Mr. Speaker, I will not talk about an extreme case but about one that was in my local newspaper on Saturday night. I would like to hear the member's comments on it.
An auction mart was broken into and vandalized. A lot of damage was done inside. The RCMP arrived and arrested the individual. The individual was a 20-year old who was just having some fun. The police comments were that he would probably get a suspended sentence because after all it was a pretty minor offence.
The dollar value was not that much. The owner of the auction mart, on the other hand, felt that rather than going through the cost of the court system and potentially putting the individual in jail for
two days or fining him $100 that maybe a much better way to handle this sort of situation would be public service.
The public service he suggested was this. He has a lot of cattle liners coming into his auction mart. A cattle liner after a 1,000-mile trip with 100 cattle inside is not necessarily a pleasant thing to clean out.
His suggestion was that a much better punishment might be three months of helping out at the auction mart cleaning out the cattle liners and that probably he would think twice about vandalizing an auction mart again.
I wonder what the member might think about that sort of fair punishment for the crime, and does he think the individual would learn from that experience?
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