Thank you, Chair.
What we're trying to do here, is we've seen already a change from the existing clause 75 in the bill, which had as a part of the threshold a fine of $500. That's now been changed to “a fine not exceeding basic pay for one month”.
The reason for removing that is to say that any fine ought to be the threshold, not the fine of “basic pay for one month”. I can see why someone would choose a number like that. It's an attempt to be more fair, in the sense that $500 might be arbitrary. For somebody who's got all kinds of money, a fine of $500 would mean a lot less than to someone who depends on every dollar they get in order to support themselves.
I can see the intent here is to try to make it more proportionate. But if I look at the scale of punishment that's found in chapter 104 of the Queen's Regulations and Orders, which I think we passed out a little earlier in both official languages, it's clear that when we've got the scale of punishment going from “imprisonment for life”, which is (a), to “minor punishments”, which is (l), when we get to “fine”, which is (k), it doesn't give any amount of the fine at all. The fact that it doesn't do that—and this is from section 139 of the National Defence Act—is that any fine is greater than any minor punishment, according to the definition here, because it says that “each of those punishments is a punishment less than every punishment preceding it”. In other words, this goes in descending order from “imprisonment for life” down to “minor punishments”, and any fine is considered to be less than a severe reprimand or certainly less than any of the other ones listed above it.
I think it's very logical and very reasonable to say that if your basic pay happens to be $3,000 a month and you're fined $3,500, you end up with a criminal record, and if you're fined $2,500, you're not. Yet a reprimand would be considered a more severe punishment than a $3,500 fine in those very same circumstances, or a severe reprimand as well. In fact, you have to go to three levels higher than a fine to get a sentence that's more severe to put you into the category where you'd get a criminal record.
While I recognize that the intention was certainly honourable, to try to have something that's a little less arbitrary than a fine of $500, I think we ought to go further and say that the four categories that establish the threshold above which a punishment that includes a criminal record ought to be any fine at all. It's easier to administer. You don't have a circumstance where a person giving the sentence has to consider the actual amount of the fine and someone's basic pay to determine whether or not a criminal record applies. You don't want a criminal record to apply just because it happens to be...it could even be an unintended consequence of a sentence, if it turns out that the basic pay is less than the fine that's given.
I think it makes sense, even under the scheme of the act, as contemplated by amendment G-2, that not specifying any amount of the fine makes more sense, is more fair, is more reasonable, and is more in keeping with the scheme that's proposed here of having (i), (ii), (iii) and (iv) as the possibilities.