To be brief, I think you are all aware of the Charkaoui decision by the Supreme Court. Clearly that decision said that detention has to be reviewed on a regular basis. In Charkaoui's case, they said that keeping someone in detention after 120 days without a review of detention was a violation of both the Canadian charter and international human rights standards.
Basically, I think the provision in the bill that makes it possible to keep someone in detention without reviewing the grounds for detention for one year will be legally challenged. If we draw from the Charkaoui decision, a case with a very particular context dealing with security certificates, we know that this particular provision in the bill will be challenged because it is both unconstitutional in relation to our Canadian charter and a violation of several human rights standards.
Just to mention two of them, one is the principle of proportionality in international law. International law does not say that detention for immigration purposes is forbidden. It just says that it has to be proportional to the objectives sought. In this particular case, it is difficult to see how we can justify one year of detention of asylum seekers without review of the grounds of detention, if the objective of detention is just for irregular arrivals. Also, there is inhuman and degrading treatment, which is a norm in international law that certainly has been translated into our Canadian charter too, under, among others, sections 7 and 9 of the Canadian charter.