When you go into the emergency room at a hospital, there's a sign on the wall that basically says that it's not first come, first served. There's a prioritization, a triage.
I do a fair amount of appeal work in my own practice. What frustrates the heck out of me is that with the CBSA, partly because they're stretched perhaps, there is no triage. I don't see the kind of triage that I think needs to happen. All cases are treated the same. All you need to do is reorient your priorities in the CBSA hearings department, for instance, and say you're going to identify those more serious offences, maybe the ones that get more than a six-month sentence, and prioritize those for fast-tracking.
You could even take it to another level. If you wanted to treat it like you have treated refugee reforms, you could say that you will fast-track cases that meet certain criteria. The problem with it now is it doesn't draw any distinction between those egregious cases and the ones that aren't egregious.
I've got to say that we do have some concerns. The problem with basing this kind of legislation on egregious cases is that many of them are just not appropriate. The Clinton Gayle situation, for instance, is more of an enforcement problem than an appeal process. It happened under previous legislation. The minister brought up the Just Desserts case, which happened under previous legislation, where four people were charged in the offence and three of them were convicted. The three convicted were Canadian citizens and the one acquitted wasn't a Canadian citizen. It's not really a very good example of the failure of the appeal determination system.
The problem with the Khosa case which the minister referred to, which did take years to wind through the courts, is that it set a precedent for how the courts review administrative decisions in Canada. It is a fundamental case. I teach it in my law school class. It changed all the rules. It was a principle of law case. It wasn't Khosa stringing out endless appeals; in fact, he won the early level. It was the good department challenging the decisions, not the individual. That's not a good example of the failure of our system. Not that there aren't failures. We have failures in the criminal justice system. We have people who get acquitted on technicalities or because of excessive delay. We don't say we're going to cancel criminal trials and take away the right to criminal trial because some bad guys get away with it. We have to have more faith and we have to look at prioritizing.
The other suggestion I had is to look at the possibility of imposing conditions at the officer level. It would be a statutory amendment, but I think it could be done.