Thank you very much, Mr. Bernier. I am delighted and very proud to be here. It's rather unfortunate that Mr. LeBlanc couldn't be here, as he is my member of Parliament.
I am, as the chairman said, the dean of law at the University of Western Ontario. I've been the dean there since 2000. Before becoming dean, I spent 21 years in the Canadian Forces. I was a chief petty officer. In other words, I was the subject of the system of military justice, and to that extent perhaps I offer a view that one doesn't often hear: the perspective of someone who has legal training but also was an enlisted person in the Canadian Forces.
As we all know, context is all-important when it comes to the interpretation of legal regimes. We hear over and over again that our Constitution is a living tree. That's a notion bequeathed to us by Lord Sankey and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council 80 years ago now, and it has remained a core principle of understanding our Constitution and our legal system generally.
The adoption of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was one of our crowning achievements as a country, but I think it's fair to say that we know much more about the pressures placed on an armed force through modern military operations than we knew in 1981. In 1981-82 we had not been in a hot—as they say in the service—situation since Korea. The fact is that since 1991-92 we've been perpetually in hot situations through the Gulf War, the Balkans, and most recently Central Asia. It seems to me that all of us who have an interest in and care about the system of military justice share a duty to try to breathe life into and try to fertilize the living tree that is the system of military justice, in the context of what we know now about the strains placed on a military organization by modern operations.
It is trite—and I know you've heard this before—that the purpose of a system of military justice is to preserve efficiency, and because that's trite, it makes it easy to overlook what's really embedded in that. Really what we are looking at is a system that will allow a commander to blow a whistle and to cause a bunch of young Canadian men and women willingly to go over the top, even though they know that most of them will be gone in a short period. That's the context of the system of military justice. Thankfully, it's not put to that litmus test very often, but that is still the litmus test to which we have to put it: how well would this suit our armed forces in the time of extreme peril?
Another thing that lawyers often talk about is the notion of purposive interpretation, that we should give our laws an interpretation that would best meet the purpose for their existence. I think it's important for us to remember that a system of military justice exists for very different reasons from a system of civil justice. The regular justice system, the one that all of us who are private citizens live under, exists to preserve our freedom, to keep the government out of our lives as much as possible—what the late philosopher Isaiah Berlin described as negative liberty. That's mostly what the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is ensured to do, to ensure that I've got as much freedom as I can have to say and do what I want.
The purpose of the system of military justice is very different. It exists not to preserve freedom, but to preserve unit cohesion, to ensure—to repeat myself—that young men and women will willingly place themselves in situations of extreme peril because someone told them to and for no other reason. In other words, the system of military justice doesn't exist to reflect Canadian values; it exists to give us an instrument with which we can project Canadian values. That's what we're doing in Central Asia; that's what we did in the Balkans; that's what we did in the first Gulf War; that's what we did in Korea. We need an instrument as a country with which we can project Canadian values.
As someone who was subject to this system for 21 years, for more than an adult lifetime, I can say that the real key from the perspective of the men and women in the trenches, so to speak, is a sense of fairness. It's not whether it's the same as what civilians have. It's whether people think they're getting a fair shake, whether they think that their commanding officers will listen to them when they have a story to tell, whether they think that their commanding officers will give a contextual interpretation to whatever happened. That is why the vast majority of people who can choose between a summary trial and a court martial choose a summary trial. For the most part, they have confidence in the fairness of the system.
As someone who teaches administrative law, I would say the real core of the system of military justice is the doctrine of natural justice. If people think they're going to have a fair shake, that they're going to have the opportunity to tell their side of the story, that's really what's important.
I'll finish by saying that the Canadian system of military justice is probably the most studied system of military justice in the world, certainly in the western world. We had the Somalia inquiry; Chief Justice Dixon did a study; Chief Justice Lamer did a study; we have this meeting today. The truth is that our system of military justice, though not perfect, is pretty darn good. We do not have instances of mutiny, insubordination, or violent insurrection by people in the service. Our service people, in the main, have confidence in the system of military justice.
I think that Mr. Drapeau and I agree on some things, but we have a different view on others. This is the third attempt that Parliament has had at trying to introduce some amendments. I urge you to pass this legislation so that we can move on to other legislation.
Thank you.