Jury duty is the most important civic duty left in Canadian society, and it is the last mandatory civic duty left in Canadian society. When you receive a summons, you are bound by law to respond to it. We want Canadians to welcome the opportunity to serve their communities in court to deliver justice and not to want to shirk the responsibility or find ways to avoid it.
We believe that a national organization that represents the interests of those on jury duty and that can support jurors and promote jury duty to Canadians is missing from our country as it is now. Police associations and first responders and our veterans associations, which we have connected to through our work to raise the profile of mental health and PTSD, are wonderful organizations that work on behalf of their members to support them and to give them access to evidence-based treatment and the like, which jurors do not have access to.
That's a shame, because jury duty is not a vocation. It's not something for which there is training. It's not something that has personal and professional development or peer support, yet jurors are the most vulnerable to trauma, due to the evidence they see in court and the burden of jury duty and the decisions they are bound to reach as part of a verdict.
We're already working with fantastic organizations like the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Peer Support Canada and the Canadian Mental Health Association, and we met yesterday with the National Judicial Institute and we'll be partnering with them on programs for justices. They're approaching these from the judge and the justice side. We're bringing the voice of the juror to the table to provide those solutions and the like to train judges on their roles and responsibilities in the courtrooms.
Many judges actually have power to execute very cogent security programs for jurors in the courthouse. They just don't do it because they don't realize that it's necessary. When jurors are sitting in a case involving gang-related activity and are being stalked outside of the courtroom, or are going through the security in and out of the courthouse and passing witnesses who follow them to their cars, that isn't fiction. It's actually happening.