Thank you, Chair, and good afternoon, Mr. Minister. Thank you for being with us today.
I'll get right to the point because I only have a short period of time. We support many things in the bill, but we have some concerns. You mentioned the Charter of Rights and Freedoms a number of times during your presentation, and the necessity for public confidence in the administration of military justice and indeed legislation. We've had a number of occasions, of course, where changes had to be made to the military justice system because of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Indeed, we agreed on swift passage of one of those, a companion bill to this, Bill C-16, in a matter of three weeks back in the fall of 2011 for that very reason.
But public confidence was somewhat shaken recently when it was revealed by a senior justice department lawyer that the vetting of bills by the justice department, which is required by law for charter compliance, is in fact being done with a degree of confidence of I think 5%. In other words, the statement made by the senior Justice lawyer was that if there was a 5% chance that it could comply with the charter or if there was any argument that could be made, it didn't matter, the justice department would not flag this to Parliament for consideration.
Can you tell me, Mr. Minister, in regard to this particular iteration of the bill and the confidence level that you have, as you've expressed here today, is it the 5% confidence level that the justice department seems to be using as a standard, or is there some other level?