Great. Those are very important questions. I don't mean to make light of them, but they reflect a natural...some tensions around town between lawyers. It's not unusual; you see the same in private practice. I will address that in a second.
I will address the second question first, if I may, Mr. Chair, on the concept of civilianizing military justice. We have heard that out in the public as a suggestion perhaps to improve the military justice system. I fundamentally disagree with such a proposition. I think it's critical to have those judges. We are talking about the military judges who actually sit at courts martial. We're not talking about the judges who sit on appeal at the court martial appeal court who are civilian judges. I fully support and always have supported the concept of having civilian judges on the appeal review, because those are matters of law and they will have a broader perspective from across Canada and in their Federal Court roles. But internally, I think it is vital to have people who sit in judgment of our men and women in uniform on either mundane or very serious charges, as we saw recently with Captain Semrau, or the courts martial involving Major Watts and others that are in the press these days.
To me at a very fundamental level it's common sense that you want somebody who obviously knows the law, is very practised in the rules of evidence and criminal law and discipline. But again it's that point: discipline. That's what separates the military justice system from the civilian system. It's discipline that requires the troops to pay attention so that when they are in times of crisis, in firefights in the middle of Afghanistan, they are going to respond to orders without questioning them. It's that habit of obedience that discipline really goes to form.
You have to have, in my opinion, clearly someone who fully understands that, who has actually been brought up in that culture, if you will, of understanding what discipline really means, and the context in which our men and women in uniform actually conduct their activities. It's one thing for us to sit sometimes in the relative comfort of offices here in Ottawa, and another to actually be out there and understand what it's like on the front lines.
I think it would be very dangerous, in my respectful opinion, to have that part of the courts martial system civilianized. I think we would lose not only the experience of those judges, but the understanding of the concept of discipline.
In regard to the part-time judges that you mentioned, what we're really referring to is the ability to have what we call a surge capability in times of heightened activity when we may need more military judges at courts martial. Right now the way the scheme is proposed, we would have to appoint them as military judges. As you know, with Bill C-15 and Bill C-16, they would have tenure until the age of 60. We may have a surge of activity; let's say we were in a major conflict again and we needed more judges to sit on courts martial and then after that surge we're left with perhaps a pool of 15 to 20 military judges of which a lot of them functionally we don't need. This gives us the ability to surge when we need to, to have part-time military judges, reserve judges, who could then not be required once that surge element is over.
Regarding the interaction, overall I can say with a great amount of confidence that Parliament and Canadians as a whole should be very proud of all of the government's legal advisers. We do some tough work, a lot of times in anonymity. We're not asking to be put in the headlights, that's for sure, but there's a lot of hard work done in the trenches, literally. We work closely with the Department of Justice, Foreign Affairs, and Privy Council legal advisers.
Having said that, as I said, in response to Mr. Harris's question earlier, reasonable people can agree reasonably to disagree over interpretations. It doesn't mean one is wrong or one is better than the other; it simply means there is a different perspective.
What we bring to the table, not to put it too lightly, is 100 years of critical experience of military operations and understanding of how they're done not only at the strategic level, but right down to the tactical level as well.