Thanks for your question.
I need to comment on your opening comments. You said you're a layperson. Please, that's exactly what I'm looking for, to have laypersons interested in it. Why? Your sons and daughters and nephews and nieces are serving in the military—symbolically, but whatever. You have to have an interest in what's happening in the military.
When young men and women sign on the dotted line to volunteer their services and eventually their lives, they don't, as Mr. Ruby said, give away any of their rights. In fact, as a former leader in the armed forces, a commissioned officer, I don't want them to do that. I want them to incarnate what's best in our nation, our youth. I want them to be aware of what their rights and freedoms are so that when I put rifles in their hands and send them on a peacekeeping mission or a mission abroad, they not only know that their rights are respected but they will also act as people who flow from our society and will transpose those rights and freedoms. We don't make them better soldiers by saying, “Park your charter rights at the door, and now do as you're told. I don't care about your rights.”
To me it's very important that they know and understand that the military justice system respects their rights. Why? They're Canadian, first and foremost.
Second, when it comes to the summary trial itself, there's such a simple solution before us that it's not even funny, and Mr. Ruby has alluded to it. All you need to do is decriminalize the summary trial system.
I'm not advocating that the summary trial system be done away with; I'm not. Keep it. If you're deployed on a ship or you're deployed in the field in Afghanistan and you want to have immediate justice and military discipline in play, then maybe, but don't criminalize it. Do not import, as we do now, the Criminal Code into the code of service discipline and then go as far as sending someone to detention, deprivation of liberty, for up to 30 days. You don't have to do that.
It could be a disciplinary process. It leaves no criminal record, and it is decriminalized. This you could do very simply, and that would be the end of the discussion.
If you don't want to do that, then do something like what is done now in the U.K., Australia, and Ireland: create a summary appeal court where there is a right to counsel, there is a transcript, there is rule of evidence, and someone can appeal a decision by the summary trial. This is what the U.K. has done as a result of being told to do so by the European Court of Human Rights, because the system in the U.K., which was identical to ours, was non-compliant with the European Convention on Human Rights.
So we have two examples before us.