Mr. Speaker, if the member opposite had listened carefully, he would have heard the example I listed during the speech, that of auto wreckers. There is great concern in those industries, because through their work they regularly obliterate VIN numbers.
What the fundamental issue is with this bill is the onus of proof and this whole concept of the probabilities: whether or not a person has to prove their innocence or whether it is up to the prosecutor, the Crown, to prove the guilt of a person. That comes back to the fundamental pillars of our judicial system and how our judicial system has been built up over decades and in fact centuries. One of those pillars is an assumption of innocence.
If we were to change this in a case of this sort and say that the balance of probabilities means that if the probabilities are 50% plus one that the person may be guilty, then in fact the person will be sentenced. Fifty per cent is almost fifty-fifty. It is a coin toss. That undermines the very fundamental basis on which our judicial system has been built.
The Crown has tremendous resources at its disposal so that it can in fact prove the guilt of someone who has been convicted. To shift that responsibility onto someone who would have to prove his or her innocence would be incredibly onerous. In fact, it comes back to some of those very democratic principles on which our society is built, which are that government apparatus, government departments and the prosecution have an obligation to prove guilt and that innocent people will not end up in prison.
Of course, as was pointed out, that is not a Conservative principle. I guess the principle of vigilantism, et cetera, is closer to the principles on the opposite side.
Let us return to this whole fundamental principle of institutions of the government and of the Crown not having the onus on them to prove guilt. Let us look at it being up to an individual citizen to have to do it. In fact, we see that in a lot of places in the world. In the former Soviet Union, that is exactly how things worked.
Even in Canada, in situations where the burden of proof lies on the Crown in very serious cases, murder cases, where beyond a shadow of a doubt we have to prove guilt, quite often with new evidence as the years go by we find that people who were convicted and have spent a great number of years behind bars were in fact innocent.
If we shifted to a coin toss, balance of probabilities, 50% plus one—and that is what we are talking about, basically fifty-fifty, a coin toss—that would be a fundamental shift, not just in how our judiciary has been built up but also in our democracy.