I'll accept that, but with your permission I'd like to go back to a couple of the points you raised earlier. We have to be careful in the context of this discussion not to conflate hate crimes—major, minor, anti-Semitic or other racist graffiti, and so on—with these particular categories of crimes.
They present challenges. One of the suggestions apropos an earlier exchange that you had is that we waive or consider waiving AG sign-off on charges, and that might change the dynamic with law enforcement at the local level in terms of their discretion. Currently, the concern they express—not infrequently—is that the hoops they have to jump through in order to successfully get a charge laid are not worth the investment of effort on their part.
There may be other remedies for lesser offences than promotion of genocide and terrorism. I take your point about how it could actually exacerbate the challenge, given the provincial role.
For us, though, I'd be reluctant to use the phrase “unintended consequences”. That's more germane to the earlier presentation. I think it just fell through the cracks. I think that it is not frequent. It's not square on the radar in terms of the experience of the judicial system to deal with. In the desire to tailor something to address the challenges of speed and efficiency, this simply was caught up in the net.
By flagging it for you, we're asking that you give consideration to excluding it. It's not going to have a material impact on the intent of the legislation, and there is, as Leo Adler mentioned earlier, some weight to what it could represent in terms of signals to society.