Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for this opportunity to elaborate on what I said earlier.
He is quite right. In other words, it is tantamount to abuse of powers. In my previous life as a teacher, when students did something wrong, we had to punish them of course, but the punishment had to fit the seriousness of their action.
We might tell a student “You broke a window. You are going to have to fix it. You are going to pay for it and we are going to give you a little extra work to do as punishment” or “Your parents are looking after it and you will serve your detention at home. You will be grounded for a few hours”.
If the corrective measure is appropriate and equivalent to the seriousness of the action, the child will benefit enormously and perhaps never repeat the action. However, if the measure taken against him is twice as harsh as the seriousness of what he did, what will the child do? He will start to revolt, because he will feel that he is being punished more severely than his action warrants.
When a child is in revolt, what does he try to do? He feels that people are taking revenge for what he did and, in turn, will seek revenge as well. Things then begin to escalate and no one can say where it will lead. The child grows older. When he becomes an adolescent, he thinks the same way. When he is an adult, he thinks the same way.
It is not the unfortunate consequences of an action that should be punished. It is the action itself and the seriousness of it. This is what I tried to show when I gave the example of the two people preparing the same quantity of poison for two different people. One succeeds and the other does not. They would be given different sentences because one was luckier than the other. Yet, the action of each is as serious as the other's, and the intent was the same, to kill.
Even in cases where the intent is the same, the law would not punish in the same way. Why would the government do so in Bill C-18, when the intention of the person driving while intoxicated is never to cause the death of another person?
Of course, there is a greater risk that he will, but that is not his intention. Yet, that person would be treated like a criminal who walks into a bank or a senior citizens home—there is intent here—and shoots people at point-blank range.
If a person driving while impaired should kill someone, that person would be treated like criminals who kill people intentionally.
In its current form, Bill C-18 is more about seeking vengeance to please people who, unfortunately, whose lives were affected by such tragedies, either directly or indirectly, in their family. To show that we sympathize with their plight, that we share their grief, we will impose excessive sentences that do not fit the circumstances and have nothing to do with the justice that should be applied.
Again, I urge the government to give this serious thought. Beyond the votes that the government may win by pleasing people who, understandably so, would like to see such a bill become law, there is more to consider, namely the interest of society in the longer term. Instead of locking up forever people who made a mistake and are willing to do something about it by playing a positive role in society, we have to consider how we can best help these people.