Well, I think we've been told, Mr. Chair, with respect, that it's all about the will of Parliament. The will of Parliament is being determined by the people who are here. If the will of Parliament is to move from clause 75, as submitted in the second reading version of the bill, to a proposal to the committee by the government in amendment G-2, then surely the will of Parliament can be expanded in an amendment to G-2 to add another section, and we're proposing section 100. Even though it potentially attracts a large punishment, the possibility is that any lesser punishment, including the four listed in G-2, ought not to result in a criminal record.
As Colonel Gibson has said, the will of Parliament has been expressed in the past by giving the maximum punishment. That's an objective gravity. Well, I can't imagine what circumstances would attract life imprisonment for an offence of this nature, but I suppose you could consider the most extreme circumstances. Almost an act of treason would be required to allow enough people to escape or to organize the escape of enough people in the wrong circumstances that it ended up causing a major disaster where people lost their lives.
You'd have to have something that you would have to pile on, detail after detail of aggravating factors to end up with the possibility of a life sentence for something like this. But if you wilfully let someone out who then committed an act of terror or an act of murder or caused that kind of mayhem, I can see that there might well be circumstances that could be strong enough to attract significant sentences beyond what we're talking about.
But it's the kind of offence that could have a small amount of actual harm being done. It could be a very minor escape. If someone is not in custody for a few minutes because he got out of one room and was grabbed by the fellow officer and returned to his cell, that wouldn't necessarily be serious. It might well involve someone being negligent in the performance of his duties. As Mr. Larose said, quite often there can be an administrative response to something like this that wouldn't require someone having a criminal record.
I like the fact that Mr. Larose is here to provide us with the reality of life for soldiers. He helped us out by saying that they don't always think of all of these things. They're thinking in the moment. There was the idea that the best thing to do was to try to get to Mexico to avoid the consequences. I'm assuming they never made it to Mexico. But that gives you an idea of the state of mind of people who end up being confronted with the kind of law we're making here today. I'm asking that we try to make that law as fair as possible, and one of the ways of doing that is by adding section 100.
It is very easy to see how the person who is actually doing the escaping is far more culpable than the person who is actually found guilty of carelessly allowing them to escape or admitting to doing something that ended up in somebody getting out. That seems to me to be wrong and we should try to fix it. If the circumstances are such that that's the case, then this law should allow that the person who, through some omission, maybe a minor omission, ends up being guilty of this offence should not get a criminal record.
When we're talking about punishment, especially when we are having a scheme like this, where certain offences with certain levels of punishment attract a criminal record and some do not, we have to regard the criminal record as part of the punishment.
So, in case A your punishment is a severe reprimand and in case B your punishment is a severe reprimand plus a criminal record. If that's the consequence, if it's possible that there can be an A and a B, then there must be a level of fairness associated with that.
If we have a situation, as we're talking about here, particularly with section 100, where offender A, who commits an offence and gets a severe reprimand, has no criminal record, and offender B, who instead of a severe reprimand just gets an ordinary reprimand, or who gets a fine, but also gets a criminal record in a related circumstance—it could even be the same incident, where the escapee gets a severe reprimand and the person who is found guilty of assisting in the escape or facilitating the escape negligently ends up with a criminal record—then that's wrong.
This is why we're opposing this, Mr. Chairman. We think that this particular provision ought to be included and that we ought to add section 100 to G-2, as proposed.