Mr. Chair, I want to just flesh this out a little bit because, frankly, in the context of the committee meetings we've had.... We haven't had a ton of them. I think we had seven where we heard witnesses, and today's meeting is our eighth. Just for clarification, when we talk about the mandatory minimum penalties in these sections, this is on someone who has already been convicted of the same offence, so now they've been convicted twice of, for example, weapons trafficking or possession for the purpose of weapons trafficking.
Frankly, a lot of the discussion that happened and witness testimony at committee were couched in the terms that this was someone who got caught up in an unfortunate incident or someone who had a few drinks and shot the side of a barn. For this section, are we talking about, for sections 85, 95, 99, 100 and 103, someone who has this as their second offence? Is there a minimum on their first offence? Do any of these...? This says, “second or subsequent”.
I guess I'm a bit familiar. In a previous government, when there was a mandatory minimum penalty of four years for certain gun crimes and because of the issue of recidivism, which is basically the same person committing the same types of crimes over and over, we brought in a change to the law that meant that, on your subsequent offence, it would be five years and then after that, seven. I think that's where it kind of landed. I think originally it was four, seven and 10, or something like that, but eventually it landed at four, five and seven, I think.
I just want the committee to be 100% clear, because I don't think it ever came up in our witness testimony. Are we only talking in this clause about someone who's already been convicted of a prior offence in the same section of the Criminal Code?