Justice committee  My name is Michael Spratt, and I'm here representing the Criminal Lawyers' Association. In the interest of brevity, I won't go through the opening spiel. I've been here before, and you can check past transcripts to find out who we are and what we do. To cut to the chase, I'd lik

Justice committee  The minimums are already there. Whether the minimums work or not, I guess there can be some debate. You can't really debate the evidence. The problem with saying we're just increasing what's already there is that the minimums that are already there are barely passing constitutio

Justice committee  Briefly, denunciation is but one of the principles of sentencing. The problem with bills like this and with mandatory sentences is that they put too much weight on that principle, and in an unconstitutional way. There's a fallacy in the logic that was employed in the question. T

Justice committee  If I may, just very briefly, when we look at the most serious and the most heinous cases, we're not talking about 90 days or six months for those. Routinely there are very lengthy sentences for those cases. But when we're looking at reasonable hypotheticals from a constitutional

Justice committee  Of course you're taking it out of context—

Justice committee  As you know, there are ranges to all offences. There are some that are very serious and some that are less serious. The problem with minimum sentences is that they treat less serious offences the same as a more serious offence, and in doing so they discard some very important pri

Justice committee  If you actually go back and look at the sentencing research, you see that to a large extent courts do impose consecutive sentences a large majority of the time. One of the other witnesses was testifying and using a sort of banal example of multiple offences against mailboxes. If

Justice committee  Thank you very much. It's an honour, and a privilege to appear before this committee. I notice that I'm here alone in the hot seat with no one beside me, which is good because I don't have any written submission. I would welcome any oral questions, and I'll try to be as detaile

Justice committee  It wouldn't. It would remove one of those conflicts between the existing provision and this bill. It wouldn't address the other legal and statutory interpretation conflicts that I've identified. My understanding is that one of the reasons this bill was put forward was specifica

Justice committee  I would expect so, because these are complex issues. These are complex agreements. Even when committees and Parliament are dealing with other criminal law issues, the thing about criminal law changes is that small changes can have tentacles that touch a wide variety of issues, an

Justice committee  I couldn't disagree that it would make it somewhat more consistent with the other measures.

Justice committee  Yes, and I don't want to overstate that point. This isn't a charge that I expect would be laid disproportionately in a large number of cases. We're not dealing with a theft under...or impaired driving, or something like that. These are sort of extraordinary occurrences that aren'

Justice committee  It would be fairly rare, but you can expect there would likely be a number of challenges to the first charges laid, and I would expect to see this provision, given the conflicts inherent in it and the other section and the issues of statutory interpretation, being brought before

Justice committee  Yes.

Justice committee  I think there is an important educational aspect that can be accomplished, but not necessarily through the Criminal Code. It's much like someone who's going to be engaging in this type of behaviour probably isn't going to be deterred by this extra section. If I were a betting man