Mr. Speaker, quickly on the points about the government not dealing with crime with a holistic viewpoint and with regard to its judicial appointments, one of the things that is of concern to a lot of trial lawyers in the country, in particular those on the prosecution side, is that we are going to get hit with another Askov type of decision by a superior court.
The backlog in the criminal area is increasing dramatically. A number of cases have been dismissed. The fear is that at some point there is going to be an overwhelming decision by one of our superior courts or appeal courts that is going to strike down a large number of criminal cases. It is not going to be an issue of dealing with them at all; they are just going to be out of the court system. When it happened in Ontario back in the early 1990s, it included a number of serious criminal cases that were dismissed at that point because they had not been dealt with in a proper fashion.
To deal with the issue of the government's attitude toward our judiciary and in particular its trying to interfere with the independence of the judiciary, probably the classic example of this is the former justice minister, not the present one, who sat with us on our review of judicial appointments. The position that he consistently took was that of wanting to create a less partisan appointment process, which was the case under the Liberals in a number of cases, one where the person being appointed is the absolute best choice in the country or in that region, without caring about his or her political affiliation one way or the other, not as a positive or a negative. It would be that we simply went on merit and took the very best candidate.
I remember how hard he pushed for that when he was the justice critic for the Conservatives. Now that they are in power we see what they are in fact doing, which again is to very much move away from the complete independence of the judiciary, as our Constitution requires, and toward a very clear, focused attempt to ideologically affect the appointment process, which would then ideologically affect the judiciary at all levels all the way up to the Supreme Court of Canada.