Mr. Speaker, the Minister of Justice had questioned me. Instead of putting before this chamber the evidence that he was using, he went back to make more attacks on the judiciary. This is wrong.
We have a respect in this country for our court system. Most Canadians have a high regard for members of our judiciary because they do difficult jobs for us and society.
The minister has to be reminded that the Attorney General of Canada is normally the person who should stand up for the judiciary in public debate and actually is the highest legal officer of this Parliament. What we have is someone who seems to think its is fine to casually talk about our judiciary in a manner that does not show it the respect that it deserves.
We have a Criminal Code in this country. It sets out the penalties across the country, not just for one location but for everywhere, not just for people in one region but for all the diverse multitudes in Canada.
We know there are issues. We have to go back each time and look at what the Department of Justice in its 1994 report by the Firearms Control Task Force said about the mandatory minimums and what was said on the data at that time. There has been a lot more data compiled in various jurisdictions around the world since then, but this is not a bad summary to start off with.
I will go over some of the things. Charges with minimums are often plea bargained. The public is not aware of which offences are covered by minimums. The participants in the justice system alter their behaviour to mitigate the harshness of the sentence. Discretion shifts from the judges to the prosecutors. Minimums result in lower conviction rates. We are getting the reverse of what we are after with the wrong population.
The Minister of Justice in his comments to me made it sound like members on this side of the House do not want to have convictions on serious matters. Absolutely we do. We want the right people in jail and we want them there for whatever time period. We have a floor on many mandatory minimums. It is a floor, not a ceiling.
The judges have the discretion if we leave it with them to consider the circumstances of every case and make the sentence higher or lower, depending on the circumstances. The circumstances of the case applied to the law will give the most just result in our Canadian democratic society.
We do not want rough justice in this country. We do not want approximations. We do not want a one size fits all justice. We want situations where the proper people are kept in jail. Some of them should stay there for a long time, there is no doubt, especially violent repeat offenders.
We have those 10 listed offences right now with the gun crimes. We put them there. Our Liberal government put them there. Do not tell me there was not something done. It has been done. We have not had a study that shows the results of that legislation at this time.
Let us return to the same Department of Justice review of the data. As a means of incapacitation, that is taking somebody out of society, a person who is in jail cannot commit another crime. Minimums are estimated to have no more than a modest impact on crime rates for the target offence. There have been more studies on this but they are inconclusive. Minimums result in increased prison populations. Keep in mind that the stats at that time said it cost $62,000 to house federal inmates. We know that in federal prisons it is a higher. It varies somewhat but it is a little higher than this on an annualized basis. Minimums increase trial rates.
Mr. Speaker, am I at my eight minutes?