Justice committee  This codifies an agreement we reached with the provinces years ago to do this. We just never had a vehicle to implement it until a decision was made to move on this general issue.

Justice committee  Yes.

Justice committee  Actually, proposed subsection (3.3) won't deal with the circumstances so much as the arithmetic.

Justice committee  They first have to state what the offence is. Form 21, the warrant of committal, sets this out as well. It's attached to the bill to make it clear to judges how this will work. So you state the offence, the amount of time a person has spent in pretrial custody, the sentence the

Justice committee  I guess we disagree on that, and I shouldn't comment.

Justice committee  Well, as you point out, we have a number of places in the code where reasons are requested. In fact, when Bill C-41 came into force in 1996, it imposed a general obligation on courts to give reasons for sentencing. But what we're trying to do—and we've done it in part XXIII of th

Justice committee  It creates a window, or I should really say a door—quite an open, wide door—for judicial discretion. I am concerned that it doesn't cover the long record of the person or the breach of conditions, something that the government would like to retain, for sure. And frankly, I have s

Justice committee  Yes, it happens.

Justice committee  The direction we had from our minister and from the government generally was to prepare a bill based on one to one, with an opportunity to go up to 1.5 if the circumstances justified it. Frankly, its impact will be that courts trying to do justice will find that in many cases the

Justice committee  Not really. That is one of the problems. The jurisprudence points to three factors that justify some enhancement of the time spent. One is this one that you bring up, which is going to apply universally to all these offenders now, and that is that there is this loss of remission

Justice committee  It's the justice of the peace who will make the decision as to whether or not the individual will be released. It's the sentencing judge who will deal with the credit issue if the person has been in custody until the trial and sentencing. I may not have understood your question

Justice committee  Actually, we're in the process. Our research division is trying to get access to the court files that would indicate more precisely than sentencing decisions do the amount of credit that's awarded. So far, we have information from the Yukon Territory and also from the City of Win

Justice committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. With respect to Mr. Ménard's first question, one of the things we wanted to capture is related to one of the elements of the bill and one of the government's platform commitments going back to the 2006 election. If one of the reasons the justice of the peac