Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and I want to thank all the members of the committee for allowing me this opportunity to speak.
I represent the Association of Justice Counsel. The AJC is made up of two families, as some of you may know. There are the Department of Justice lawyers, who essentially make up the civil litigators of the federal department, and then you have the Public Prosecution Service lawyers, who make up the federal crowns, and it is really their role that is the context in which I make the following remarks with respect to guns and gangs.
The real victims of guns and gangs are people. I think that goes without saying. They're the real victims of the terror that is within the framework of the gangs and the way in which they work, and it is the drugs that fuel the work of these gangs. Federal prosecutors serve as the last line of defence against the social chaos that is created by these gangs and the havoc they would otherwise seek to mete out in society. For these reasons, our work matters.
So what is the work we do? Well, we prosecute an array of offences under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. We also prosecute an array of offences under the Criminal Code. We carry out organized crime prosecutions, and often enough, both Criminal Code charges and CDSA charges, or controlled drugs and substances charges, are married up under rather significant, rather complex trials and proceedings. So that is essentially what our role is.
Now we're confronted with a number of challenges as a result of the complexity of the litigation, which has evolved over time, and some of you have become aware of that in reading about these cases in the papers. So what are the major issues federal prosecutors are confronted with as the level of litigation becomes more complex? Well, we have issues that deal with drawing the right line on what is the reasonable expectation of privacy. We have issues that deal with wiretap laws and the extent to which wiretaps may be authorized in the absence of judicial authorization when carried out in exigent circumstances. And perhaps more than anything else, we also are confronted with incredible disclosure issues.
I would imagine that many of you are aware of the watershed decision of Stinchcombe, and as a result of Stinchcombe, disclosure has become what is, in essence, the biggest impediment to carrying out an efficient and speedy trial. So as the offences become more complex and the evidentiary rules that are incorporated into those proceedings become more complex, our abilities to carry out our disclosure obligations are proportionately challenging, or the challenge to mete out those obligations is becoming proportionately challenging.
That is the essence of the work we do, but it's not just about prosecuting these cases. There's also a victim side to this, and often enough when thinking about drug crimes, which again are the fuel for many of these guns and gangs, there's an assumption made that they're victimless crimes. But that's not true at all. The people who are the victims of these crimes are the ones who have themselves lost their lives to drugs, and once the prosecution is carried out, it's up to the federal prosecutor to reach into the toolkit of our sentencing provisions to arrive at what is a fair sentence. So when we're actually trying to determine what is a fair and fit sentence in the circumstances, we have to balance the various objectives. And in cases involving guns and gangs, intuitively, the federal prosecutor will look at denunciation, will look at separating the offender from society, but at the same time, we also want to bear in mind the need to rehabilitate.
So these are the challenges we have moving forward.
There have been proposals that have been advanced, including mandatory minimums. There are various disparate social science data about whether or not mandatory minimums will be effective in the long run. I think at this stage it would be premature to rule that out of the sentencing toolkit.
That's the essence of the challenges we face as federal prosecutors. What I would simply say in closing is that it is important to remember that federal prosecutors also play a critical role in the overall scheme of combatting guns and gangs and drugs.
We thank you very much for your time this afternoon.