Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to pose a question to the Minister of Finance on this bill. Although he may not believe it, it is probably he, more than the Minister of Justice, who has a greater capacity to contribute to the goal that we all have of there being fewer victims.
I will tell the House what I mean by this. At committee, we heard from witnesses—and the academic literature is replete with the same conclusion—that mandatory minimum sentences do not work. They do not result in fewer victims.
What we heard at committee is that funding programs for rehabilitation and reintegration do work. One program that we specifically heard about at committee was circles of support and accountability, where the success rate of eliminating recurrence is 70% to 80%.
My question for the minister is why does the government insist on going back to mandatory minimum sentences to address this problem when we know that they do not work, while at the same time defunding a program that has an 80% success rate?