Thank you, Mr. Chair.
And thank you, witnesses. There were some very interesting comments made about drug treatment courts, Mr. Doucette. And I know, Mr. Yost, that we're probably going to get into splitting hairs on the implications of this law. I'll leave that to my friends here.
I want to spend my time with CBA. I've been a member of CBA since 1984. I'm not beating up on you. I know that we have Law Day.
To me it's an issue of public education and awareness, because it seems to me, after coming back from out west--we had hearings out west--that a lot of this seems to have sprung from a lack of understanding of how the legal system works. That may be partially our fault as lawyers and our not explaining to the public that lawyers speak for their interests and don't always represent the whole of the community of lawyers.
Frankly, this attack on judicial discretion may be a symptom of a lack of respect for the judiciary. We certainly saw out west, in some quarters, a lack of respect for the system. You hear terms thrown around like “some defence lawyer”. We don't at these committees say things like “some cop” or “some judge”--we do sometimes, but....
People who aren't lawyers might say that the CBA section consists of defence lawyers, prosecutors, and legal academics. I've been saying for some time that we don't hear a lot of prosecutors. We know it's the Canadian Defence Lawyers association. They're the defence guys. But we have hardly ever called, in three and a half years, the prosecutors association, if they have one. They're supposed to be represented out of your tent.
Ms. Inness, you're a defence lawyer. You very capably presented the position of the defence bar.
Ms. Schellenberg, the CBA is a large tent. In an adversarial system, you can't represent all points of view, but consistently the CBA, when doing briefs, tends--in my opinion--to sort of represent the defence bar of the section. If that were made clear, maybe everyone would understand that this is really the position of the CBA defence lawyer subsection.
Maybe I could have your comments on that.