Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
The issue of security certificates has received great debate in this committee. If you look at the citizenship report recommendations in the previous Parliament, there was a very strong aversion to the security certificate process being instituted against citizens.
We had before us one witness--and it's in the report--Justice Roger Salhany, a retired superior court justice. He essentially stated that the Canadian judicial system is not set up to hold inquisitions, as they might do under the French system, where you have a justice who does criminal investigations.
The point is that it's fairly simple and it's very broad. You have someone accused of a crime. Reasonableness is a very low threshold. But if you look at a couple of cases as to how our justice system operates, we have Paul Bernardo and Clifford Olson—very dangerous individuals who will spend the rest of their lives in jail. Of course, you also have people like Guy Paul Morin, Donald Marshall, Steven Truscott—a whole list of people—wrongfully convicted.
What our justice system does, with all the safeguards, with the appeals, with “beyond a reasonable doubt”, is try to find a balance. I point that out because, even if you have all that, you have many wrongful convictions, and many people in Canada have been hanged. Of course, there are cases where they're still trying to prove innocence many years after the cases were dealt with. We have the case of the guide in Quebec who was wrongfully executed, whose family is just starting to push for having the gentleman's name cleared.
I throw that out because Justice Salhany is a very good justice, who has written many books that are used in courts, and maybe in law schools. I'm sure Ed probably took courses from him and used the books on evidence.
But this really is what's at issue here. We have a terrible situation right now, because what you really have is the crown prosecutor and the police giving evidence before a justice in camera, and there's no test of that evidence—no test of that evidence. There's no representation from the accused. It's not good enough to get a summary of what the reasons might be for issuing the certificate. The fact of the matter is there's no testing of evidence that's given to the justice.
I would submit to the committee that what happened with the Arar case, where the RCMP misled the Americans to have a Canadian citizen taken to torture in Syria and, when the RCMP had information that this was wrong, withheld that information.... The goodwill that would be required for this kind of system to work is just not there.
I would even submit to you that what happens when you undercut the judicial system we have, which has a pretty fine balance, is that you tend to corrupt the system itself. We always have to be careful that doesn't happen.
Now, what Justice Salhany suggested needs to be done, and I think the Supreme Court is dealing with this issue right now and that we can expect a judgment sometime this fall—Meili and I were observers for some of the hearings at the Supreme Court—is to provide a lawyer who's going to—