Thank you, Chair.
Thank you to all three of the witnesses.
Again, talking about mandatory minimum sentencing, here is a scenario that I've heard about how taking away from judges the ability to use their discretion in sentencing has been a problem, and how disappointing it is that this government hasn't actually repaired that policy of the previous government. Here is the way it's been described to me.
A woman—in this case an indigenous woman—ends up being accidentally the accessory to a crime. Her boyfriend uses her car as a getaway car, her house is the address. It could be something so remote. She doesn't have great access to the justice system, doesn't have the means, and doesn't get good representation. In any case, in the past the judge might have been able to say, “I see you're in a bind here. I will allow you to serve your sentence on weekends in jail, at which point you can ask a grandmother or somebody to look after the kids.” If the hard and fast rule is that you must serve your sentence starting on day one and ending on year three or whatever, then that woman can lose her children, and those kids go into foster care or are split from their family, and then we have the intergenerational trauma that Dr. Yuen described.
Could it be that simple, that small a crime, that then has that collateral damage, when mandatory minimum sentencing is the framework in which women are sentenced?