I think this ties into a point that Mr. Caputo was making about part of the disagreement at the Supreme Court, which I think was largely about who should be clarifying the law, not necessarily that corporal discipline should not be permitted at all. I'll run through that really quickly.
We have six of nine judges agreeing that this is constitutional. Justice Binnie agrees in the result that it is constitutional for parents, so now we're at seven out of nine. Justice Arbour said there wasn't much to go on and that on its face, it's too vague and would permit the severe discipline of children and severe use of force. She said it should be Parliament that clarifies that. It was her position that we shouldn't be going through this and noting all the things it does not allow because that should be for Parliament. She said to send it to Parliament and let them fix it.
There was much more about the relationship between courts and Parliament behind Justice Arbour's dissent, and it was likewise with Justice Deschamps. As Mr. Garrison rightly pointed out, Justice Deschamps said that the Supreme Court was asked to rule on the constitutionality of this provision, not to reinterpret or basically amend the provision to make it constitutional. However, that's what the court did, and we can discuss whether that should have been Parliament. I think it's helpful, in certain ways, to have that embedded in the statute for clarity, but that's really what the Supreme Court did, and Justice Deschamps recognized that.
For two of the nine judges, I think what was behind much of their dissent was not that there should not be any form of corporal discipline at all permitted. It was about whose job it is to remedy provisions that on their face are not precise enough.