Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Yes, I would certainly concur with the concern expressed by Colonel Gleeson with respect to a potential chilling effect of such an amendment on the exercise of the right to elect court martials. Court martials exist not only for the very important purpose of trying the most serious types of offences, but also as a safety valve for the system, to prevent any circumstance where the accused has a concern that he or she may not be treated fairly at summary trial.
If you're putting in place a disincentive for that person to exercise that right to elect court martial—if they do have a concern--by saying that if they go to summary trial they'll have no record, and that if they go to court martial and get convicted they may get a record, that frustrates that important safety valve.
The other point that l think is important for members of the committee to appreciate is that the list of offences that are triable at summary trial is set out in QR and O article 108.07. At the most serious end of those, there are some very serious Criminal Code and Controlled Drugs and Substances Act offences, including assault, assault with a weapon or assault causing bodily harm, assaulting a peace officer, or possession of a substance under subsection 4(1) of the CDSA.
I would suggest that the members of the committee would wish to very seriously consider from a public policy perspective whether Parliament's intent is best suited or best served by exempting those types of--literally--Criminal Code offences from acquiring a record, whereas if a person had been tried at a court downtown, they would.
I have one last very small point. I would not want the members of the committee to be under any misapprehension as to what the policy intent of clause 75 was. It was put into the bill, as Colonel Gleeson mentioned, for the purpose of recognizing that by the nature of service life, one is subject to constant scrutiny, to being held to a higher standard of discipline than a civilian would be, and therefore, as a consequence of that, one should not acquire a meaning within the Criminal Records Act for conviction for very minor types of offences. It was not put in there under any notion or suggestion that the scheme of summary trials was deficient.