Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to all of the guests for being here today.
To give you some context, I come at this not from a legal point of view but from that of a business consultant, an NGO director. It's not from the deep steeping in the law that all of you have, with over 100 years of representation at the bar and what have you.
I want to share some stats with you. I come from a province that is part of the country and has 55% of the indigenous population of Canada. Twenty-five per cent of the youth in my city are indigenous, and we will have the absolute largest concentration of indigenous peoples anywhere in the country by 2025. Indigenous peoples are overrepresented in the criminal justice system, yet under-represented on juries. We're 27 years from the Sherratt decision, which made it clear that peremptory challenges can help make it more representative but can also harm representation.
I take you at your word, Mr. Fowler, that you're one of the good ones and that you don't use peremptory challenges to exclude people, but we have lots of anecdotal evidence that it occurs.
I want to start with Ms. Sullivan. How do we get to this goal of more representative juries if we keep peremptory challenges and practitioners are able to abuse them? I'd like comments from all of you on what Nova Scotia does. Instead of using property ownership as a means to select juries, it uses the health care system. If you take a look at how we're selecting our juries, it's like where we were before women's suffrage for voting.