Well, I'll go further. Adding sections, it's 17 or 19.
So who's getting nervous about all this? Those who talk about judicial activism do so because they don't agree with the judgment. When they agree with the judgment, they don't talk about judicial activism; they just don't mention it.
We're not talking about many laws that have been struck down, because the very introduction of the charter triggered, throughout the country in the various departments of justice, the creation of committees that would vet any bill before it went to the House—their respective houses—to see whether it was charter-suspect. It was mainly in the field of administrative law, which is full of reverse onus clauses, with a punishment at the end for having violated the law—some of them indictable offences, one of them punishable up to five years—with reverse onus clauses.
So what they did, after a couple of judgments from the Supreme Court—I think it was Chief Justice Brian Dickson who wrote the unanimous judgment—after that judgment, they scrambled and cleaned up a strew of laws doing away with reverse onus clauses where they weren't warranted.
Reverse onus clauses sometimes are okay. I mean to say, the person, the citizen, is the only one who can come up with the explanation and it can be found out.
So I never did get excited about people talking about judicial activism. There were some glaring things that had to be corrected and were corrected. Certain forms of constructive murder were murder to me and to my colleagues—because, let's not forget, you have to get a majority, at least, for it to be a judgment; otherwise, you don't talk about it. Constructive murder was rearranged, because murder is a crime of intent.
I think that's one of the most criticized judgments of those days. There are some that have been criticized lately, the kirpan thing and the gay rights, but there again, these are issues where you can't win. I mean to say that society is split down the middle, practically, and you're bound to have half of society saying they're activists and the other half saying they didn't go far enough. So I don't get excited about people who talk about judicial activism.
What effect, you asked me, has this had on the government's wanting to get tough on crime? What I know about what's being said is that it gets tough on crime. Well, the Criminal Code is there. It can be very vicious. I don't think the fact that the courts have applied the charter and that a few laws were struck down and re-enacted—and some of them were not re-enacted....
Let's not forget one thing, and this is apolitical as a comment. Successive governments have been shovelling to the Supreme Court and have recently shovelled—I've been gone for seven years—their hot potatoes. They want to get the brownie points, if there are brownie points to get, but they don't want to get the blame. The day after a judgment is handed down by the Supreme Court, there is a Gallup poll taken to see if the judgment is popular or not. And the comments of the members in the House will take into account the result of the poll. They'll be for the judgment, or they'll be against it. I call that parliamentary activism.