Thanks, Mr. Rankin. That's a good question.
I would say that the vast majority of our jury trials actually take place in the communities, not in Iqaluit.
I was just canvassing the office before I came in, and we can't remember the last time we had a full jury trial in Iqaluit, but looking at the schedule, we had two back-to-back in a month scheduled for Rankin Inlet.
I think Nunavut is very much an outlier when we're talking about juries, especially when I hear the evidence put forward by my fellow witnesses. In Victoria, Australia, there is a pool of 170,000 people. We have 810 eligible individuals in Pond Inlet to serve on a jury. If we do back-to-back juries in the community and we pool 250 people each time, we expel the entire adult population very quickly.
We're a travelling circuit court. I've put a lot of this in my written brief, so excuse me for any repetition. We have one permanent courthouse in Nunavut, and that's where I'm sitting right now. We travel to the other 24 communities weekly. We do 100-odd circuits per year.
When we go into the community to do a jury trial, we don't have a courthouse. We set up in a school gymnasium, a community hall, or a hamlet office. We put a jury to deliberate in what is not the most ideal of situations, and then, when the verdict is over, the court party gets on an airplane and comes back to Iqaluit.
I found Ms. Donaldson's testimony extremely interesting and fascinating, and it's something I have to follow up on, but to hear that only 10% of jurors experience this extreme stress is something that just doesn't really apply in the Nunavut context.
You'll find a quote in the paper I submitted indicating that in these communities there are sometimes only hundreds of people. There are not thousands or tens of thousands. It's inevitable that those 12 people sitting on the jury know the accused and know the complainant. They may be a second cousin to those people, so to think that they're not stressed or burdened by this on a very high level is a misnomer. Nunavut is an outlier here, much like in a lot of contexts for Nunavut.
I hope I've addressed your question, Mr. Rankin.