I'll be taking it, Mr. Chair.
Minister, it's nice to have you here. Based on what I've seen before, I could probably ask you about the federal child support guidelines under the Divorce Act, but I will try to stick to Bill C-40.
I want to follow on from what Ms. Gazan was saying. This bill is supposedly aimed at giving the poorest, most vulnerable defendants a better chance of reaching out to a commission and having an opportunity to have their grievances heard about the verdict in court. My concern is the exhaustion of appeal provision. If I'm the poorest of defendants, how often am I going to be appealing to the court of appeal if I don't have the money to pay a good lawyer to be able to do that?
If this happened years later, after I'm time-barred from appealing to the court of appeals, wouldn't I then be locked out of this process? Wouldn't it be better to reconsider that exhaustion of remedies approach to allow the opportunity for the new commission to consider all factors as to whether or not it could consider a case?