Justice committee  Not from these court data; the court data reflect the sentence imposed. The time served in custody is an issue we would have to get from the corrections file. Whether or not we're going to develop the total time in relation to the time imposed would be a function of linking those

Justice committee  There were a total of 137 case convictions, from which we were able to identify 133 unique people, whom we could then use as the base for going back and checking prior history. So, yes, it was 133 people in 2003-04.

Justice committee  Right. There are ten offences with mandatory minimum sentences of four years. I have those offences here. They are: causing death by criminal negligence, section 220; manslaughter, section 236—and the mandatory minimum provisions are contained within those code sections; attempt

Justice committee  No, because homicide has a mandatory minimum of life.

Justice committee  For offences going back that far, the data set we have for court data, representing approximately 80% national coverage, goes back to 1994-95.

Justice committee  Right, and those are from police-reported statistics, not court data.

Justice committee  That was for 1994-95. There are some jurisdictions that have been supplying data since 1991. Quebec has been supplying data since 1991, and P.E.I. and Saskatchewan since 1992, but prior to that it's not possible. The volume of court records makes it very cost-prohibitive to go o

Justice committee  That's one of the difficulties with the court data, because it does reflect solely the content of the code. If it's not in the code, there's no way to extract that data from the record. When the code changes, and it appears one year, but it wasn't there prior to that, it's imposs

Justice committee  Yes, I can produce that. The difficulty is that if I start in 1996, the number for years prior to that would be zero.

Justice committee  In each subsequent year, for these forty individuals, I'm going to potentially count them numerous times as I go through that deck, because they show up in different years. It's the difficulty around that. That's why we presented one year, because what it results in is a situatio

Justice committee  In terms of the average sentences?

Justice committee  Thank you for the question. It's a good question. It's difficult in the administrative data that we have, because we don't have any indication about consecutive or concurrent. What we are able to do with the court data is to look at the most serious offence in that case and use

Justice committee  I haven't broken that out for this slide. Really, what we did was look at the 10 most serious offences with a firearm and looked back to see whether or not there was at least one of those prior. We didn't look at the type of that, but it is possible.

Justice committee  There's nothing in the court data that....

Justice committee  That's a perspective that has been taken in the past. We know that some researchers have used these data in taking that approach. One of the difficulties in preparing a data set, and doing the analysis in quite that way with the court data, is that there are times when the sequen