Justice committee  Thank you. I understand I have 10 minutes for the presentation.

Justice committee  That's fine. Please tell me if I go over. I have one of the fancy watches that's not very specific, but it's very stylish. Thank you very much for the invitation. My name is Jonathan Rudin. I'm the program director at Aboriginal Legal Services of Toronto. At Aboriginal Legal Ser

Justice committee  I guess the difficulty is, first, I don't know what “intrusive”.... Certainly, there are young people who will do a lot, if they're prepared to do it. It can be very intrusive, but I—

Justice committee  I'll speak briefly. It's nice to have principles in the act that may restrict the use of incarceration; the difficulty is we don't see them working particularly well. Paragraph 718.2(e), which was in the Criminal Code and is now 39(2)(d) of the Youth Criminal Justice Act, says

Justice committee  Those are from Juristat .

Justice committee  The Juristat figures take a self-identification notion of aboriginal people, which in our experience means they're a floor. We have generally found that when many jurisdictions count the number of aboriginal people in the facilities, they undercount; many people who are aborigin

Justice committee  I have not. Maybe some of my colleagues have.

Justice committee  Thank you very much. Aboriginal Legal Services of Toronto appreciates the opportunity to present our position on Bill C-4 to the justice committee. ALST earlier appeared before the House and Senate justice committees regarding the development of the YCJA, and we're proud to sa

Justice committee  You raise, I think, an important point from our perspective. This is not related to the committee specifically. Within the Department of Justice itself, it does not appear that these considerations get attention when these bills are drafted, and that is a concern. While the Depar

Justice committee  Our concern with regard to the hybrid offences is that it essentially turns the Crown into the judge. If there's a plea or if the person has been convicted, the Crown will determine what defence will be based on, whether the Crown decides to proceed summarily or by indictment. Th

Justice committee  It's interesting you ask that question because two weeks ago I was in Ottawa for a meeting of all the aboriginal court work programs in Canada, and one of the things we discussed was the need to try to bring that voice forward. Because we have been to this committee before, I sai

Justice committee  Thank you. You raise an important question, one that is difficult to answer in a short period of time. I will do my best. When you look at prisons and you see, in our case, disproportionate numbers of aboriginal people, that can mean that aboriginal people are perhaps committin

Justice committee  It's interesting, the comment you made about jails and boarding schools. Actually, in the late 1980s, the Canadian Bar Association issued a report called Locking Up Natives in Canada. One of the things they found in that report, looking at Saskatchewan, was that—and all these fig

Justice committee  As I mentioned, they've picked up a lot of new skills, but they're not skills we would want anyone necessarily to have learned.

Justice committee  I can't give you a list right now. I suppose I put some faith in courts of appeal--in the trial judge and in the courts of appeal. Certainly we see regularly in Ontario many offences that do not have mandatory minimums, yet judges routinely hand out prison sentences, often somet