Merci, monsieur le président, and thank you very much to both of you for coming this afternoon and for your comments.
Mr. Spratt, you did it well. You talked about the things you like, and then you left some rather compelling and I think informative concerns to the end. You finished with a number of questions that would cause us to reflect.
The purpose of modernizing, after many years, the justice provisions around the National Defence Act has as one of its objectives, as I think everybody agrees, bringing it more into line with modern charter decisions, with Supreme Court precedents, and with the work of the late Chief Justice Lamer. We all, I think, share the view that this is the objective, and you've identified a number of areas where perhaps we've fallen a bit short of where we might want to go.
This is dangerous, because I don't want to speak for the people who run the military justice system. I think they do a very good job with the instruments and the context that they're given, which is often a difficult context, such as an operational context in Afghanistan.
You said at the beginning that you recognize military justice has some different aspects from a typical criminal justice context in a civilian proceeding. That doesn't mean the rights of an accused person should be less respected. I wouldn't suggest that at all, and you certainly didn't, but how do you balance out what I think military commanders or those in an operation overseas, for example, would say is the necessity to maintain the cohesion of a unit, discipline, in a particular theatre, and requires this expeditious summary process for the less serious offences? How do you balance that with the right to make a full answer in defence and the right to counsel, all of which are very basic elementary principles of a criminal justice system in a civilian context?
In your view, can some amendments be made that would bring this legislation up to a higher standard, to which we might aspire, without compromising the clear need of the military to have that flexibility? Frankly, you've identified some troubling elements. If we want to try to amend this bill--and the minister and others were certainly open to thoughtful amendments that preserve the integrity of the bill--do you have any suggestions of how we could do that? I don't think it's realistic to import into the summary context the full protection that you have in a criminal proceeding for an indictable offence in a civilian context. That's not realistic. At the same time, it doesn't mean we should compromise procedural fairness and actual justice rights, let alone the charter rights, of somebody facing a serious sanction.