Justice Committee on April 15th, 2010

[Denis Meunier]

It would go to the RCMP in those cases where, let's say, the RCMP has provided us with voluntary information about a particular investigation. We would provide that to the RCMP, and if we felt it was important for the Toronto Police Service to get it, we would ask the RCMP for permission to share it and we would go back to the RCMP and ask them for that, or the Sûreté du Québec or whoever.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

In terms of the information that is being transferred, the files that are being transferred to the police forces or CSIS, the intelligence services, is there a breakdown as to what percentage is going to the intelligence side, if I can put it that way, the public security side, and what is going to traditional criminal activity? Do you break that down, either in absolute numbers of dollars or in percentages?

[Denis Meunier]

We have a breakdown actually that doesn't identify CSIS, or whatever, publicly. We've published the percentage that would go to.... Yes, I have it here. I can tell you that last year--

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

This is 2008 or 2009?

[Denis Meunier]

This is 2008 and 2009--our fiscal year. These are packages, disclosures packages. So the totals do not add up to 100%, but 68% went to the RCMP, 27% to the Canada Revenue Agency, 27% to municipal police forces, 17% to foreign financial intelligence units, 14% to the Canada Border Services Agency, 10% to CSIS, 10% to provincial police services, and 1% to the Communications Security Establishment of Canada.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

So there's a substantial overlay where more than one agency is getting it.

The Auditor General did the report, I think it was in 2005, critical of not your offices, but of both the RCMP and CSIS, for not pursuing the information you gave them. I saw subsequent reports where it seemed that they had picked it up.

In your opening remarks, Madame Goulet, you put out that the test here is how many prosecutions, how many investigations. In terms of the transfer of information, can you tell us how much is in fact followed up with either investigations or prosecutions?

[Hélène Goulet]

I think I'd have to ask the RCMP for that information. What we do know is that we receive more requests for information from them and we have disclosed more and more to them. We have become more timely. We do our work faster, and with the last piece of legislation that came in, Bill C-25, we can give them a lot more information. So our information is seen as much more valuable than it was in the past. So we know that they follow up on more, and the fact that they ask for something means they're already investigating. When they ask us for information, it means they're already looking at something, so we have to assume that they look at most of what we give them.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

In that same report she made the specific comment--again, being critical of the intelligence services and police--that they weren't coming back to you. So can I conclude from what you just said that you are having that exchange now, which you weren't having at that time?

[Hélène Goulet]

Yes. We have been very deliberately talking to the RCMP and CSIS more and more to see what their priorities are in terms of what they're looking at so we can be more and more helpful to them. So we have those conversations with them on a regular basis, while respecting, of course, our different mandates.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

How much time do I have, Mr. Chair?

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

You have 15 seconds.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

As a quick question, then, on the tactical versus strategic, who are these people? What are their backgrounds?

[Denis Meunier]

With respect to tactical, we have a lot of people who have come from the private sector, from banking institutions. We have people with post-graduate degrees in economics, business analysts, people in government, people who are experienced investigators--

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

No lawyers?

[Denis Meunier]

Yes, we do. Actually, most of my managers are lawyers.

And with respect to tactical, we have PhDs in mathematics and economics. On the strategic side....

[Hélène Goulet]

On the strategic side we have engineers, statisticians, people who are experts with quantitative data, and others who are experts in analyzing that and making sense out of it—very highly qualified people.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

Thank you.

We'll move on to Mr. Woodworth, for seven minutes.

[Stephen Woodworth, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Thank you very much.

Thank you to the witnesses for being with us today. I want to begin by apologizing for arriving a few minutes late. I like to give people the opportunity, at least once in their lives, to hear a politician apologize when it's appropriate.

I have appreciated your comments.

I'd like to direct some questions particularly to our guests from the Public Prosecution Service. One of the recommendations I have heard and am considering has to do with case management, particularly in organized crime, with the lengthy trials. This of course relates to disclosure issues as well as other things. The recommendation or proposal would be to amend section 645 to allow judges who are not going to actually hear the trial to make pre-trial rulings.

I can think of some benefits and some disadvantages to that, but I would be grateful to hear from the point of view of our prosecution service—if you can tell me succinctly—what would be the benefits and the disadvantages of that, and on balance, whether you think that would be a good or a bad thing from the prosecution's point of view.

[Yvan Poulin]

I believe personally that it would be a good idea to do that. For instance, if we take the case of Colisée, a wiretap case, we divided the case into separate court files to make it easier to manage before the courts. We didn't want to have the trial of 101 accused before the courts at the same time. So different judges made rulings in Colisée, and theoretically it could be a situation where a judge would decide that the wiretap evidence wouldn't be admissible in one trial and a different judge could arrive at a different conclusion. So for the prosecution, it would be easier to get one judge to decide all the pre-trial motions, one being the admissibility of the wiretap evidence and admissibility of other kinds of evidence, and then we could move on with the real issue of the guilt or not of the accused.

[Stephen Woodworth, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Monsieur Lacasse, do you have anything to add to that, as to advantages or disadvantages of the suggestion that I have proposed?

[François Lacasse]

Of course I concur with my colleague, who has had recent direct experience in managing probably the biggest case so far in Canada on organized crime.

That said, another advantage that I can see is of course saving of time. You deal with one issue once for the purpose of all the related cases that will be handled by the court system.

One disadvantage that I have heard would be to say that then it's not the same judge who is aware of the evidence in relation to the pre-trial issues and the trial issues per se. My answer to that is they're different issues and there is no necessity to hear evidence in relation to what I call the trial of the investigation, which those pre-motions are all about, and the trial proper, which is about innocence or guilt. That's why I would say it would be advantageous.

[Stephen Woodworth, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

The other question I would really like to come to grips with is the question on disclosure of the threshold of relevance. We have heard, of course, that following Stinchcombe, the threshold is that the crown must produce anything that is “not clearly irrelevant”. I've heard other phrases regarding evidence that is potentially relevant. I wonder if you two fine legal minds would care to suggest what you think might be a threshold that would be both fair to the accused and more manageable for the prosecution than is the existing Stinchcombe threshold of “not clearly irrelevant”.

[François Lacasse]

One comment I will make in that regard is that disclosure obligations apply not only to mega-cases but to the vast majority of cases for which disclosure will often be covered by a 10-page document. That would account for at least 80% if not 90% of the cases throughout Canada. So I wouldn't see that there is a huge problem, and I've prosecuted in the Yukon, and I've prosecuted organized crime in Montreal as well.

The difficulty in trying to restrict the scope or the parameters governing disclosure is deciding exactly where you put the line and how you define it.

[Stephen Woodworth, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

That's what I'm asking you.

[François Lacasse]

From my own practical experience, at least now we know that when we're in doubt, we simply disclose. From an analytical perspective, I would submit, that's the easiest threshold to find. It's when you have to apply it and what it brings as far as managing the costs and resources that go into major prosecutions.... I am not convinced I would be able to provide you with a threshold that would allow one to do that, that would deal strictly with those cases that we could qualify as mega-cases. And what is a mega-case? What were mega-cases ten years ago are now probably run-of-the-mill cases. In my mind—and I'll let Mr. Poulin talk about it—it's more an issue of management than of defining the proper threshold to apply.