Thank you once again for inviting the Criminal Lawyers' Association to present before you. I want to start off by saying that our basic position is that we're delighted to see that the federal government is interested in this issue, and we broadly support efforts to provide counselling and mental health services to jurors after difficult cases.
I'm the vice-president of the Criminal Lawyers' Association in Ontario, but I'm also a practising defence lawyer. I've been involved in a number of cases that had the sort of evidence you've heard about in terms of causing difficulties for jurors, and I was involved in one case where, on an ad hoc basis, supports were provided to jurors because of the nature of the evidence.
Our submissions today are going to focus on two issues. Vanessa and I are going to split them. Vanessa is going to deal with the importance of providing mental health supports as a means of ensuring representativeness of jurors, which is an important issue.
I'm going to talk about the opportunity you might have to think about this in maybe a slightly broader perspective than what you have right now and suggest to you that you might want to think about extending supports to all participants in the justice system to the extent that they don't have access to them already. Our position is that this will promote access to justice, it will ensure retention of lawyers in the profession, particularly women and racialized lawyers, and it will ensure that we start reducing the stigma in the legal profession around mental health issues.
You've heard a lot of evidence about vicarious trauma and how exposure to evidence can cause vicarious trauma. If you accept, which I hope you do, that the research is clear that exposure from a single case to difficult evidence can cause jurors to have significant psychiatric difficulties, you must also accept that prolonged exposure over time for lawyers on a repeated basis can also cause that exact sort of trauma. The impacts on people's lives are serious, so for that reason we support providing these supports for jurors, but we also suggest that you might look at it a bit more broadly.
On the specific issue of jurors, I think one of the things you're going to have to look at is section 649 of the Criminal Code, which is a jury secrecy issue. You've already heard from Saskatchewan that there is a prohibition about speaking about deliberations; I'm sure you'll take a look at it. It only provides for discussion of deliberations in respect of investigations of jury tampering. It strikes me that it may well limit the ability of jurors to actually seek and obtain the sort of support they need, to the extent that their psychiatric issues arise from or are exacerbated by the deliberation process. That's one issue.
Why are we suggesting that you should look at this more broadly? It won't surprise you that I'm going to suggest that really what you need to do is extend this to lawyers, and in particular defence lawyers. I'll explain why in a minute.
You'll know—or some of you might know—that in criminal cases crown and defence counsel often work very hard to limit the sort of evidence that gets put before a jury. Crowns and defence actually get exposed to much more and often much more graphic information than judges or jurors, because we take time to minimize the prejudice and minimize the impact. The reality is that lawyers are exposed to a lot more of this sort of information.
It's also the reality that most of the participants in the criminal justice system, if we think about judges, crown attorneys, and court officers, are usually people who are employed either by the government or other institutions, by and large, and have access to benefits. Defence counsel, in contrast, are usually sole practitioners and self-employed, who wouldn't otherwise have access to the sorts of supports you're talking about. If they need the supports, they're going to have to pay for them out of pocket.
That research has been done. A University of Toronto researcher named Ronit Dinovitzer has done research that shows one in four lawyers suffers from mental health issues. Lawyers who are self-employed or in private practice are more likely to suffer from mental health issues than government or public sector lawyers. If you take that together, it strikes me that it's clear that defence lawyers are at particular risk of experiencing mental health issues and, as well, not having the supports to deal with them.
We're also interested in ensuring that people stay in the profession. We've done studies—I know that some of you know about this—about the retention of women in the practice. We know that women are five times more likely to leave defence practice to go to the crown's office, largely because of the benefits that are available there. If we're interested in retaining diversity in the profession, that's one of the issues you may want to look at.
We are delighted that you're studying this issue and we think it's important, but if you want a healthy, properly functioning justice system, we think you should also think about extending whatever benefits you might extend to jurors to those other members of the justice system who don't otherwise have access to them.
In some provinces there are very narrow member-assistance programs available through the law societies, but we would encourage you to expand it and open the safety net that you're providing, to everybody involved.
I'm going to turn it over to Vanessa to deal with the other issue.