Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I do want to start off by saying that I think some of us around the table have sort of forgotten the situation we were in when asking about why people weren't consulted.
The Supreme Court made a decision, which created a gap in the criminal law. It also created a lot of confusion in the public. I think that a consensus among all of the parties—among ourselves—was that we needed to act quickly. These sessions we're holding now were planned at the time because we knew that the consultations couldn't really take place fully unless we were going to leave that gap for months after the Supreme Court decision. It's kind of been forgotten here that we really are endeavouring to do those consultations at this point because of the time frame we were forced into.
I want to thank the representative from MADD for being here. He's in a peculiar position of providing a kind of negative evidence, but I think it's important that MADD was here today to say that. I think we still have some of that confusion out in the public that this decision has somehow affected impaired driving.
I know it's an awkward position for you to be in here today, saying it doesn't affect what we're concerned about, but I think an important message for us to get out to the public is that it doesn't change anything about impaired driving.
With that very long preamble, I would like to ask the Native Women's Association of Canada about what we actually did in the bill and whether they think it's sufficient.
In common language, we did two things. We set a very high standard for what it means to be in extreme intoxication. It's basically automatism where you're not in control anymore. Also, we require that evidence—not just a claim—be presented of that state. The second thing we did is we said that prosecutors can then evaluate whether care was taken by a reasonable person.
Given the Supreme Court decision, what I'm really interested in today is if this is a good thing that we've done here. Is it a sufficient thing that we've done?