Justice committee  Correct.

Justice committee  The jury is going to be asked almost to flip a coin, without any evidentiary basis before them, because they're not going to have before them any evidence, even of the person's character or background or history or the factors that would go into a judge's decision. The jury won't

Justice committee  Correct.

Justice committee  I don't have the exact numbers before me, but I saw it in the legislative material prepared for this committee on this bill. The numbers of multiple murders are quite small when compared with single murders. It is a very small group of people. On a percentage basis, I believe it

Justice committee  I wouldn't be surprised if that were the case.

Justice committee  Sure.

Justice committee  I think the element of discretion may—may—save this provision. That's to be seen down the road--but yes, in a specific case. Charter values obviously inform all decisions made in the criminal courts, and a charter value approach to looking at sentencing would certainly hold out

Justice committee  I think rehabilitation is a tough challenge on any given day, but the minute you snuff out the light at the end of the tunnel, or make that tunnel so long that you're really removing hope, I think you really run the risk of not only ending the hope for rehabilitation—and I agree

Justice committee  Yes, I know. To make it more problematic, the discretion is binary, so you're giving a judge a choice, which is very blunt. It's either 25 or 50 years. I would imagine that most judges looking at a person, given those two options, will err on the side of caution and go with judic

Justice committee  That is correct.

Justice committee  Not at all.

Justice committee  This is perhaps a classic Canadian compromise, but in the bid to get rid of capital punishment, the trade-off was a sentence for first-degree murder, which was likely unheard of in terms of its length in other Commonwealth and similar countries. So it may have been the political

Justice committee  I don't know the exact answer to that, but I do know there's an increased measure of discretion in terms of release that is borne out by the statistics, which in the U.K. are significantly lower than ours.

Justice committee  This week?

Justice committee  I have many times.