It is very much an anecdotal exercise when you ask us to reflect on what happens. As it stands now, this is what you know about potential jurors absent a challenge for cause: you know their name, in most cases; you know the city where they reside and perhaps their municipal address; and in some cases you know their occupation. That is it. You know nothing else about the person.
The way it is now, by its very nature the peremptory challenge forces you to rely on stereotypes about people, whether they are socio-economic stereotypes or gender stereotypes, based on a particular case. In this regard, we agree with Professor Roach that there is a way in which you can have limited questioning of the jurors in a challenge process that allows you to find out a little more about this person who is going to be sworn in as a judge to decide whether or not someone has committed a criminal offence.
In the United States, as Professor Roach and other academics have pointed out, the system has gone a bit awry. It has led to lengthy proceedings and jury-vetting procedures, but it need not do that. One of my colleagues, who does a lot of work with respect to aboriginal communities, was telling me about an inquest he was recently involved in, in the province of Saskatchewan. The coroner was able to allow limited questioning of the jurors and was allowed to draw a jury—a differently constituted jury, obviously, for that purpose—that included representative people from the indigenous community and also from the rest of the community. He was reflecting on the experience and, knowing that I was coming here today, he said that when you allow a little bit of inquiry and you control it through judicial management—in that case, the coroner was managing it—you get a much better appreciation for the particular biases, whether they're known biases or implicit biases, that might be affecting not the willingness of the person to decide the case fairly, but their ability to do so.
We do support an evidence-based approach in that regard.