Thank you very much, Mr. Moore, and thank you for all you do as one of my two parliamentary secretaries. You and Monsieur Petit have been very helpful with our justice agenda.
I'm pleased, as well, that you have quoted Cecil Clarke, the Attorney General of Nova Scotia. He has been very helpful and very supportive of our crime agenda. Allison Redford from Alberta, as well, has been very supportive. They're doing it for the right reasons. They want the system to work.
People want to have confidence in the criminal justice system. If you analyze and dissect the elements of a successful society, a successful country, people look to see if there are parliamentary institutions that work. Our parliamentary institutions work in this country. But they also want to make sure there is a justice system that works as well. There is no finer justice system than the one we have in Canada, but we must be vigilant all the time to maintain public confidence in that system. And certainly this is a component of that.
I was out in British Columbia about a month ago, and the attorney general was pointing out a case of a guy who didn't want to have a bail hearing because he wanted to be racking up two-for-one credit. I practised some criminal law in the early eighties, and I had never heard of such a thing. You went and saw your client, and the first thing they wanted to do was get back out onto the street after a bail hearing. But the attorney general was telling me that this individual said, “Skip that. I don't want any bail hearing. Just let me sit here.” So presumably, if and when he's sentenced, he gets this credit of at least two for one.
This is not what we need in this country. This doesn't make sense. We want people to get justice in a timely manner. We want this to be done in a fair way, and we don't want to have any incentive for anybody to have delays in the system.
On the main estimates, we talked about some of the challenges in having access to justice and in making sure the court system works. Well, this is an important step in the right direction for making sure there is no incentive for slowing down the criminal justice system. And it gets slowed down under this particular system, so we have to move forward.
Again, I thank you, and I appreciate your support and comments on this.