I'm going to pick up on the diversity point that Breese raised.
Another way of thinking about the broader context of the discussion we're having today is to think about the whole range of supports that are or are not available to jurors when they end up performing this important democratic function. In addition to pointing out that at least until recently in most provinces there's been a real lack of mental health supports, in a lot of provinces there's also a significant ongoing problem with just the very basic supports that we provide to jurors. What I'm talking about here are, for example, the daily stipends that are provided to jurors who are required to turn up and perform their civic duty. For trials that last between one and 10 days, jurors are not paid anything to be there. Their employers must by law give them time off work but there's no obligation to continue paying employees. That already influences fairly significantly who is able to make themselves available. Once trials extend beyond 10 days, there are modest stipends available, and the amount goes up for very long trials, but the bottom line is that the lack of a meaningful income supplement for jurors who are called to serve in this way is a real disincentive. More than that, it essentially renders jury service for entire groups of people impossible. We talk about the jury as being this great democratic institution, but many people justifiably ask to be excused because they just can't afford to do it. In addition to there not being meaningful income supplements, in most provinces there's also no support provided to offset the costs of child care or elder care. We start out thinking about the pool of jurors as being the peers of the accused, but at the end of the day, we have a group that's really much smaller.
To the extent that this committee is considering the mental health supports that we provide to jurors, the CLA would also recommend that you think a bit more broadly about the way we support jurors in performing this function. This not only is important because we want juries to be diverse and to represent the diversity of our society—we want all individuals to be able to serve—but this also has a very real impact on the accused, who has a constitutional right to a representative jury. There was a major report released in 2013 in Ontario by former Justice Frank Iacobucci, which identified some significant concerns from the standpoint of representativeness on Ontario juries, and he identified the issue of these income supplements, the lack of child care, and the lack of elder care supports as being significant factors in some of the representativeness problems that plagued the province. There, the concern was in particular with the under-representation of indigenous people.
There's lots of authority that establishes that this is a problem, and so to the extent that, as I said, this committee is thinking about how we support jurors and the relationship between that support and the fair-trial rights of an accused person, in our view it's really important to take that holistic approach.
Thank you.