I would say this: I think there are a number of myths, and one of the myths is that the status quo is not working. It's not working because some people are saying it's not working. I think there's a myth of a revolving door. I don't have the statistics here, but I know that there have been some published recently in the province of Ontario.
In the province of Ontario now, we have more people on remand in our provincial jails than we do serving time in provincial jail for the first time in the history of this province. That would tend to suggest that we are detaining more people after bail hearings than we are releasing. What we hear about are a couple of cases in which a person gets released on bail, if they are notorious cases that may offend sensibilities. We don't hear about the persons who are detained in custody pending trial for minor matters, knowing that the sentence that they will get would probably far exceed the amount of time it's going to take to have that come to trial. That's not being discussed.
If we're going to talk about these things, I think we have to look at them in the broad spectrum. There are some myths about the revolving door. As I said to you at the outset, I've been practising for 25 years. Getting bail for my clients 25 years ago was a much easier task than it is now. I have many more clients—and I'm not talking just about having more clients—who are actually in custody awaiting trial than on the outside awaiting trial.
One of the announcements this morning was about changing the reverse onus for gun crime. Whether you want to accept it or not, most of the justices of the peace in this province who deal with releasing people on gun crime—and there are exceptions—already consider it to be somewhat reverse onus. Crowns do not consent to the release of people who are charged with gun crime. They have a directive on that. Justices of the peace tend to remand those people in custody, but the problem is--and these myths develop--we hear about a couple of cases in which someone gets out or there's some sentence that seems to be outlandish, in that it's not tough enough, and we react to that. We don't tend to react to the success stories, and that is a concern.