Mr. Speaker, last week my colleagues went through all the studies and the Canadian Bar Association stated in 2005:
Mandatory minimum penalties do not advance the goal of deterrence.
--do not target the most egregious or dangerous offenders....
--have a disproportionate impact on minority groups....
--subvert important aspects of Canada’s sentencing regime....
That speaks to his second point, which is that there is a difference between a justice system and a legal system. A justice system upholds the proportionality of the crime and takes into consideration all aspects of what occurred during the process of that crime. A legal system serves to punish. We need to reconcile the two and work very closely with that.