In fact, in my opening statement I proposed a number of suggested reforms to the Criminal Code to try to make them work.
Statistics Canada just came out with a report—it was from 2010, but they just came out with it—about hate crimes. Over the period they were looking at, they identified 1,400 hate crimes that police found were substantiated by the evidence in front of them, and they identified during that period 14 convictions.
Now, there's a mismatch between the two tables, because for the reporting, they looked at hate-motivated crimes as well as hate crimes, but for the convictions, they looked only at hate crimes. Even so, there was a very low conviction rate, and there was quite a high incidence of criminality. Part of the problem, which is one of the reforms we've suggested, is that we put hate motivation into the offence rather than into just part of the sentencing.
Right now we need the consent of the attorney general. I appreciate your suggestion to introduce it. But the consent of the attorney general itself, although I think it's valuable, does present a problem. We get cases where the police, even publicly, have said that there's an offence, but the attorney general has refused to consent, because there are free speech absolutists. We get letters to that effect.
Even though the federal Attorney General only consents for the Northwest Territories and Yukon and Nunavut, I think if we had guidelines from the federal Attorney General about the use of the consent, or maybe in concert with the provincial attorneys general, that might help to get these consents working.
As I said in my opening statement, we can't just abolish the civil jurisdiction and say that it's criminal and leave it as it is, because the criminal law is almost entirely a dead letter right now.