Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for bringing this matter to my attention. There is no question in my mind that this bill, if it becomes law in its present form, will not allow any prosecutor to deal with those who have already been convicted with regard to the dangerous offender provision.
That provision is provided for the cases that will be brought forward after this bill has been passed. It has expanded the window, the time that the crown can apply for the dangerous offender status, to six months.
Of course, what we would like to do is amend the bill in this area to have dangerous offender status apply at any time during that period of incarceration, particularly at the end of the warrant of a violent offender.
The reasoning and rationale behind this is simply that if a dangerous offender application has not been successful or has not even been applied, and an individual who has committed a violent offence has served his time and at the end of his warrant period has not been rehabilitated, if there is clear evidence that this person represents a high risk to reoffend, why are we releasing him?
If we would expand the provision that my hon. friend referred to so that the prosecutor could apply to the courts for an indeterminant sentence application, the dangerous offender application, at the end of the sentence we would have a workable tool to determine whether the Augers, a prime suspect in the murder of Melanie Carpenter, ought to be released.
In that case Auger was released on statutory release. The officials were concerned that he was a high risk to members of society. There was not a thing they could do about it because there were no tools within the law for them to do anything about it.
We will be making this amendment to this bill at the appropriate time to expand that window of time from six months to the full warrant period in order to provide the tool that I have just described within the justice system.