For the benefit of the committee, I retired a few years ago, but I was a Crown attorney for 32 and a half years. In the last 20 years of my career, I was Ontario's provincial lead for our provincial strategy to prevent Internet crimes against children.
I think that in many of the cases where the mandatory minimums were struck down by the courts, it was based on a, theoretically at least, reasonable hypothetical and not on the idea that the sentence imposed on the particular offender or the particular facts for which they were being sentenced was cruel and unusual punishment. Rather, the defence counsel or the court would get creative in coming up with some idea of an example where the mandatory minimum sentence would be inappropriate, strike down the minimum, and then feel like they could give a sentence below the minimum to an offender.
I think the way this bill is worded goes some distance to stopping that, in the sense that it tells the court that they can't come up with some hypothetical situation. They have to look at this particular offender and the facts of this particular case and determine whether or not that would be cruel and unusual.