I think there's vulnerability here. To be honest, I didn't have enough notice of this appearance to do a more fulsome analysis. I think that in any instance when you're dealing with depriving someone of liberty, which of course is ultimately what all sentencing is about, you have questions about that, and taking away, or at least delaying due process around eligibility for parole would certainly trigger the section 7 liberty interests under the charter. The question then would be whether it does so in a way that's conducive to the principles of fundamental justice, and whether it is justified, and I think that's where you would get into these arguments. To be honest, the fact that there really isn't any evidence here to say that this would achieve a benefit, in terms of making society safer, that couldn't be achieved in another way—say, through dangerous offender designations and so forth—I think leaves some potentially significant liabilities in terms of justification. In fact, in some ways the government is already doing the thing that minimally impairs people's rights through the dangerous offender provisions, as compared to through a provision like this.
I say all of this without having conducted a fulsome analysis.
