Yes, in addition to the revamping of the judicial appointments process, I and my officials have been speaking with many different jurisdictions around the need to have additional judicial spaces, and as you articulated, I was very pleased to see in the budget that we received the dollars for 28 new judicial spaces.
Twelve of the 28 have been allocated to Alberta, one to the Yukon, and my officials and I are continuing to work with other jurisdictions to understand their business case and need for additional judicial spaces. We will be continuing to do this work to allocate the remaining spots.
Broadly speaking, in terms of your question with respect to the Jordan decision from the Supreme Court of Canada, this is definitely a concern of mine and my counterpart ministers of justice and attorneys general across the country. We had the opportunity as recently as two weeks ago, I believe, to meet collectively and talk specifically about delays, and how we can assist each other in our shared responsibility for the administration of justice.
Without question, my counterparts talk to me about the need to have judicial appointments in their jurisdictions, but they also recognize that there's no one solution to delays in the criminal justice system, and we collectively identified a number of priorities we would address that seek to assist in reducing delays, priorities around minimal penalties, bail, the administration of justice, looking at the reclassification of offences, and preliminary inquiries.
I was very pleased with the collaborative approach that we were able to achieve at that meeting, and I look forward to the work we're going to be bringing forward in the near future and into the fall.
