole, and moving forward in a progressive way.