Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
We will be voting against this clause. Once again, the primary problem here is that the government has not demonstrated the need for this reduction in the threshold for using recognizance with conditions or preventative arrest. We are lowering our threshold from “will” to “may”, “will” to “likely”, and “necessary to prevent” to “likely to prevent”.
What we are really going against here is 800 years of British legal tradition in which we actually require someone to be involved in a real act before we make them subject to penalties. The BC Civil Liberties Association, which I intended to quote, has already been cited by Ms. May, very eloquently, in saying that we are going down the wrong road. However, Ms. James said that witnesses testified that this was a problem.
In fact, if you go back to the RCMP Commissioner's testimony, he did not say that. He said it “might” be useful to lower these thresholds, but when I asked him specifically whether the threshold had been the problem in obtaining either recognizance conditions or preventative arrest, what he answered was that there was a greater problem with the court process than there was with the thresholds. Unfortunately, he did not have a chance to tell us in great detail what that meant, but the example he gave was one where a court, because of its business—and one could only presume lack of resources—put off a very important decision for a month. I understand that in that case subsequently there was success in getting restrictions placed on that person.
Again, before we take large steps which restrict civil liberties, potentially for those who've had nothing to do with a specific act, we have to be convinced on this side that there is a real need to do that. If the problem really is resources at the courts and delays in the courts, which the RCMP Commissioner seemed to say, then we need to attack that problem first.