I'll take this question, Chair.
One of the problems that I think surrounds this debate is that the focus remains on the black-letter wording of an offence, as opposed to the circumstances in which it is committed.
For example, take “robbery with a firearm”. When people say that, what comes to mind immediately is the person with the gun in their hand holding up the bank. What doesn't come to mind is the drug-addled assistant to the robber, who is driving the car and has no idea or is willfully blind to the fact that someone is going to go into a store with a weapon. Is that person in the same circumstance as the person holding the weapon? Clearly not, but they're going to be treated the same under a mandatory minimum, because one is a party and one is a principal, and under the law, those things are the same.
When we speak of offences in the singular terms of how they're written down in the law, we lose sight of the fact that they can be done in a wide variety of circumstances, and when we think about conditional sentences, that's particularly important.
Think about drug importing. We all think of the major drug trafficker who brings kilos and kilos into the country. We don't think of Cheyenne Sharma, the appellant in the Sharma case before the Supreme Court of Canada, who was raped at 13, was a sex worker at 15 and was trying to feed her family by taking on a task at the behest of someone who was exploiting her.
In my respectful view, it is overly simplistic to look to just the name of the offence and close the book. What we have to think about is not just the evidence, but what happened.