A lot of the time, either these individuals are excused before they ever show up to court or they show up to court and provide their explanation and they're excused. That obviously is a huge problem.
Then, of course, for those jurors who do end up sitting, this inadequate income supplement is a big problem. There was some mention of travel. This is another significant factor, particularly in Ontario. For example, I believe in North Bay, that one centre holds jury trials, and this is one of the biggest judicial districts in the province. Now, excuse me if I've confused North Bay and Thunder Bay; I'm not from Ontario.
It's a huge problem. It means that people are often required to travel quite some distance not only to have their trial heard if they're an accused person, but also to serve on a jury. This has been one reason among many why there's been a real issue with indigenous people not ending up on juries. We need to think about the cost of requiring people to travel if they need to travel. What's the cost of meals, for example? If a jury is sequestered, there are potential costs associated there, too, so there's a need to think about this closely.
If you don't mind, I may also just pick up on your point about section 649 of the code, the juror secrecy rule. Just putting on my constitutional lawyer hat for a moment here, or my constitutional law professor hat, there's some question about how much of this the federal government can act on and how much will require some collaboration with the provinces.
Certainly one thing that the feds could do that would help support this initiative would be to propose some amendments to section 649. In my view, this could be done fairly narrowly. It depends on how broad you want to go, of course, but you could just amend the juror secrecy provisions of the code to allow individuals to access a counsellor, and of course we already know that these counselling services are confidential. For many of the concerns that animate the juror secrecy rule, such as the desire for decisions to be final, the desire to preserve the integrity of the deliberation process, and preventing jurors from being subsequently harassed, none of those concerns are really at play if you create a narrow exception that allows people to—