I think the reasons are a good start. It may be an inadequate start, but we're talking about the legislation that's before us now rather than talking about education, large education processes or starting anew. My preferred solution to this would actually be to start over with bail. We've been modifying the bail system since a couple of years after the amendments came in in 1971. One of the advantages of being old is that I can remember that. We started changing that, and I was impressed with the success that we had with the Youth Criminal Justice Act.
The Young Offenders Act before that act had been changed a number of times, most notably in the mid-1990s, to say all the sorts of things that everybody seemed to agree upon. The Conservative, NDP and Liberal members all together seemed to agree on the general principles of what it should be doing. That was changed a number of times before that, most recently in the mid-1990s, and things didn't change very much. I remember when the government announced that it was going to bring in the Youth Criminal Justice Act. My first feeling—and, again, here I was wrong—was that it was not really necessary because what the government wanted to accomplish could be accomplished under the Young Offenders Act. The government of the day went forward with a new act and everybody realized that this was a new game and it was a new set of rules. There was the education that went along with it.
Going back to really answering your question, I think that if we really want to change what is occurring with bail, we would start from scratch. Not today, because we're not going to do it today, but we'd start with a process—and it wouldn't have to be a big royal commission-type process—through which we'd say, “What do we do with these sections of the Criminal Code and how do we accomplish what we want to accomplish?”, which would be to detain people who are risky people and to release the rest of them. Let's start from there with the general principles, and let's think about how to do it and come up with something new, and then do a good job of making sure that those in the criminal justice system know about it.