Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Perhaps I'll start by introducing myself and my colleague. My name's Michael Spratt. I'm a criminal lawyer and a director with the Criminal Lawyers' Association. To my right is Constance Baran-Gerez. She is also a criminal lawyer, a member of the Criminal Lawyers' Association, and certified by the Law Society of Upper Canada as a specialist in the practice of criminal law.
As I said, we're here representing the Criminal Lawyers' Association, or the CLA. The CLA is a non-profit organization of over 1,000 members from Ontario and across Canada. Our mandate is to educate, promote, and represent our membership on issues relating to criminal and constitutional law. The CLA is routinely consulted by parliamentary committees, such as this honourable committee, to share our views on new legislation, and we're pleased to be here doing that today.
The CLA is in favour of legislation that strengthens recognition of charter values and procedural fairness. As I said, we're here to present our perspective on this bill today. What we're going to be presenting is the perspective of criminal lawyers. I haven't been in the military and I don't do much military work. I expect the committee will hear from members with that perspective.
To put our comments into perspective, there may be different considerations in criminal courts than in the military context, but I can start off by saying that I'm pleased to say that in general the CLA is very pleased by the language and the new clauses in this bill. They seem to strengthen procedural fairness and adopt many of the recommendations in the Lamer report. I'm going to leave it to Constance to tell the committee all the good things that you're doing, and at the end of Constance telling you everything that we like about the bill, I'll end on the very pleasant note of telling you a few things that perhaps from our perspective could be strengthened in the bill.
Having said that, I'll turn the floor over to Constance, and she'll use the majority of the time to tell you what we think is positive here.