Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
This is an area where I think we would have a lot of agreement.
All committee members would agree on this point.
I think we can all agree that the two offenders who were appellants in this case committed very bad crimes and that they should have very strict sentences. In fact, the Supreme Court is willing to change the sentence of these two offenders. I would argue that they were too lax, at least one of them.
I think that we would be able to agree that the minority ruling in this case, or the minority judgment of the four judges that said that the majority should have deferred more to Parliament, were correct, but I think we can disagree with the Supreme Court's majority judgment without attacking the Supreme Court as an institution or attacking individual judges on the court and making claims about political motivation being involved in the judgment.
What I do think we can work on together is sentencing guidelines. That is something the justice committee could focus on. Are the sentencing guidelines incorrect? We could talk about the use of hypotheticals, as Mr. Brock raised, and whether or not Parliament should be clear about what hypotheticals should be or not be used in the context of such a case.
We certainly could go back, and I think we should go back and legislate to deal with the court's ruling to require mandatory minimums in the case of these child sexual offences that deal with hypotheticals. All we need to do is create a class that excludes the hypothetical of the teen sex that even Mr. Brock agreed he wouldn't have prosecuted.
I think it's a willy-nilly leap to go to the notwithstanding clause, which is something that Parliament has not done since the charter first came into force. It sounds like some of the people here would use the notwithstanding clause over and over again. I don't think that's the work that Parliament should do. Parliament should do the work.... If we don't agree with the majority ruling of the court, we go back, we look at the judgment and we legislate properly to ensure the strongest possible sentences. We take into account that this class was perhaps too wide, and we narrow the class slightly to remove this hypothetical.
I agree with Ms. Lattanzio's position that we don't need to use the notwithstanding clause. We need to legislate and properly address the court's judgment.
Thank you.