I understand.
Mr. Chair, I'm fine with the general verbiage of the subamendment except for the words “and that this be reported to the House.” To me, what we should actually be doing is sending a letter to the Minister of Justice advising him of the committee's recommendation. We can certainly inform the House by sending a note to the Speaker. I'm not sure what the words “that this be reported to the House” actually achieves.
If there's a way to do this, I think the very first step is to advise the Minister of Justice and to talk to the Minister of Justice about what the desire of this committee is. If the committee wishes to make a point, he really should be the focal point of this because we're asking the government to take an action that would be spearheaded by him.
Again, I think we have a situation here where we're broadly in agreement that the offenders committed a pretty terrible crime and that these two gentlemen really needed to go to prison. The Supreme Court here didn't change their individual sentences, but we might want to work on sentencing going forward and be more specific about that. We might want to work on sentencing and talking about sentencing guidelines. We might want to look at the issue of using hypotheticals and talk to the minister about having Parliament rein in hypotheticals that are used that have really very little relationship to the cases before the court. I think this would be better achieved by a cross-partisan approach to the minister.
I'm not really aware that reporting it to the House makes the difference. I think this should be a letter to the Minister of Justice and Attorney General to ask him to effect the reforms that the committee is asking him to do and to work with us on more issues, including sentencing guidelines and the issue of the use of hypotheticals.
I don't support the crafting of this subamendment, but I would support it if the words “and that this be reported to the House” were replaced with something else or just dropped and we could agree on whatever that would be.