Good afternoon, everyone.
Thank you for inviting me to appear before the committee.
It is a pleasure to address you today.
My name is Julie Desrosiers. I am a professor of criminal law at Université Laval. I specialize in penology, that is, in sentencing.
I have written a lot about both minimum sentences and alternative measures. I am the co‑author, with Hugues Parent, of a reference work on sentencing entitled Traité de droit criminel: la peine that is widely used by the courts and cited by courts at all levels.
More recently, I co‑chaired the committee of experts on support for victims of sexual assault and spousal violence, which published a report entitled "Rebâtir la confiance", and so I am more well-known recently for those aspects of my professional career.
Today I am going to focus on minimum sentences and alternative measures, the subject of the bill before us. Because I don't have a lot of time, I'm going to focus on certain aspects of the bill. Of course, we can come back to the points that are of more interest to you during the question period.
What I would like to say, first, is that the bill proposes to abolish certain minimum sentences, but not all. Many more minimum sentences have been enacted in recent years than the ones covered by the bill. It is nonetheless a step in the right direction.
In general, abolishing minimum sentences has little impact on the case law, since the judgments that make it up involve crimes of average seriousness. Where it particularly presents problems is at the extremes. A judge who is dealing with a minimum sentence has their hands tied. To be clearer—which is what I generally do with my students—I invite you to look beyond the question of being for or against minimum sentences. We have to see the concrete problems that can arise.
Two situations have caused problems in the Quebec case law recently. The first concerns discharging a firearm with intent. We might think that this kind of offence is associated with street crime or organized crime, for example, but it applies in all situations where someone discharges a firearm.
I wanted to bring a case to your intention involving a suicidal indigenous man who was intoxicated and discharged his firearm in his home, over the head of a police officer who had come as backup, after the individual's wife called him. That man was liable to a minimum sentence of four years.
We also have to remember that minimum sentences apply to accomplices.
Another situation also raised a problem when a young woman aged 19 was given a minimum sentence when she was the driver for her spouse, who was the one who committed the robbery. The first sentence received by a 19-year-old woman with no criminal record was therefore a mandatory sentence of four years.
We can come back to these issues, but the decision to repeal certain minimum sentences is truly welcome, because it gives judges back their decision-making discretion in situations where the accused to not deserve long prison sentences.
I am very glad to see conditional sentences, that is, the opportunities to apply a conditional sentence, being expanded. This type of sentence has very strong penological potential that has not been exploited in Canada. Limiting the opportunities to use conditional sentences created a number of problems, in particular for indigenous individuals. We can also come back to this point in the question period.
The last subject I would like to talk about quickly is opportunities for diversion in drug cases, to stress that, here again, we must not be afraid of diversion, which in this case applies for both police and prosecutors. There are two possible cases where diversion applies. Here again, the possibility of diversion does not interfere in any way with the possibility of taking a case to court in situations where it is necessary to do so for public safety reasons.
I'm going to stop here, given that the time I have is very short. We can come back to these points during the question period.
Thank you for your attention.