Thank you, Mr. Chair, and I thank the witnesses for their testimony.
I want to pick up a bit on what my colleague Mr. Brown said. I think I've had this discussion in the past with Ms. Thomson on some other committees.
Mr. Barrette, you made the distinction between the CBA and your group. Your group is maybe an action group, or so on. You're promoting a certain view, and that's understandable. But I've struggled with this in the past, and I see the CBA as a professional representative organization of which I'm a member.
I've sat on a number of committees of justice where we've received from the CBA statements that are more value ones. I was on the committee studying the child protection legislation, the committee studying the definition of marriage, and now this committee, and the CBA has taken positions that are very much what I would call in some cases personal opinions, value judgments, or so on. They have made statements like:
Any suggestion that this exemption better enables police officers to investigate criminal offences is an unsatisfactory basis to justify such a radical departure from the rule of law.
We had that statement from the CBA. I'm a member of the CBA and I don't agree with that.
I don't want to get bogged down in this, but I'd like to know what your mission statement is. You're the professional organization I belong to. We have group insurance and that type of thing. We promote the interests of the legal profession by weighing in on decisions that would impact lawyers specifically. But some of these things seem to be more like value judgments. I want to get your opinion on this.