Well, I suppose if the House decides that letting people who have served a full sentence out without any progressive release is called for, that's up to the House. We have known for probably almost a century now that progressive release is the only way that really serves the public. From my perspective, that would be absolutely foolhardy and is guaranteed to cause reoffending to dramatically increase.
Let me go back to what you were asking my friend. I would say that it does happen sometimes that people manipulate the system, fire the lawyer on the day of. Judges see through it. The case law, if you read it, has judges seeing through it and saying, “I'm not giving you two for one because you fired your lawyer on your day of trial”, or “I'm not giving you two for one because you didn't diligently try to advance the case forward.”
However, let's get to the other issue that the Attorney General for Ontario and the minister have identified, which is that this is caused by pretrial delay, ultimately, and this bill does nothing to address that problem. If you eliminate delay in getting to trial, you eliminate this perceived problem that is generating this legislation in the first place. Frankly, in Ontario, according to the Attorney General, delay has almost doubled the average time for cases since 1992. His goal is to reduce it by 30%. In my view, it's hopeless. So far there's been no noticeable reduction in the delay. Until and unless that happens, what you're doing, in effect, is punishing the people who have no control over the length of time it takes them to get to trial.
Judges do have the ability to bring the hammer down on people who manipulate the system. They have it now. You don't need this bill to give them that tool, because the current Criminal Code says it's in their discretion.