Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to all of the witnesses. I've appreciated your comments, each one of you, which I thought were very thoughtful.
I hope Superintendent Preston and Mr. Scholten won't mind if I say that I understand that you're here because you're representing others, whereas I will say to Professor Stewart that I doubly appreciate your attendance. I know that you're here because you love just and honest laws and sound principle. I hope that you and I are kindred souls in that respect. I appreciate that, and I wanted you to know it.
Having said that, though, I'd like to engage with you a little bit regarding your comments. In particular, I'd like to focus on proposed paragraph 34(2)(h): “whether the act committed was in response to a use or threat of force that the person knew was lawful”.
Now, we've already discussed the fact that this is subject to an overriding requirement of reasonableness. Quite frankly, I'm not sure that I can even imagine a case in which a judge or jury would conclude that defending against the lawful use of force was reasonable. Assume, for the sake of argument, that some judge or jury had specifically had their attention brought to the fact that a person knew that the use or threat of force he or she was defending against was lawful. If the judge and jury still concluded that it was reasonable for the accused to have offered whatever defence he or she did, I would be okay with that. In other words, the underlying principle on which I would be happy to rest is the notion that a judge or a jury should have some residual discretion to conclude that an individual's conduct was reasonable.
Is there any chance that I might convince you that residual discretion for a judge and jury to conclude that the conduct was reasonable isn't really a dramatically bad thing? Is there any chance I could convince you of that?