Thank you, Mr. Chair, for inviting me here to make submissions to the committee.
At the outset, I should indicate that I endorse fully and echo the submissions of my colleague Bernd Walter.
I'll speak very generally, in a broad fashion, about the three or four main areas of the bill.
With respect to the new enhanced notice provisions to victims, the review boards of Canada really take no position, but would note parenthetically that it seems to be antithetical to some of what's been in the media about victims' desire to be less engaged and not revictimized annually. This set of provisions, to our mind, drags the victims into the system and enmeshes them more fully. In Ontario we have a system where the victims can waive off future notices, and that is indeed where many of them, if not most, go. They do not wish to be further engaged or enmeshed in the system.
With respect to public safety as a paramount concern, as Bernd Walter has indicated, that has been the law for a decade or more. The review boards take no position with that.
With respect to the threshold of “least onerous and least restrictive” being replaced by “necessary and appropriate”, we note that it's a conjunctive test, which most of the academics find puzzling more than anything. When would something be necessary but not appropriate, or the opposite?
The real problem, to our mind, comes with the “high-risk accused” designation. It's with respect to this that there is grave potential for the amendments to actually, contrary to their purported aim, make the public much less safe rather than more safe.
One must remember that individuals who are prospective HRAs are individuals who have elected to avail themselves of the NCR defence. By putting into part XX.1 provisions that might, for a lack of a better way of putting it, appear frightening to the accused—for example, the prospect of being locked up in a hospital, where clinically contraindicated, for up to three years with no opportunity for review—you will inevitably find many accused not availing themselves of the NCR defence. The result of that, of course, is that they will take their chances, take their lumps, in the regular prosecutorial stream. That same individual who might otherwise have gone through part XX.1 in the review board system will one day be dropped out onto the street with no supervision, no gradual reintegration, no treatment.
That, Mr. Chairman, is a much more dangerous situation. The potential here is that the amendments will scare individuals who are presently being very well looked after, and whose reintegration into the community is a very carefully monitored, titrated process, out of that system and into one that would simply have them out onto the street, with no controls in place whatsoever. As Mr. Walter indicated, this is in no way a contest between those who are for public safety as opposed to those who are for accused rights. All professionals engaged in the system recognize that public safety is the paramount concern. That is our collective objective. Our submission is that the amendments proposed in Bill C-54 will, however, take us the wrong way down that road.