Madam Speaker, I would like to thank my friend from the justice committee for his very passionate speech. I have certainly enjoyed working with him these last few months on the justice committee.
He is quite right in his description of how the faint hope clause currently works. It is an onerous task at times. The application has to be made before a superior court judge. If it makes it past that step, then it has to go before the parole board. Often these applications are unsuccessful. However, the real victims of those applications are the families of the deceased victims of the crime.
So, in those many cases, the faint hope clause application is just that, an application that is likely going to be unsuccessful from the beginning and the only people who are adversely affected are the families of the victims.
I would like him to comment on why we should put those people through the process when there is arguably little chance of success of the application on behalf of the offender and huge emotional costs for the families of the victims yet again.