Justice committee  I'm a criminologist.

Justice committee  I received a PhD in social psychology.

Justice committee  Yes, and what we're doing then is we're turning the sentencing function over to the prosecutors rather than leaving it with the judges. It seems to me that what we really want is honesty and transparency in sentencing so that the facts of the case are the facts of the case.

Justice committee  The simple answer is no. The prosecutor has to demonstrate, has to give notice of these things before a plea. We've had exactly the same thing in proving the second impaired driving. We've had that for years, for decades. No, that doesn't.

Justice committee  Well, of course the prosecutor has the power not to demonstrate that certain conditions hold, but the point of a mandatory minimum sentence is that Parliament in the year 2011 is saying that some small number of marijuana plants, for example, is deserving of a six- or nine-month minimum sentence.

Justice committee  Excuse me?

Justice committee  Possession for the purpose of trafficking, but I would suggest to you--

Justice committee  I would suggest that most use of marijuana includes trafficking as it's defined by the act.

Justice committee  Let's start with the issue of the mandatory minimum sentences. It seems to me that even though the government is admitting they made a mistake, or carried over a mistake from the previous bill without correcting it, and are now saying that the mandatory minimum sentence of nine months only applies to people who have six marijuana plants, organized crime, grow-ops with six marijuana plants, the difficulty is that it clearly ends up with a disproportionate sentence.

Justice committee  Well, the most obvious is clearly, in various parts throughout the bill, the idea that mandatory minimum sentences are going to keep us safe. The evidence that harsher sentences generally and mandatory minimum sentences will keep us safe is clearly absent. The evidence would suggest that it is going to have no positive impact.

Justice committee  The legislation won't make us safer. That's absolutely clear. What the legislation may do is increase youth crime. In part, we know that we have to incarcerate some youth. What we've learned since 2003 is that we can afford to reduce the number of people we incarcerate and we have no evidence of any increase in youth crime.

Justice committee  I am Professor Doob, from the Centre of Criminology, University of Toronto. For today's presentation I considered simply listing the many instances in which empirical evidence was apparently ignored in developing this bill. Instead, though, the main point I would like to make is that the process the government has chosen for examining Bill C-10 does not allow sufficient opportunity for Parliament to consider adequately ways to improve the bill.

Justice committee  I don't agree with the change that is proposed to paragraph 39(1)(c). The reason for that is that 39(1)(c) is the gateway to custody. If we were talking about the judge being aware of them, that would be one thing, but it seems that we're loosening the conditions that allow the judge to put the youth in custody.

Justice committee  No, I wouldn't, and the reason I wouldn't is that it seems to me that largely what the Youth Criminal Justice Act is about is responding to youths who have committed offences. So if you focus on what are, in a sense—no matter what you might call them—the punitive aspects of the criminal law, which is what criminal law is about, it seems to me that the difficulty is that we're not going to accomplish public safety through changes to the various punishment sections of the Youth Criminal Justice Act.

Justice committee  I'm sure there is. Certainly in discussions that I've had with various people, various things have come up. The pre-sentence detention or the pre-trial detention is the largest single area of concern that I would have.