Thank you. It's a little earlier out here than it is down there, so you'll have to pardon me if I'm a little sleepy.
I don't have a great deal to say on the new legislation, because I was unaware until Friday of last week that I had been asked to appear.
I would say that when I conducted the Air India inquiry, we spent considerable time on witness protection. If you refer to volume 3 of that report, chapter 8, you'll see that we dealt with witness protection from pages 178 to 255, and we raised a number of questions. The circumstances there dealt with terrorists. There were conflicts between CSIS and the RCMP, and witness protection showed certain flaws. We had problems with ethnic identification. We had problems with one police force overseeing or undercutting the other—all in good faith but all counterproductive in that each thought it knew best how to solve the bombing.
I'm rushing a little because I know about the time, but I would suggest that the public perception of witness protection is that it protects the witnesses. They seem to forget that the essential ingredient to witness protection is protecting the public: to get vital witnesses to testify is a safeguard that the community deserves.
I would say that something you might consider is that in certain circumstances there are alternatives to witness protection, such as having witnesses testify behind screens for instance, having them testify in private, or, in certain circumstances, excluding the public from the testifying.
You will hear from Professor Dandurand, who has a number of suggestions with respect to witnesses not testifying in public. The only caution I would raise with respect to that is that some of the suggestions, while effective, might run into charter challenges and would not be sustainable.
One of the recommendations we made in the Air India report was that the RCMP should not be in charge of witness protection but rather that a senior official in the justice department should determine the eligibility of witnesses. We thought the RCMP was in a good position to administer the witness protection act, but it should not be the group that decided who would go into protection and who would not.
The one other matter I would raise in passing is that one size, with respect to the witness protection act, does not fit all. The circumstances of our society are such that we have to tailor our witness protection to the witness we are trying to protect. For instance, in the case of a juvenile, who makes a decision with respect to his going into witness protection? Is it the parents or is it the people in charge of witness protection?
There are exceptions, also, to getting witnesses to testify. As you know, ministers have a certain veto over proceedings. Crown prosecutors play a role in who is going to be called. The Supreme Court confirm their role and that of police-informer privilege.
I think you'll be interested in what Professor Dandurand has to say about hearing witnesses in private.
Finally, I would say there should be some mechanism to resolve disputes between witnesses and those in charge of the program. It's a difficult thing for some witnesses to be taken out of a society in which they're comfortable and placed in a witness protection system. For a number of reasons they sometimes don't fit into that particular environment. The RCMP in charge will sometimes be arbitrary in removing people. It would be useful if there were some resolution method whereby the witness and the people in charge of witness protection could resolve disputes rather than terminating the protection. Again, I refer you to what is said in our report on Air India.
I'm open for questions.