Thank you very much. Your positioning on this is quite refreshing, and it has raised a couple of issues that I have been trying to mine into myself--earlier.
I want to focus specifically on the constitutional rights of those who are charged with an offence to have access to reasonable bail. That's an explicit charter right under section 11.
In this particular case there are two things I want you to comment on. You've alluded to them already, but I'd like you to comment further, if you can.
First, the government has chosen in this case, notwithstanding their plan to push back or alter an explicit charter right, not to include any kind of preamble to explain why Parliament is doing what it's going to do and to couch it in a way such that if this thing has to be charter-proofed, it could be seen to be reasonably justifiable in a free and open society.
Second, in the absence of that preamble, the bill includes reference to sections of the Criminal Code that arguably, in and of themselves—just seen by themselves in isolation—might not be regarded by the average person as involving dangerousness.
I'll use the example—you've referred to some—of the guy with a couple of bullets in his pocket, but no gun, who's charged under one of these sections included in the bill and who, by virtue of the fact that he has a couple of bullets in his pocket, has the reverse onus applied to his case. He's lost the right to bail; the onus has been reversed.
My gut tells me that just doesn't fit within the charter paradigms I'm used to seeing and reading about. We can't arbitrarily turn the tables on a citizen because they might have a couple of bullets in their pocket. It has to be reasonably justifiable and it has to be thought through.
So in relation to those categories of offences that are not normally in and of themselves seen to be really dangerous stuff, are we on thin ice here, in terms of the charter acceptability of these reforms?