Mr. Chairman, I'd be happy to speak to clause 28, and obviously my colleague will jump in if he thinks there's anything we should add.
Clause 28 deals with trials that have commenced. According to the notes to our regulations, courts martial are commenced when the accused pleads guilty or pleads to the offence. Essentially, he's placed in jeopardy at that point in time.
That's the commencement that's being referred to here. So this is to ensure that if this comes into force, trials that have actually started, that are ongoing, can continue to their conclusion. That's essentially what this is doing. It's not dealing with courts that have been convened but not yet commenced. It's not dealing with cases that are in the system that have not yet even been convened. It's dealing only with that small body of cases that may actually be ongoing at the time this comes into force.
We're repealing two types of courts martial here. For example, the disciplinary court martial is being repealed. This would ensure that a disciplinary court marital, if it were actually ongoing when this came into force, could finish without having to stop and restart. Restarting a court where somebody is in jeopardy raises a number of different legal issues with respect to whether you could retry the individual. So it's trying to provide, in the JAG's terms, the certainty that the overall bill is trying to provide. This clause is trying to provide some certainty with respect to courts that are ongoing.
From a process perspective, in the court martial process an accused is asked, before he pleads, whether he has any objection to the court that's trying him. The Trépanier decision has resulted in some accused saying, “I don't want to be tried by this court.” That's what has generated the four or five cases that the JAG referred to that have been sent back to be restarted.
In this circumstance, if the court has commenced, the individual has already, in all likelihood, indicated to the judge that he's happy to be tried by the court that has been convened to try him, and this will let the court finish its work. That's all it does.