Senator Pate: Thank you, Senator Boisvenu, for both your speech and your ideas. I would love to work with you on that kind of initiative and I would welcome that opportunity. I am troubled, however, by your suggestion. Given that you know that there are many of us in this chamber who similarly have family members who have been murdered, sexually assaulted and victimized, as well as the fact that we know police organizations, women’s groups and victims’ groups do call into question the issue of mandatory minimum penalties, especially when it comes to the issues you ended your speech with, namely, Indigenous women — that is partly why it is one of the recommendations of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.

I am troubled by your suggestion that the bill would actually repeal mandatory minimum penalties. In fact, it is quite the opposite. You stress the importance of section 718.2(e) especially for racialized prisoners and, in particular, for Indigenous women. Yet, that is precisely what the impact, the import and the role of the bill would be. It would be to allow, in exceptional cases, those mandatory minimum penalties that the courts have already challenged, including the Supreme Court of Canada, when they said in R. v. Luxton that when considering the life sentence for murder, the only thing that saved it from being unconstitutional was the fact that there was a “faint hope clause,” and we now no longer have it.

Would you agree that you have perhaps overstated a bit the fact that this bill will repeal mandatory minimum penalties? In fact, it won’t do anything of the sort. In exceptional cases such as the ones discussed by a number of us in this chamber, it might provide judges an opportunity to give reasons as to why they would not utilize the mandatory minimum penalty.

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