Justice committee  But we are limited by what's there.

Justice committee  Right, they will miss that. What they will also miss is that there are many more alternative strategies out there than there used to be for informal resolution, so it never actually gets necessarily documented as a criminal offence.

Justice committee  I stay current with the statistics, with the published research that comes out. I'm constantly devouring the reports from the RCMP, from Justice, from the Solicitor General, and this is the material I work with to go into the classroom and to go to public sessions to explain what

Justice committee  It has to be based on the evidence, on the research. I would be eaten alive if it wasn't. I'm a bit of a pariah as it is for not being a left-leaning criminologist, and if I make one misstep, as I occasionally do, the sharks circle me, and they're quite merciless.

Justice committee  The point is that there is no reason Washington state and B.C. should be different in that capacity. Their crime rates are quite similar for almost everything else, but in grow ops it's day and night. The only difference that I can attribute it to is sentencing, five years versus

Justice committee  It's my understanding that 1962 was the first year that a crime rate was established and made public. The problem is that the measure of what goes into the crime rate has changed over the years, so it does become difficult to make comparisons from one decade to the previous. But

Justice committee  It can do a world of good for offenders who want the help. Let me quickly tell you, my brother-in-law is a lifer; he committed first-degree murder. He was eligible at 15 years with a “faint hope”. The two people he was co-convicted with, who were much more seriously involved in i

Justice committee  I would encourage the continuation of pardons for offenders who have committed property crimes, maybe small-level drug crimes in their youth, who have made mistakes and carried on with their life. I would not grant it to the most serious cases that are for public discussion right

Justice committee  My understanding is that it's almost 20% less than it was in the sixties.

Justice committee  That is just using basic demographic data that has been accessed from Statistics Canada, delivered through the census.

Justice committee  Anecdotally, I hear that all the time from police officers. They will confiscate the marijuana, the alcohol, and they won't proceed formally. It takes too much time, and it's extremely frustrating because they know ahead that all of the processing is for naught—nothing is going t

Justice committee  It would depend whether we're talking about the actual sentence being enhanced legislatively or about judges imposing it.

Justice committee  The impact would be that this is additional time during which those individual offenders cannot accumulate more victims. That would mean less crime. It doesn't mean they're not going to reoffend when they get out, but at least we would have had a holiday from them.

Justice committee  Yes.

Justice committee  The issue that I would add to that, though, is that there's little comfort to victims and families who have lost loved ones when people are sent back into the community untreated and who have not had an opportunity to engage in rehabilitation. I don't think we want to talk about