Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank all of our guests for coming here today and offering their opinions and experience to the committee.
This is a complex bill in the sense that there are a lot of clauses that we're dealing with here. Some of them have to do with relationships, as Ian Holloway has pointed out, in terms of the nature of military justice and it being a different system.
I think we all recognize the importance in the military context of having a disciplined system that responds to the operational needs. As Dean Holloway pointed out, in an extreme situation where the taking of a life is part of an obligation that one is required to do, I'm sure implied in that, Dean Holloway, is the qualification that unless such an order is unlawful, in which case one would be required to refuse. These are not black and white situations we are dealing with. We are dealing with degrees. All three of you have been in the military, so perhaps you could all offer your opinion on that.
One of the concerns that we have raised on this issue this time out and the last time with Bill C-41 was the attraction of criminal records to service offences. There are quite a lot of them, as we know. We do know that the procedure for some retrials is rather bereft of procedural protections that would normally be attracted in a civil trial, and yet we end up with individuals getting criminal records. There are dozens of offences. I add to that the fact that, based on the last records that we have here from the JAG, there are some 2,500 offences per year in a relatively small force—65,000 regulars and another 20,000 or so reservists—most of which are tried by summary process. That's only for one year. If you're in for five or ten years, what percentage of our forces come out having served and being subject to the kind of discipline we're talking about—for good reason—end up with criminal records for which no pardons are available? Now they have something called a record suspension. Isn't there something wrong with that, and shouldn't we try to find a way to fix it?
I'm inviting all of you, because I know you're junior ranks, Dean Holloway, and others have served as officers, so there are different perspectives here.