Status of Women committee  Which judges go to the training is really up to the chief justices, and so Mr. Sabourin may have something to say. But we hope, as we institute this plan, that we will have a more formal way of assisting the judges, reminding the judges that this is a course we recommend, and so on and so forth, and working with the chief justices to assist them in keeping those plans in place.

Status of Women committee  First of all, there is now the mandatory new judges training, but I think it's much more than that. When a judge gets appointed—and I'll speak about federally appointed judges because we work mostly with them—generally speaking, they are assigned a mentor in their court. When they first arrive at the court, their chief justice will give them some mentor on the court of senior judges.

Status of Women committee  I worry about training in the pre-appointment process being effective. When you ask what the federal government can do, I suppose I would turn that back on us and say, what can we do to give you confidence, to give Canadians confidence, that once judges are judges, they are being trained in sexual assault training and all of the other training that is connected with gender-based violence?

Status of Women committee  One of the problems is transparency. As I've said before, I think we can do more as well in terms of the training. We have good training. We have training in sexual assault, how to manage trials, the social context around the people who come into our courtrooms, but I think we can do more.

Status of Women committee  Merci. Good morning to you all. Thank you for allowing the National Judicial Institute the opportunity to come here to give you some information about judicial education in Canada, an initiative we're just starting with respect to sexual assault training. Before I do that, I want to say a couple of things to you that I think we likely all agree on.