Mr. Chairman, in the definition the reference is to offences for which there is a maximum of at least five years imprisonment as a punishment. It is for indictable offences with that consequence. It is not only in the Criminal Code but in other federal statutes as well. I am not sure if it would be helpful to provide that list because it is very long.
In terms of penalties, the Criminal Code is divided into a series-to use a word-in which there are groups of offences punishable by six months, two years less a day, two years, five years, ten years, fourteen years, and life. Those are the distinctions in terms of Criminal Code penalties.
Those offences punishable by a maximum of five years on indictment make up a very considerable group both in the code and in other statutes. I do not know that it would be helpful to have that list. What we are trying to do here is give the court a sense of the degree of seriousness to which we are looking when we say that someone is involved in a criminal organization. Therefore we have picked those offences which have the maximum of five years, which are up on the scale. They are not six months or two years plus a day or two years, they are in the medium range of seriousness and beyond. These are significant offences.
In response to the question put by my friend from Crowfoot on the issue of series, I am reminded as I look at the Oxford concise definition of series that the element that would be missing if we used two or more, rather than series, is the element of successive or the temporal relationship between the offences. In other words, if a person committed both offences in the same day, both having to do with the same event, for example, robbery and assault, that would be more than one but they would both be in connection with the same event and would not capture the notion of series in the sense that there would be successive occasions on which such events took
place; a person committed a crime in February but also committed the crime in October and so on.
As we look back over the five year period the notion of series is to connote not only a number, more than one, but that they were successive, in temporal relationship, one to the other, and there was a pattern which demonstrated that on more than one occasion the person had engaged in that criminal conduct. That is what series gives us that two or more would not.