Mr. Speaker, during the member's speech, thankfully, because I have heard many members from his party speak to this issue, he at least mentioned victims. He talked about victims' impact statements and about victims being involved in this. He said that victims' statements should be part of sentencing, and that would be good, but that only a limited number of victims got involved in the victims' impact statement process.
I might suggest that the reason for that is the limited time they see the person who committed a crime against them getting. They may not want to be involved in sitting across the table with the person who victimized them so that the person could get out early and victimize them again.
He also said, in answer to the question asked by the member for Wild Rose, that the best sentence was the sentence that the client accepts. I love it that we are judging the sentences on how well the criminal likes them and that we should tailor the sentence to fit the individual. Again, we should set sentences based on what the perpetrator should say.
He went on to say that perhaps we should look at the parole system in closing off the end of it so that if people were not getting out early we could probably accomplish what we are trying to accomplish by putting them in for longer
I am not certain how opening or closing either end of this works but I will just quickly get to how we protect the victim. One of the greatest ways is to have the person incarcerated at the time when they might have committed the crime and then the crime would not occur at all. What we are suggesting by mandatory minimums is that people are actually in jail rather than out perpetrating crimes.