Mr. Speaker, I wish I could provide some clear information to answer the member's question, because this is one of the questions we did pose to the minister. If the bill passes and a regime of mandatory minimums is enacted, we want to know the estimate of how many people would be convicted and would end up in the provincial system, which would be convictions of two years less a day. We need to know what the costs of that might be as well as the number of people convicted.
Our belief is that it will be very high based again on what we saw in the United States. We had evidence regarding that at the committee. As far as we know, there has been no work done by the government, or if the work has been done, the government certainly is not disclosing it.
My constituents and people in other places across Canada are going to be very fearful that because of these mandatory minimums when people get caught up in this net and they go through the court system, the first thing they are probably going to do is plead not guilty to try to get around the mandatory minimum. That is going to take up more court time, more lawyers' time. We are seeing the legal aid crisis, whether it is in Ontario or in British Columbia. This is only going to create more chaos in a system that is already overstressed.