Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It reflects the judgments of the Supreme Court in two cases. One of them is called R. v. Covin and the other one is called R. v. Hasselwander. I can provide the clerk with the citations if you want them after the session. Basically this provision is based on Canadian firearms law and it deals with the bill. We have a lot of case law on deactivated firearms.
The Supreme Court has held that in the Covin case this means that it can't be restored to functionality within the scope of time needed to commit whatever offences are under consideration. For a cluster munition, I think, it would be quite a long time.
The only other point about the drafting of that provision is that in technical terms we needed to cover...and bearing in mind that the bill addresses both cluster munitions and submunitions. Submunitions have explosives in them that can be taken out and priming mechanisms that can be disabled; cluster munitions often don't. So that's the reason for the complex destruction standards. We wanted to make sure that a Canadian court would have absolute clarity, or as much clarity as possible, if someone is charged with possession of something that has in fact been deactivated. That makes it a lot easier to do things like training because you don't have to use the actual munitions. If it's deactivated to the standard, then it stops being a cluster munition both for the purposes of the convention and for purposes of the legislation, and the offences don't apply.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.