Hon. Donald Neil Plett (Leader of the Opposition): Minister, more than three years ago, Anne McLellan tabled a report about the SNC-Lavalin affair. Could you tell us where the government is in implementing her recommendations?

Hon. Donald Neil Plett (Leader of the Opposition): Minister, your government is proposing to extend conditional sentence eligibility for serious offences including sexual assault through Bill C-5. Women’s groups and victims’ groups have expressed great concern about an abuser’s ability to serve his sentence from his home or in the victim’s community.

Jennifer Dunn of the London Abused Women’s Centre stated in the House Justice Committee on April 29, 2022:

. . . Women and girls are five times more likely than men to be victims of sexual assault, and sexual assault is a violent crime on the rise in Canada. With conditional sentencing, many women will be stuck in the community with the offender, which places them at even higher risk.

Minister, what message is your government sending to victims of sexual assault by extending leniency to sexual abusers?

Senator Plett: Characterizing what I asked. Sexual assault, minister, is a serious crime — a very serious crime, minister. If this bill passes, sexual abusers will be serving their sentence in their communities. Yet, as Jennifer Dunn stated, you have women on the other side of this who have to live with what happened to them and have to look over their shoulder in the community. That, minister, is a lifetime sentence. That is serious, minister.

What message is your government sending victims of sexual assault by treating sexual abuse with leniency? Given that sexual assault is the most under-reported crime in Canada, what do you say to the advocacy groups who say that this will further deter abuse victims from coming forward?

Conditional sentence orders, in any case — but particularly in the very serious situation that you have cited — are only available where there is no threat to public security. That includes victims, honourable senator. We are moving forward in a way that corrects the failed, so-called tough-on-crime policies of the Harper government, which have only resulted in clogging up the criminal justice system, in the overincarceration of Indigenous, Black and other racialized people in the Canadian justice system and which even an esteemed judge and expert like Michael Moldaver said have basically failed.

[Translation]

Hon. Donald Neil Plett (Leader of the Opposition): Minister, on June 12, 2018, you and your cabinet colleagues voted in favour of a motion to designate Iran’s IRGC as a terrorist entity.

Minister, it has been 1,576 days since you stood up to signal your support for that. IRGC terrorists have since killed 59 Canadians and 30 permanent Canadian residents on Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752. Women in Iran have been protesting on the streets, and Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman, has been murdered. Those are serious crimes, in my opinion. I hope they are in yours. Canadians are dumbfounded by your government’s reluctance to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization in its entirety. In the 1,576 days that have gone by, has an independent council in the Department of Justice gotten around to reviewing documents listing the IRGC under —