Mr. Speaker, obviously this issue is extremely important, but we would have hoped that the bill as it was passed the last time would have been presented and then we could seek to make improvements to that.
The reality is that more than 90%, I think some 97%, of offences are tried in the summary conviction manner, and the military tribunal that the previous speaker talked about is actually the court martial, which is a different place. In the court martial, individuals have all the protections of right to counsel, full answer and defence and a criminal record attaching to that. We do not have a problem with that.
It is the summary trials, which do not have the legal protections that are available if one is before a provincial court in any of the provinces of Canada and one is a civilian. This is the area we need to work on and fix, and I do not hear at this point yet the signal from the government that it is prepared to fully explore that and try to find out what is the best way of achieving that goal and still maintain the importance of military justice for the purposes of efficiency, operational efficiency, morale and discipline that is essential to a military force of any kind.