I apologize. My time is short.
Just for the benefit of the viewers at home, I'd like to try to explain what is happening vis-à-vis this argument on mandatory minimum sentences and what the government proposes to do.
We saw recently the Senneville decision, in which the Supreme Court struck down the mandatory minimum sentence for access and possession of child pornography. The court relied on a reasonable hypothetical scenario in which two teenagers supposedly would send each other an explicit picture, and that may be tantamount to possession. Of course, the court said that this would be absurd, and because of that, they can't maintain the minimum sentence.
That was not the case before them, but they decided to strike down the mandatory minimum sentence on the basis of a hypothetical that, in my view, no respectable Crown attorney or police officer would touch. What they did is that they reduced the sentence for Senneville, and in fact, in Naud's case, it was reduced to nine months instead of the mandatory 12 months. This is despite the fact that Naud never argued that a mandatory minimum sentence of one year would be cruel and unusual. The court strikes it down in a hypothetical, but awards the defendant Naud with a lower sentence than is prescribed. Now the government comes along and says it's going to use the safety valve, that it's going to allow for these extreme scenarios that would allow a court to escape from the mandatory minimum sentences.
I submit that what it in fact does is weaken mandatory minimum sentences. It still allows judges in cases like Naud to disregard the mandatory minimum sentence, even though absurdity was not pleaded.