I do. I don't deal with jury trials in my practice, but I did pay a lot of attention to the controversial trials last spring. I've also paid some attention to the peremptory challenge process in the United States and what takes place there in relation to peremptory challenges. I think we would be doing a very big disservice in our justice system to eliminate peremptory challenges and to simply pick the juries from who shows up, remembering that when you're in small communities or communities with large indigenous populations in particular, the likelihood of people responding to their jury summons, the likelihood of people showing up for that, and then getting seated on the jury is very different than it would be if you were in a major urban centre where the notices are going out to a more diverse group of people.
There are different challenges that keep indigenous people from responding to those summonses and showing up to sit on juries. Eliminating the ability of defence counsel or Crown counsel, as appropriate, to ensure that juries are more representative, through careful use of peremptory challenges, is hugely problematic for creating diverse juries because of those additional societal roadblocks that keep people from showing up. We could look to some examples in the United States where judges have the power to question counsel about their use of peremptory challenges if it appears that they are trying to racially stack a jury, or trying to stack a jury in some economic way, or whatever the case may be. It may be more appropriate to give more power to judges to look at the motives behind peremptory challenges if it appears that something is being done in bad faith rather than eliminating that ability all together.