Thank you, Mr. Taylor. I think you're agreeing with me in that, essentially, an allegation of cruel and unusual punishment would be almost part of standard operating procedure as opposed to a constitutional challenge.
Members opposite to me must understand this. In and of itself, this weakens the mandatory minimum penalty, but wait, there's more. I mean, what are we talking about when we talk about cruel and unusual punishment? At the end of the day, the court does a weighing exercise in terms of what's reasonable or not. That's all it is when it comes to mandatory minimum penalties being cruel and unusual.
I have to be honest. Throughout our political careers, we often try to reach out across the aisle. I'm proud of my professional relationship with Mr. Housefather. We often see eye to eye on many issues. It's a necessary bridge in committees such as this when you can approach your friend on the other side of the table and try to be reasonable with each other. Mr. Housefather responded to my contention that there is no intention to strengthen mandatory minimum penalties, because an exception is made for treason and murder, which, on the scale of moral turpitude, are probably at the top of all evils. Then why do we pretend we're going to be strengthening the mandatory minimum penalties for all other offences?
Mr. Housefather's suggestion, and I think Mr. Taylor sort of alluded to it, was that they're generally not as susceptible in that they are so evil, generally courts try not to depart from them. Well, then, I would ask Mr. Housefather this: How about possession of child pornography or access to child pornography? How about sexual assault? Do those offences not rise to the level of turpitude where we should strengthen them as opposed to weaken them?
Here we are, by our own admission, saying there are greater evils that we don't want to depart from, because it's not about the strengthening but it's about departing from the mandatory minimum penalties. For murder and treason we will not, but for sexual assault or possession of child pornography we will.
This is an absurd result we are now arriving at. I've been waiting for this for months now. I think my Liberal friends are understanding this. Do you know what will happen? We will be here again in a couple of years. In a couple of years, we'll have a government, an attorney general and a justice minister saying that we need to address crime on our streets. We'll do this all over again. We've been through this with Bill C-5 and Bill C-75. We've done very comparable work on Bill C-14, which came short. I think Bill C-16 is now undermining the administration of justice.