I find it very, very interesting that some people are against lists unless the lists meet a certain purpose. I guess I'm a bit confused, because I related, I suppose, a little more closely to Mr. Latulippe and Mr. Mainville, who have a job to do. I guess they might say they don't have time for the esoteric arguments and the debating society over the legal issues: there are bad guys out there and the bad guys need to be caught. There's something standing in the way of that and they see the development of a list as a way to get past one of the hurdles.
When you become a police officer, you're told that the common law is pretty easy to understand. It is that the average person on the street, given a certain set of circumstances, believes that something is right or something is wrong, and that becomes part of your law. But I guess we've developed a society in which the law gets very confusing, and the crowd at Tim Hortons doesn't understand it anymore. That's the crowd that goes to people like Mr. Latulippe and Mr. Mainville and asks why the heck they're not doing something about it. So then they point to people like Mr. Bartlett and say, “Draft something up for us”.
It goes back to what I call the duck and the platypus. They have beaks and webbed feet. I don't know what a platypus says, but you'd think it's a duck. A lawyer will then come up and say that the feathers are really not feathers but hair, and therefore it's not a duck, but a platypus. I guess that's the argument here. It sounds kind of strange to say that. As someone who now is at the stage of attempting to draft legislation that meets the problem, I become confused when I listen to people who are usually anti- the debate and anti- what you want to propose.
I guess in its simplest terms, Mr. Bartlett, if you were talking to somebody and ordering your double-double at Tim Hortons, how would you explain to them the difference between a terrorist list and an organized crime list and how the courts see that?
That's if there's any time left. Sorry about that.