Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank the witnesses, and in particular I want to thank Mr. Fraser and Mr. Courchene and Mr. Muhammed. I know it's not easy to come forward with your stories and to share those, but you put a human face on an issue we're dealing with, and I'm deeply appreciative of your doing that.
We had the minister in last week and we went over a number of weaknesses in the bill. The minister acknowledged a number of them, and they concern me deeply. One is referenced in one of the presentations--I can't remember whose. It made the point that in one night you could in fact have five indictable offences. It was Mr. Fraser who indicated that. So you could have a person in one night make one mistake from which there stem five indictable offences, and under this current bill as it stands, that person would never have an opportunity for a pardon.
The other concern, of course, is the nature of the indictable offences. The bar is pretty low. A lot of people don't consider that when you're dealing with hybrid offences, some of those indictable offences could be possession of marijuana, or they could be somebody in a desperate situation writing a fraudulent cheque. We're not saying they should do these things, but clearly these are not the types of things on which we would want to bar people forever from being able to get a pardon.
Mr. Hutton, if I could go to you to start, my concern is this. If we shut the door, if we say to people that there is no hope, that they're not going to get the opportunity to get a pardon, or call it a record suspension, whatever the title you might want to put on it, aren't we endangering public safety by saying to those people that there is no light at the end of the tunnel, that they have no way back in, they have no way to become a productive member of society in the way that other citizens are? That would be the first question.
Secondly, if changes should be made, where do you think the line should be redrawn? Are there examples where you feel that a pardon or record suspension shouldn't be made available to individuals?