Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Colonel, for your presentation.
We'll have to leave the disagreement about the effect of the charter challenge to the evidence that we have before us from both yourself and the others.
I will repeat, first of all, what I said the other day, which is the fact that there are strong opinions in favour of the constitutionality of the military justice system by the Judge Advocate General and the lawyers, but that doesn't stop the charter challenges from being successful in specific individual circumstances. We've had that opinion from some of the legal experts who testified the other day.
I'd rather get to some of the technicalities here because what I'm concerned about is that with the proposed amendment.... I can't avoid saying that we did amend this the last time. We did have the assistance of the JAG. We did have an amendment accepted by this committee, and yet when it came before the House, it was gone. We were back to square one. It's only because of persistent argument in the House of Commons that we did get a commitment to put it back.
You say the only thing remaining are the eight Criminal Code offences that are still there, but that doesn't seem to jibe with leaving out a charge under section 83, for example, or section 85—sorry, section 85 is there, but section 83, for example, is basically disobedience of a lawful command.
That is not a criminal law offence. It's probably a serious offence within the military, or it could be. It might be minor or it might be serious, but in any event it's not a criminal law offence. I wonder why that's been left out. Is there a rationale for that?