Justice committee  I have been teaching full-time at the University of Toronto since 1993.

Justice committee  I have never practised criminal law except in the restricted setting of doing student legal aid work when I was a law student--where many of my clients were alleged shoplifters, I might add. But that's a long time ago.

Justice committee  1998.

Justice committee  No, I have never practised law as a lawyer.

Justice committee  That's right. One way to deal with my concern would be to say these are all aspects of reasonableness and we have a list of factors. Certainly Canadian courts are no stranger to long, non-exhaustive lists of factors in guiding the application of a legal concept. That's certainly something we're quite familiar with.

Justice committee  Yes, that's correct.

Justice committee  Yes, at the Ontario Court of Appeal; that's correct.

Justice committee  I've written on evidence. I've written a textbook on evidence as well as a treatise on evidence, and recently a book on section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Justice committee  I'd say “support with reservations” would be the most accurate description of my position. I support the idea. The existing provisions in sections 34 through 37 are widely recognized to be confusing and difficult to explain to juries. They don't cover the territory in a very neat way, and this has been pointed out over the years.

Justice committee  He may indeed.

Justice committee  I think my concern about this section is a little more serious than the way you described it in your summary of my remarks. So the first one, proposed paragraph 34.(1)(a), the person has to “believe on reasonable grounds that force is being used against them”, does sound a bit like the first element.

Justice committee  All right, then. We'll just go in the order we were listed. I'll start. The aspect of Bill C-26 I'm going to focus on is proposed section 34, the proposed amendments to the self-defence provisions. I'm focusing on this because this is the most significant proposed changed to the law of self-defence in Canada since the Criminal Code first came into force in 1892.