The concern I would have is if we look at the case of Pearson from the Supreme Court of Canada and at the dissent of Justice McLachlin at the time, whereby she would have struck the section because it was too all-encompassing and went too far.... Reverse onus is an exception, and the Supreme Court was very clear that if we were going to do this sort of incremental whittling away at a charter value, it had to be done on a most exceptional basis.
The criteria that saved the reverse onus in Pearson do not appear to apply here. It's not the highly commercial big money concerns about leaving the country—all of those things that were in the drug trafficking context.
One fear is, yes, bringing in people who normally shouldn't have been caught in such a wide net.
The second—and I think it's a very real concern—is that the reverse onus in Pearson was saved because it was not arbitrary. There will be arguments made—I think it's foreseeable that there will be arguments made in every jurisdiction in this country—that the boy with the bullets is arbitrarily being asked to show why he shouldn't remain detained, while the next person in the prisoner's box is accused of a much more serious crime with a weapon, and that has no burden.
So I think the arbitrariness is a concern there. That was one of the key reasons why Pearson saved the clause.
As far as the preamble goes, I'm afraid I may not be the best person to speak about whether there should be a preamble, why there isn't, whether the preamble really would do anything or not to save...when the specific sections fall afoul of what the court has decided in Pearson and what our courts have decided in other constitutional law decisions.