It's certainly my view that we have a very powerful case. A decision by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2002 required the government to permit federal prisoners to vote, and we have documented the case. One of our petitioners in this matter was in and out of trouble in his previous life. He managed to straighten out his life. If he were still in trouble and not out of it and were still doing time in a penitentiary, he would be able to vote. He's homeless now in the downtown eastside, and his right to vote is in jeopardy.
I don't want to comment on the politics of motivation of the government. But in a legal context, this comes down to section 1 of the charter, where the government bears all the onus to show that anything it does that interferes with the right to vote is demonstrably justified, including the fact that the mechanism it puts together is proportionate to the problem. We have a mechanism that has affected 1.7 million people, and I hope for one million of them it will be resolved with this bill.
That's to address what? What is the problem? The report to the Commons by this committee said it really had no information about the scope of the problem. So talk about killing a gnat with an atom bomb. That's the way this is going to be presented to the court, and in my submission we have a very powerful argument to bring to the court.