Public Safety committee  Yes. When you have someone who is detained for a long period of time without programming, without access to rehabilitation, when they're cut off from their community, when opportunities are closed to them, when they are not able to make choices about accepting responsibility beca

Public Safety committee  One of the most heartbreaking and hard cases I've ever dealt with was representing a young Black man who was charged with first-degree murder. He attended a house to steal some marijuana. It was one of the most tragic and heartbreaking cases I've ever seen. Around that time, I sa

Public Safety committee  No, not for these types of offences, and that's borne out by the criminological evidence. If you're acting out of desperation, out of poverty, or if you just don't give a damn, the minimum sentences or the length of a sentence doesn't deter crime. Where they might is when you h

Public Safety committee  Of course, nothing is a panacea, and nothing is going to fix the problem in and of itself, but we do see legal handguns being used. Domestic violence and domestic homicides often involve legal handguns, and those are a large problem in terms of the number of homicides we see.

Public Safety committee  Nothing is a panacea, but a total ban would be better than a diffuse divesting of that responsibility to the municipalities, which would result in a patchwork across Canada.

Public Safety committee  I think so. Each situation is unique and, of course, any violence with a firearm or a handgun creates harm. Even merely possessing it and never discharging it as part of a criminal enterprise can create harm. Those individuals are all in different places, whether it be poverty or

Public Safety committee  In all fairness, Mr. Friedman might be more of an expert on this issue, but certainly control of sales, how one possesses a gun and who can legally possess a gun, is important. Of course, there are better people to speak to border controls and the like, but certainly it is alwa

Public Safety committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and good afternoon. Thank you to all members of the committee for inviting me to address you today. By way of a brief background, I'm a partner at Abergel Goldstein & Partners here in Ottawa, and I've been practising almost exclusively crimina