Through you, Madam Chair, merci, Monsieur Fortin.
The issue of whether the trial is remote or in person is equally affected by the fact that judges who have general jurisdiction have to be deployed for criminal cases first. Otherwise cases get stayed if they've taken too long to get to trial. That's what Jordan does. That then has the ripple effects across the system, because a lot of times they can't get to them in time and then they're stayed anyway. Legitimate prosecutions are stayed, and then those judges have been deployed and others have been kept waiting in all the other areas of law within the jurisdiction of those courts—family, civil and child protection.
There's no right to a trial within a reasonable time in those other areas of the law, so the conversation between the branches of government that I propose is thank you for your [Technical difficulty—Editor] court from five years ago but you didn't see this pandemic and the delays associated with it coming. We, the elected Parliament, are saying it's time for a pause, a timeout. We're going to suspend the effect of that decision, and let's work toward new solutions. Allow the judges to do their job with counsels. We have dedicated, hard-working judges who are doing the best they can, but the system is falling apart, and we need to be able to take a pause so that criminal cases are not put in peril by this court-imposed time limit.
I have to say, Monsieur Fortin, the courts are not always right. Our Supreme Court of Canada in 1929 famously said women are not persons for purposes of Senate appointments. The courts are dreadfully wrong sometimes on matters of public policy. They're not coming from Mount Olympus with great wisdom. As Professor Hogg pointed out, they have their own failings. They're not perfect. They don't pretend to be perfect. Many of them don't want awesome powers. The charter provision for the over-ride is there for this conversation that has to happen in times of crisis. It's not the War Measures Act. It's a balanced conversation about how to carefully use scarce judicial resources in our trial courts so that all of our citizens have access to justice.