Mr. Speaker, I thank the minister for his speech. It is not often that I find myself mostly in agreement with him. I guess the issue here is that it is more mostly than fully.
Regrettably, this was an opportunity to amend and clarify the military justice system in this country. Frankly, it does not come up all that often and so when it does come up it really is an opportunity to get things right. I congratulate the minister and the government on getting most things right, but there are two sticking points that he did mention in his speech. On those two sticking points there has been no movement from the government.
The first point has to do with the issue of a soldier's constitutional rights.
These summary conviction trials run the entire gamut from what we would consider to be trivial offences right through to the possibility of imprisonment, in other words, confinement to barracks. In the process of confining to barracks, or taking away the liberty of a citizen, in the case of a person in the military, who is also a citizen, we run into the concern about the issue of section 7 of the charter. Frankly, we in the opposition, particularly the Liberal Party, are not satisfied that this provision had been addressed. There were no provisions available to make sure that the accused had access to counsel, that there was a transcript, an appeal process, et cetera. Therefore, the first question is: why did the minister not take the opportunity to address that issue fully and make that provision in summary trials fully constitutionally compliant?
The second point, of course, is with respect to the ability of the Vice Chief of the Defence Staff to intervene in a police investigation.
It appears that we have learned nothing from Somalia, which was an accident in terms of its exposure to the light of the public. It was an egregious set of facts that never would have come to light unless, by accident, the media was there. However, after having a protocol, from Somalia to now, which basically precluded the chain of command from intervening, we have now, by legislation, created a right for the Vice Chief of the Defence Staff to intervene, and there are no restrictions on that.
Therefore, there are two questions. Why did the minister not take the opportunity to fix both of these issues?