Thank you.
First of all, I want to thank you very much for the invitation to be here today. It's a real honour.
As an academic, I've published extensively in the area of miscarriages of justice in Canada and other common law countries for the last 20 years. My research has focused on a number of areas, including examining the factors that contribute to miscarriages of justice and prison and post-release experiences of the wrongly convicted, amongst many other things.
I also took part in the consultations held by Justices LaForme and Westmoreland-Traoré around the proposed reform in 2021. I've met, spoken to and interviewed many wrongly convicted people over the years, and I'm well aware of the devastation that a wrongful conviction can wreak on individuals and their families.
In 2012, I started Innocence Ottawa, which is, through the Department of Criminology, an innocence project that's run by criminology and law students. Our aim is to help the wrongly convicted who are seeking exoneration.
We've come a long way. When we started in 2012, we had bake sales and sold T-shirts to fund our work, whereas in 2023 we've just received an access to justice grant from the Ontario law foundation for an outreach to indigenous prisoners program, so we've really moved quite far.
It's clear—as I've heard through these hearings these past few weeks and as I think we all accept—that indigenous and Black prisoners are overrepresented in federal and provincial and territorial institutions, but they're strangely absent in the numbers of exonerees or even amongst those seeking conviction review.
Thus far, Innocence Ottawa has filed one application for conviction review through the CCRG on behalf of one of our applicants, so I'm well aware of the difficulties in the current system. In fact, we submitted his application in 2019. Four years later, it's still at the preliminary investigation stage. Just as an aside, he also happens to be a person of colour.
My frustration over the last 20 years of the difficulties and challenges of innocence work is that it just shouldn't be this hard to overturn a conviction, to correct an error, because the stakes are just too high. Thus, I greatly anticipated the new legislation, and I feel it's a very important first step.
In the next half of my short talk, I'll briefly comment first on what I see as the strengths of the bill and then on the areas that I believe are in need of improvement.
The independence of the conviction review process now I think is an excellent step forward, but I feel there are some constraints on this as well. The commissioners should not be considered as government employees. The commission itself I believe should be viewed more as a court rather than a small government agency, and it should be located outside of Ottawa, with possible regional offices. Otherwise, that may detract from the perception of it as being independent.
On accessibility, the bill proposes to enhance access to previously marginalized groups, those who are overrepresented in the criminal justice system—particularly indigenous and Black prisoners—and I think that being an altogether new entity may help address this matter with a new conviction.
On the change in the threshold test, as was discussed in the previous hour, I think this change from a “miscarriage of justice likely occurred” to a “miscarriage of justice may have occurred”, or to if the commission “considers that it is in the interests of justice to do so” they can conduct an investigation, I think is an important step. It sounds far more expansive, but at the same time, I wonder to what extent this is going to change things, because it is also somewhat vague. My experience thus far with the CCRG itself, the criminal conviction review group, is that it's unclear as to what it actually takes to recommend reviewing a conviction.
Three other important additions are the examination of the personal circumstances of an application, enhancement of investigative powers and greater victim involvement.
On areas that need improvement, I believe the number of commissioners is far too low. The LaForme and Westmoreland-Traoré report advocated for nine to 11 commissioners. That seems reasonable and necessary, in my view. The number suggested by Bill C-40 is clearly not adequate, because if the commission isn't properly staffed with both commissioners and investigators, it's going to incur huge delays, and that's an ongoing issue with the CCRG.
I have a couple of other things. I believe the mandate should include sentences, as a sentence can also represent a miscarriage of justice, and also those whose cases have not yet been before a court of appeal. Otherwise, it may severely limit the number of applicants.
Finally, I think as an academic that we have a really great opportunity here with this new commission to get it right, to have a proactive and systemic approach to miscarriages of justice, to collect data from cases, derive policy lessons and discern patterns. I think it would be a shame to miss that opportunity with this new commission.
Thank you very much.
