Thank you very much, and thank you for the invitation to come as witnesses today.
I'll begin with a very quick blurb about the Canadian Bar Association. We're a national association of over 36,000 members, including lawyers, law students, notaries, and academics, with a mandate that includes seeking improvements in the law and the administration of justice. Our work on national security and anti-terrorism issues has been a joint effort involving several CBA groups, and in particular the immigration law, criminal law, charities and not-for-profit law, and privacy law sections.
I'll pause to note that with respect to the criminal justice section, of which I'm a member, we're made up of equal parts, crown prosecutors and defence lawyers.
With me today is Peter Edelmann from Vancouver. He's an executive member of the immigration law section and a lawyer specializing in immigration law. I'm the vice-chair of the criminal justice section. I practice as criminal defence counsel here in Ottawa.
We're going to focus our comments with respect to those two areas in particular because they are our areas of expertise. I'm going to outline in broad strokes the CBA's position, and Peter will deal with the specific areas that we'll cover, and then we'll take questions afterwards if you have any.
We've included our response on the green paper, and we've made previous submissions on Bill C-51. The primary focus of our section in looking at this issue is to strike a balance between protecting the security and safety of Canadians, while at the same time stressing individual liberties and rights. That's our overarching concern, and when we look at the proposed legislation and potential changes, we look at it with a view to that particular issue, i.e., maintaining protection but at the same time looking for areas where perhaps the protection has gone too far and liberty interests may be infringed.
As a general comment about the green paper—and we made this comment in our submission as well—we found that the general approach was very laudable in the sense that it was looking at and asking the right kinds of questions. The one overall comment we would make with respect to the illustrations that were used is that they did tend to be a bit one-sided.
You had a scenario where all of the situations, or the potential scenarios that were described, tended to tilt toward an answer that would involve more protection and less liberty. In other words, there weren't scenarios put forward where there was a potential infringement on liberties, with the public being asked to comment on that. Rather you had a neat scenario: a potential terrorist threat, and what the proper response to that should be in terms of protections.
That said, there was a lot that we liked in the green paper, and we have a few suggestions. With those general comments in mind, I'll turn it over to Peter who will talk about some specific areas we'd like to address.