Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good morning. We'd like to thank members of the committee for allowing us the opportunity to speak to you today.
Manitoba's justice minister, Kelvin Goertzen, has actually been deeply engaged on this issue. He's urged legislative action following the loss of the previous section 33.1. He has offered to help in any way possible, so we're here hoping that we can offer some assistance in your deliberations on this complex issue.
With me is Ami Kotler, general counsel in our office, senior counsel in our appeals unit and counsel who represented Manitoba in the Supreme Court in Brown, as well as Chan and Sullivan.
It has been said a number of times in these deliberations that cases involving extreme intoxication are rare. As the office in Manitoba that conducts criminal prosecutions, we can agree that in relation to overall offences these cases are rare, but that does not mean that they arise infrequently or that their impact is not significant in our communities. Several such cases are before the courts in Manitoba.
In one that resolved just last week, the accused fired a shotgun through the front door of a random house, nearly striking a child. The accused had consumed crystal meth and was totally incoherent. Officers noted that he ate his own feces in the interview room following his arrest.
In a previous case that went to trial last year, the accused jumped into a random stranger's vehicle at a gas station and stabbed her to death. He was shirtless, barefoot and described as “speaking in tongues”. The trial judge observed that he had taken several drugs, including, again, crystal meth, and that his behaviour was “indicative of someone in a different reality and not in touch with this world.”
In a third case, pleas had been entered in relation to a homicide. The matter was set this past May for sentencing. Instead of delivering the sentence, the sentencing judge invited the accused to withdraw his guilty plea in light of the decision in Brown. He did so, and we now have this matter set awaiting trial in September 2023. We have other cases like this before our courts, and this is an issue that we will be litigating.
I raise these examples in order to emphasize the importance of a law like section 33.1. It shows that the justice system is capable of responding to the threat posed by powerful, mind-altering substances that lead to extraordinary acts of violence often against random victims. A well-established body of medical evidence links widely available drugs like crystal meth to toxic psychosis, paranoid delusions and violent aggressive behaviour. People taking these drugs frequently exhibit suicidality, homicidality, psychosis, and abnormal behaviour and movements.
The justice system must be able to respond in the face of such violence. Not only does it risk the lives and safety of the community members we serve, but it jeopardizes the public confidence in the administration of justice and the rule of law.
At the same time, however, it is important that the law recognize realities of addiction, particularly for marginalized communities grappling with the intergenerational aftermath of colonization. If we're committed to advancing reconciliation, our laws must criminalize morally blameworthy behaviour, not addiction or poverty. For this reason, we believe the answer is not to have an offence of extreme intoxication. We support the decision to root liability in negligence, and particularly to consider steps taken by accused consuming intoxicants to avoid placing others at risk when determining whether there has been a marked departure from the standard of a reasonable person.
This balance acknowledges the challenges facing many members of our community, while still insisting that whatever our circumstances, we must still take reasonable steps to protect one another from risks caused by our own dangerous acts. We appreciate that some may feel that weakens the legislation. Respectfully, we would suggest that the decision in Brown makes the need for this kind of approach fairly clear. More fundamentally, a law is not weaker because it is humane, balanced and fair—in our submission, we believe it is stronger and, of course, more likely to survive constitutional scrutiny.
To address the enforceability of the legislation, we will close by briefly discussing how we propose to obtain convictions under the new section.
Virtually all the cases we are seeing where the accused's degree of intoxication approaches the extraordinary level contemplated by the legislation involve consumption of one or more powerfully dangerous drugs whose effects can reasonably be expected to include disassociation, psychosis and violence.
While verdicts in individual cases will obviously turn on their facts and the evidence that we're able to call, we feel there is a case to make that an accused consuming these dangerous substances, particularly in excessive amounts or over a prolonged period of time, combining them with other dangerous substances or taking unidentified substances from an unknown source, courts a foreseeable risk that their actions may lead to a violent loss of control that harms another person.