Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and honourable members of the committee. It's an honour to be here.
I am chair of the Canadian Council of Criminal Defence Lawyers, which was formed as a council in 1992. For those of you who don't know, where there is a strong criminal defence organization in a province, we have a representative. Where there is none, like in the north, we have a representative. We voice and assist on legislation from across the country from a defence council's point of view.
Before we started, I said to Ms. MacInnis-Wynn that I, too, thought she was incredibly brave. I acknowledged as best I could the pain she has gone through. I also said and apologized in advance that I would probably be saying things that she, and perhaps Mr. Elliott, would not agree with. But it comes in the spirit of all of us trying to help and make the criminal justice system work better. With the greatest respect, I hope that you accept these comments in the spirit in which they're given.
Something has happened in this country in the last five years that is remarkable. Actually, I'm going to expand it to maybe the last eight or nine years. One of the things that happened was that in Vancouver, about 10 years ago, the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, together with a couple of judges, decided there should be a forum on reinventing criminal justice. Fifty people were invited to a closed-door meeting. At that meeting, we found that all the different stakeholders have more in common than not. That has led to the 10th and its collaborative study of criminal justice.
The federal-provincial-territorial ministers of justice formed the Steering Committee on Justice Efficiencies and Access to the Justice System, a committee of 15 defence counsel, chief justices from the high courts and provinces, representatives from the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, and deputy ministers to meet collaboratively to look at criminal justice issues. One of the common features in both of those studies, those programs, those committees, is the front-end management of the criminal justice system, including the problems with bail and with mental health.
I want to recommend to the committee the report of the National Criminal Justice Symposium on reinventing criminal justice, and the report of the Steering Committee on Justice Efficiencies, which has studied bail, which has studied early case consideration, as you're probably aware. Probably in every province right now, provincial governments are studying criminal justice because of the impetus here from Parliament in Ottawa in looking at restorative justice, looking at the Criminal Code, and looking at bail. Bail is actively being studied in just about every province.
I understand. I commend, for what it's worth, the person who introduced this bill to try to deal with a tragedy, to see whether or not there needed to be a legislative change. But the legislative change that you—and this is your job, not ours—may introduce and pass is legislation that affects the entire country. It is not legislation that responds to a terrible tragedy.
My respectful submission is—and I'll help as best I can—is that we do not have a legislative failure here in this case, but a systemic failure. All of the factors that my friend, Mr. Elliott, referred to, the primary, secondary and tertiary grounds, are considered every day by the courts. The failure to pass information down the line is a mistake. It's a human mistake. I would like to respectfully submit that, as a result of that mistake, attention has been energized.
My friend has referred to Ms. Irving's report. I've just been told that Deputy Armstrong did a report in Alberta. You are considering this. Indeed, criminal justice is a live topic.
I hope that when you consider these provisions, you look at this in the big picture and try to understand the impact in Nunavut, as well as in Toronto, in Prince Albert, as well as in St. John's.
Thank you.