House debate  Mr. Chair, it is critically important, in order to have a just and fair system, and in order for the system to be seen to be just and fair, that we have a bench that reflects the diversity of our great country. To that end, we have improved greatly on the diversity of the bench.

House debate  Mr. Chair, I am afraid I do not have that answer in front of me. I get the hardest questions from my colleagues. I will undertake to get back to the member.

House debate  Mr. Chair, I welcome the hon. member to the justice portfolio, having worked with her a great deal in trade in a previous life and respected her work there. As I answered my previous colleague, because there is ongoing appellate litigation in the matter, I simply will not comment.

House debate  Mr. Chair, I have to admit that I resent that question. I believe that my record in this House and my record as a legal academic over many years would put me in a position to understand, apply and interpret laws in service to the Canadian public.

House debate  Mr. Chair, since becoming Minister of Justice, never.

House debate  Mr. Chair, as I stated before the justice committee, the lobbying record shows that I met once with SNC-Lavalin in 2017. That year, I was the most lobbied member of Parliament, according to The Hill Times.

House debate  Mr. Chair, I thank my hon. parliamentary secretary for his hard work. The victims fund provides grants and contributions to support projects and activities that encourage the development of new approaches, promote access to justice, improve the capacity of service providers, foster the establishment of referral networks and/or increase awareness of services available to victims of crime and their families.

House debate  Mr. Chair, I take my cues on access to justice from my mentor, the late Rod Macdonald. An example would be that in 2018 this program provided $250,000 to Pro Bono Ontario to help it adjust to a changing context and develop a sustainable model, ensuring that it continues to be able to serve Ontario's most vulnerable people.

House debate  Mr. Chair, I was not minister at the time. As I have said before, I have no comment on those various comments by my hon. colleague, other than to say that I am confident that the Department of Justice did yeoman's work and completed its duty to furnish documents under the third party records application process.

House debate  Mr. Chair, the process that has been described to me included an identification of potentially relevant documents by the defence. These included documents on devices, and then that number was winnowed down according to relevancy, and ultimately a judge would decide.

House debate  Mr. Chair, I will provide 10 minutes of remarks and then I will welcome questions from my parliamentary secretary, the outstanding member for Parkdale—High Park. I would first like to recognize the Algonquin nation, on whose traditional territory we are gathering this evening.

House debate  Mr. Chair, as I have said, there was a process that was put into place that would allow the documents to be identified and selected, and then they would go through to a judge as well as a civil servant to determine potential privileges that applied to the documents. This is extraordinarily complex, and I am confident that we met our obligation for third party documents.

House debate  Mr. Chair, this was an extraordinarily complex case with many documents. From beginning to end, over six months, my understanding is that only 246 potentially responsive documents had yet to be reviewed when the stay happened, which meant that we complied with virtually all of the document requests.

House debate  Mr. Chair, ultimately it is a judge who would order both the final manner in which the documents were redacted and the production of documents themselves. Ultimately these were decisions that were going to be made by the judge.

House debate  Mr. Chair, this was an extraordinarily complex case in which documents needed to be identified, and in which potential privilege could be claimed for solicitor-client privilege and for litigation privilege, as well as cabinet confidence. Those decisions are, in the normal course of events, made by a judge.