Mr. Chairman, thank you.
I think I need to respond to the member's question relative to the apparent conflict made evident, it would seem, in the letter of the minister of today's date—I'm losing track of dates myself—and your letter to the minister yesterday.
Your letter yesterday did say, “we understand that it is within your authority to delay completion of that Order until other matters are resolved”—it's a reference to the Extradition Act—to which the minister is saying, correctly enough, the Extradition Act itself expressly does not give that authority.
There's a bit of dancing on words here. Your letter might well have said that is “within your power” to cause a delay. In my view, it is.
If we have to go to the Extradition Act, section 42 says, “The Minister may amend a surrender order at any time before its execution.” It's not a long sentence, it's not a complicated section. That's the beginning and the end of it.
Now, one could argue—lawyers can argue about anything, as you know—what that means, but it seems to me at first blush it would suggest there is a capacity on the part of the minister to amend his surrender order.
Mr. Schreiber himself is not, we must remember, in any way guilty, in my view, of any contempt here. He has said he's willing to be here. If there's any contempt going on, it's on the part of the persons who are frustrating his ability to get here.
He's incarcerated in a provincial institution pursuant to an order of surrender. It was an order of committal by the court. We're past that now. We're now where that's finished, and we're looking at an order of surrender.
The order of surrender by Minister Cotler at that time, dated October 31, 2004, does not have a date in it by which time the extradition is to take place.
I would add to that—not to get too elaborate—a recent decision of the Court of Appeal for Ontario in respect of Mr. Schreiber's judicial review application, where it turned down the appeal of the judicial review application. It said, in paragraph 3, that “The ultimate”—and in my view, “ultimate” is an operative word there—“decision to surrender for extradition following judicial committal for extradition is essentially a political decision.”
And then later it says, “A subsequent decision by the Minister to refuse to reconsider a surrender order is subject to at least the same level of deference”, that being deference by the courts. They're recognizing this is a political matter; it's not for the courts to interfere with the minister's discretion, which they're saying is of a political nature. By using that expression, the court doesn't mean to deride the nature of the decision; they're just saying it's not a judicial decision, it's not a legal decision, it's a political decision—and it makes reference to a subsequent decision.
In my view, given section 42, where he can amend his order, and given the Court of Appeal of Ontario's recognizing that he can make a subsequent decision, while it may be true that the Extradition Act does not give him the authority to delay—in my view, it's not necessary to find that authority in the act, apart from the ability to amend, which infers the same authority—it ought to be straightforward that the minister can determine when it is he shall extradite and delay, if I may use the word again, the execution of that extradition, pending these proceedings.
Now, that said, the man's in jail. You can't keep someone in jail indefinitely. Obviously, there might be serious arguments if two years from now the man's still in jail and the minister's still pondering whether to extradite. Clearly you can't keep someone in jail indefinitely. That's obviously a concern of the minister's, that he has somebody in jail. So he can't delay this indefinitely. But it's not the case, in my view, in the short time I've had to consider the minister's letter, that it is not within his power to effect a delay in the execution of the surrender order pending completion of these proceedings.