Thank you, Mr. Chair.
In light of the fact that we're going to be putting forward a number of these, I'd like to address the issue broadly speaking, which Mr. Fraser did in his remarks.
I would say first of all that part of the problem with this bill in terms of hybridization is the fact that the government simply took a whole series of offences without consideration to any one of those offences and said, “We're hybridizing them.” Basically, with a few exceptions, if the maximum sentence is 10 years, they're going to be hybridized. That is not a well-thought-out process.
With respect to the issue of flexibility—Crown flexibility—no witness that I heard could explain how this would address the issue of Jordan in addressing the backlog. We heard evidence that 99.6% of criminal cases are already before provincial courts. As Mr. Rankin mentioned, the effect of hybridization, as witness after witness conceded, would be of course to download more cases onto provincial courts. For the most part, that's where summary conviction offences are dealt with.
Of course, from the standpoint of the timeline in Jordan, instead of 30 months you're now dealing with 18 months for matters within provincial courts. We also heard evidence that in fact not only are you downloading cases onto provincial courts, but in terms of the prospect of cases being thrown out due to delay based upon the timeline set in Jordan, whereby delay is deemed presumptively unreasonable, the risk would increase, not decrease.
Finally, Mr. Chair, with respect to Mr. Fraser's point about sentencing principles, obviously this bill is not changing the law around sentencing principles. It is changing the sentence, the maximum sentence that a judge could provide for, in a very dramatic way—from 10 years to a maximum of two years less a day, without any transparency and without any accountability in terms of understanding why one case might be brought down to a summary offence and another an indictable offence. That was another substantive issue that was raised about the issue of transparency and the lack of it as a result of these changes.