Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I'm going to ask the committee and officials to give me a little latitude here at the beginning.
Mr. Naqvi, I think we have to make it clear exactly what it is that we're talking about. I think the study actually deals with four separate problems.
Two of those have been very high profile and public, and certainly the premiers have been raising those: the problems for public safety caused by repeat violent offenders who achieve bail. The secondary problem there is the public order problems caused by repeat low-level offenders who receive bail.
Those are two things that are very high profile. They are legitimate concerns, and they're part of this study, but we have a bail system that is kind of contradictory. In fact, we detain way too many people before trial. When you look at the numbers of people in provincial institutions at any one time, you see that most of them haven't been convicted of anything. They're awaiting their trial dates. What we find, if we look at that problem, is that those are disproportionately indigenous people, racialized Canadians and people with low incomes. That's a third problem, I think, that's here.
A fourth problem, then, is that when people achieve bail, it's quite often more difficult for some people to meet what are thought of as non-onerous conditions of bail, and they end up with a public administration of justice offence, even though they haven't been convicted of anything.
I think there are actually those four different problems. I'm going to be calling witnesses on all four of those—if I get enough witnesses—and I'm going to be asking you some questions about those.
I want to start with repeat violent offenders.
I'm not going to try to lead you into saying this. I'll just say it: I think there's a consensus that, somehow, sometimes, our system fails to detain people and maybe we need to tighten that up somehow.
One of the things that came forward in a previous Senate bill was section 518, which says that prosecutors “may” present evidence in a bail hearing on previous convictions or if people are awaiting charges or they've breached conditions before or failed to appear in court. The operative word in that section is “may”, so I'm wondering if we sometimes have judges who are making bail decisions without that information always having been put before them. If we were to change the wording in that sentence from “may” to “shall”, we would guarantee that they had that evidence in front of them.
That was in a previous Senate bill, and I think it's a reasonable thing for us to look at. I want to know what you would have to say about that.