Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, members, for inviting me to speak to you today. I will be happy to answer questions from any of you about any of the provisions of the bill before you.
I thought that probably the most useful thing I could do is tell you a bit about myself and my own perspective on this and then talk about how I see the context of legislation like this.
As the chairman noted, I am currently the dean of law at the University of Calgary; formerly I was the dean of law for 11 years at the University of Western Ontario. I've been a member of the bar for 26 years now, and I hold the rank of Queen's Counsel in Nova Scotia.
Unusually, I think, for someone appearing before you, I also spent 21 years in the Canadian Forces, as we would say in the navy, as a rating, or in today's language, as a non-commissioned member. I had the experience of having been subject to the code of service discipline and to the apparatus of the military justice system for well over half my adult life. Perhaps that gives me a different perspective from that of some of the people you'll hear from who may have military experience but not from the perspective of an enlisted person.
I think my experience in discussing things like this with people whose background is primarily civilian is that the hurdle is not so much in the details but in appreciating the very different social contexts in which the system of military justice exists.
The purpose of a civil society, the society that we all live in, is to maximize freedom, to maximize liberty, to minimize the interference in our personal liberties by the state.
The purpose of military society is to protect civil society. To do that, we Canadians need a body of people who will do unnatural things. When ordered to do so, they will place themselves in harm's way, and when lawfully ordered to do so, will take the lives of other people, from which there is no lawful recourse. If a lawful order is given to take the life of another person, the only alternative for a service person is to comply with that order. To a civilian, that's a very unnatural way of structuring a social organization, but like every society governed by the rule of law, we need that. We need the police to protect us from within and we need the armed forces to protect us from without.
The price we pay for demanding that very unnatural commitment from members of the armed forces is that we have to be willing to accept that their values can be different from ours, not completely, but profoundly in some ways. That is they place a premium on social cohesion and on the maintenance of internal discipline and order that is alien to civilians. When comparing our system of justice, the civilian system of justice, with the military system of justice, it's very easy for us to assume that we're making an apples to apples comparison, when the underlying premise of society, this social organization, is really quite different.
I had a chance to study the bill and in my submission it represents an attempt to draw a balance between the appropriate relevant needs of the military to maintain fighting order and efficiency. Remember, even when the military is engaged in peaceful operations, it's able to accomplish them because it is a fighting force. It's a balance between the need of the military to maintain its effectiveness as a fighting force, a balance of that along with an attempt to, as much as possible, provide service people, people who make a tremendous sacrifice for us, with as much protection and liberty that is consistent with the need to maintain a fighting force.
Mr. Chairman, that's what I'll say by way of opening remarks. As I said at the beginning, I'd be happy to take questions from you or any member of the committee later on.