Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good morning and thank you all.
I would like to point out that I am also the director of the Service de police de Laval, a city with a population of about 440,000.
I will first give you a few examples of cases that have occurred very recently. We have experienced a wave of violent events in the Laval area.
On the night of May 7 to 8, 2022, someone committed a murder by firearm by shooting at a moving vehicle. Five people who had just attended a 50th anniversary party were on board. The driver was killed and a 14-year-old boy was shot. The latter will suffer permanent injuries. Both of these people are not known to the police.
The next day, on Monday May 9, 2022, 10 shots were fired in a residential area at 2 p.m. It was in a multi-unit cooperative. You will understand that when residences or apartment buildings are targeted, this creates a great deal of insecurity in the neighbourhood.
The next day, May 10, 2022, an attempted murder with a firearm took place in the middle of a residential area, once again. Two young girls were only a few metres away from the scene of the shooting. They were looking for their cat under a vehicle. The girls are now suffering from post-traumatic shock.
So that's three days of violent events in a row. These three examples illustrate that the use of firearms makes direct victims, in addition to creating a great sense of insecurity among the population.
At the Association des directeurs de police du Québec, we are well aware of the prison system and the overrepresentation of indigenous people and visible minorities. However, we believe that removing mandatory minimum sentences is only treating a symptom rather than addressing the real causes of the problem.
We emphasize again that for the public to maintain confidence in the justice system, we feel that criminals who commit serious crimes, particularly with firearms, must face serious consequences.
We want to focus on the sections of the Criminal Code related to firearms. First, there is section 85, which deals with the use of firearms in the commission of an offence. There is also the discharging of a firearm with the intention of injuring, maiming or disfiguring someone, as well as the discharging of a firearm recklessly. These are the three types of offences that we have been dealing with for some time. This is not an isolated phenomenon. This is the third year in a row that the Montreal area has seen twice as many of these types of events, that is, shootings and firearm discharges. This is of great concern to the public and to all police services in Quebec. A major operation has been launched and many investments have been made by the Quebec government to counter this phenomenon.
We do have a proposal to make, however. In the Supreme Court of Canada's decision in the Nur case in 2015 and in the Lloyd case in 2016, one of the solutions proposed was the implementation of a notwithstanding clause. It would allow mandatory minimum sentences to be maintained for all firearms-related crimes, while allowing a judge to ignore the mandatory minimum sentence and opt for another type of sentence in certain circumstances, particularly humanitarian ones. This would enable us to achieve our goals of reducing overrepresentation and still ensure that exemplary sentences are imposed for serious crimes.
In conclusion, all the police directors in Quebec want to maintain mandatory minimum sentences for firearms offences.
Thank you.