Senator Pate: I’ll make a number of statements, and you can indicate whether you agree.

In the case of Luxton, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled the life sentence was constitutional because there was a safety valve of a 15-year review available. In the Bissonnette case, the Supreme Court of Canada said:

In any event . . . the existence of a discretion cannot save a provision that authorizes the imposition of punishment that is cruel and unusual by nature.

It also talked about the need to inject humanity into sentencing and left the suggestion that even a life sentence may be problematic. We know that the overwhelming majority of Indigenous women, who now form one out of two federally sentenced women, are in for violent offences, many of them for murder, as a result of responding to violence first perpetrated against them.

Would you agree those are the facts as well?

[Translation]