I think Bill C-75 is not going far enough in terms of preventing those breaches and the accumulation of offences against the administration of justice. Many changes would need to be made, one of them being the reverse onus on people who have breached a condition. That's putting some pressure on people to be held in custody, so that's highly problematic.
There's another thing that would need to be changed. That's the imposition of unrealistic conditions in cases of people who don't pose a serious threat to the public, to victims, and to witnesses. In our study, for instance, one of the most important predictors of breach was the number of conditions imposed. The more conditions imposed, the more likely you are to breach them, which seems logical, right? We know that on average, seven or eight conditions per bail order are imposed on people. That's a lot of conditions to comply with. Many of them have nothing to do with the offence. Many of them are not criminal offences in themselves, but just become so because they're entrenched in the bail orders.
We really have to release people unconditionally when they're not posing any threat. That's what the Criminal Code has been saying since 1970. The Supreme Court of Canada has been saying it and the Canadian charter has been saying it. It's still not applied by judges and peace officers. I think we have to strengthen the language in Bill C-75 to make sure we get rid of these many offences against the administration of justice.