The seriousness of the offence under all of these Criminal Code offences—you know this, as a former Crown—depends on the circumstance. We are talking about sentencing here. It's up to the judge to determine, according to all of the facts in front of the sentencing judge, the seriousness of the offence in question.
It's still the same offence in terms of actus reus and mens rea, but there are different degrees of seriousness. Serious offences will always be punished seriously. A drive-by shooting is going to be punished seriously. There is going to be serious jail time associated with that. It is an affront to Canadian people to try to mislead them otherwise.
In terms of the offences we're talking about, I based that example on a real case. The person who did that one night had a job. He had a girlfriend. He was going to school. He had a few drinks too many that evening. He put a few bullets with his shotgun into the side of an empty barn. There was nobody around, but a neighbour heard it and called the police. He was charged with a minimum mandatory penalty. He got four years. He lost the job. He lost the girlfriend. He lost the education. When he left prison, he ended up moving into the same house with the people he had served time with, so that's the education he got.
That's what we're doing here. That wasn't a serious set of circumstances that deserved jail time, whereas a drive-by shooting certainly would.