Thank you, Minister.
I agree with much of what you just said, except for the part about having the meeting chaired by a professor rather than our chair. I have every confidence that the people around this table and our Senate colleagues who serve on the Senate legal and constitutional committee would be able to have a meeting—as we do regularly—where we would have an interview. We do not have a veto. We don't choose who the Supreme Court appointment is; that's your role. You make that choice. Our role is to ask that individual questions and receive responses. I have confidence that our chair would be able to do that.
Minister, I want to ask you now about the dialogue between the Supreme Court—and this has been at the forefront in recent years—and the legislature. In our case, that is the Parliament of Canada.
There have been two recent cases. The Ndhlovu case dealing with the mandatory listing on the sex offender registry of those convicted of sex offenses was narrowly struck down by the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision. The government responded, and this committee considered Bill S-12.
I'm on record to say that I think it was a tepid response. I think we could have gone further. We had moved an amendment that would have made it mandatory for all child sex offenders, all offenses against children, to be listed. However, that doesn't go to the point of my question. There was a government response.
Similarly, a year and a half ago, the Bissonnette case, which dealt with an individual who went into a mosque and murdered six people, struck down the provision in Canada that if you take multiple lives, you would have consecutive life sentences.
I know as a New Brunswicker that this hits home because of the experience in Moncton, where an individual killed three Mounties. Rather than being given a sentence discount for multiple murders, as was the case before, this individual got a 75-year parole ineligibility.
At our justice committee, the widow of one of the victims said that she took some comfort—