Merci.
Good morning to you all. Thank you for allowing the National Judicial Institute the opportunity to come here to give you some information about judicial education in Canada, an initiative we're just starting with respect to sexual assault training.
Before I do that, I want to say a couple of things to you that I think we likely all agree on.
First of all, when sexual assault cases come into the courtroom, myths and stereotypes risk impeding the judicial process. These risks, we know, persist despite Parliament's effort at amending the Criminal Code and the guidance we have from the Supreme Court of Canada.
The dialogue that Bill C-337 has begun, along with the work this committee has done through your report on violence against women and girls, is a dialogue that the NJI welcomes. When sexual assault trials go wrong, the consequences, we know as judges, are serious for everybody involved.
For me, judicial education is the preventative key to these mistakes' being made. We know that errors will be made. There is appellate review available, but the real way to avoid the trauma that can result from appeals and retrials and that sort of thing is judicial education.
Bill C-337 proposes measures to improve the justice system when dealing with allegations of sexual assault. The NJI applauds the spirit of the act. We have some concerns about some of the methods, and I'd be happy to answer any questions about that in the question period.
With those two things said, let me get to an explanation of how we train judges. I'm going to speak first about federally appointed judges. There are two ways they get training.
First of all, almost all federally appointed judges attend NJI training in their court-based program. That's local to their various courts. Second, in addition, most of these judges also will attend one of the nationally planned NJI courses that we put on.
We know that the courts themselves also do some training. We also work closely with the Ontario Court of Justice, which, as you know, is the largest provincially appointed criminal trial court in the country. Along with the Canadian Association of Provincial Court Judges and the Ontario Court of Justice, we run a new judges school for provincially appointed judges. In all, last year NJI ran 180 days of judicial education.
NJI has been training judges about the dangers of rape myths and stereotypes and the complexity of sexual assault trials for years. Sexual assault trials first are tackled in new judges school, but that training is available throughout judges' careers, either in stand-alone programs that address sexual assault trials or as part of broader training in criminal or evidentiary programs.
Gender-based violence, equality, and discrimination issues are key parts of our broader social context programming. Social context requires judges to take into account the context of the cases they hear and not be influenced by attitudes based on stereotypes, myths, or prejudice. Because of these and other programs, I'm proud to say that we are a world leader in judicial education.
Judicial education must be led by judges; we work with judges throughout Canada to plan our programs. But it's not just judges. We call on academics to provide judges with their legal and social scientific scholarship and information about the impact of our decisions on society broadly. We also call on members of the community. Input from them ensures that NJI's goal of teaching judges the context of the people we serve is brought to the judges.
For sexual assault training, we have worked over the years with police, victim support workers in domestic and sexual assault violence, psychologists and psychiatrists, members of the indigenous community, and other diverse communities, just to give you some examples.
With all of this, can we do more? Absolutely we can.
First, going forward we want to share more information with Canadians about judicial education.
Second, NJI was pleased with the acknowledgement in the recent budget that money is necessary for the education of judges, to make that education even more robust.
Last week, NJI received additional funding from the Canadian Judicial Council. The plan with that money is to fund some videocasts on sexual assault trials, which will be put on our website, thereby making them available to all Canadian judges. I would be happy to explain more about this project to you again during question period.
With that, thank you very much for the opportunity to appear here today.