Justice committee  I will be very quick. But respectfully, that case was about a confidential informer. A confidential informer is somebody who gives information—you're a former police officer and I'm sure you're aware—

Justice committee  Absolutely. A confidential informer is a citizen who comes forward and says, “I want to help the police but I want to be kept anonymous.” That's an incredibly important part of our justice system, but those witnesses don't testify in court. They're not witnesses but people who pr

Justice committee  Sure, absolutely.

Justice committee  Absolutely.

Justice committee  I guess what I'd say is this: the cases that I'm aware of where the Supreme Court has spoken about the right to confront one's accuser have to do with situations where, for example, the accused wants to personally examine a complainant or a witness in a case, and that's been held

Justice committee  That's right. It has been put in place in England. I'm not aware of how that's played out. I know it was extremely controversial when it happened. I hope that if this is being considered, it's going to be extremely controversial here.

Justice committee  I suppose the concern is this: it creates a tremendous danger of wrongful convictions if a person can come forward and not testify publicly—not publicly in the sense that their name is going to be published in the paper, but not testify in a way that the accused can identify who

Justice committee  Right, like society in general. Absolutely. We're going to have a situation where people are going to be showing up at trials, on the day of trial, and everybody is ready to go. You may have a complainant who is ready to go and wants to go, and some witness shows up who is maybe

Justice committee  It's difficult to imagine how that provision could be saved. There is no precedent in Canadian law. There are lots of situations where people give information to the police anonymously. The law has always protected confidential informers who want to be tipsters and keep their ide

Justice committee  Yes. To call it a constitutional problem is almost an understatement. If what's being suggested here is that the identity of a witness not be disclosed—it says in the course of the proceedings—at any point in the proceedings to anybody outside, presumably the police and the crow

Justice committee  Again, in my reading of clause 20, it's not clear to me whether that clause applies to the act as a whole or only to the Victims Bill of Rights. It seems to me that clause 20 seems to be talking just about the manner in which the rights described in the previous 19 clauses are to

Justice committee  Let me address the resource issue. I suppose the concern, generally speaking, is that if there were more judges, if there were more funding for litigants, and that includes legal aid, obviously, because a lot of accused persons are legally aided and the reality is that months and

Justice committee  I'm sorry, it's clause 17. It's also page 17. It's adding proposed section 486.31 to the Criminal Code, and I struggle to understand it. Initially, I thought it was maybe a publication ban, but I see a couple of pages later that clause 19 deals with publication bans. As I say, I

Justice committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. The Criminal Lawyers' Association has had the privilege of appearing before this committee many times, and I thank you for the invitation to discuss this bill. Let me just say at the outset that victims are not an abstract concept to criminal lawyers. We k