Justice committee  The title of the bill is part of the drafting process. The title of the bill must bear a link to the contents of the bill.

Justice committee  The thrust of the bill is to ensure that those who are convicted of the most serious crime, being murder, are detained in custody for a longer period of their life sentence. So there is that link.

Justice committee  Yes. As with all legislation, we look at the charter implications of it. The minister would not be tabling legislation if he had any reservations about the charter viability of this legislation.

Justice committee  Well, every charter challenge will perhaps be unique in terms of what's asserted and what grounds are asserted. We assume that charter challenges would perhaps be based on this being cruel and unusual punishment or another provision of the charter. We're confident that a defence can be mounted that this is a reasonable limit on any possible infringement of the charter.

Justice committee  No, but if the committee wants that information, we can undertake to provide it to them to the extent we can.

Justice committee  With respect to most proposals for criminal law reform, we look at various options, and the model that was agreed upon was one that applied three months to being the application, 90 days, rather than guessing which particular three months applied. As my colleague indicated, that was considered to be a reasonable period of time for a person to bring the application for the process after a 15-year period or after waiting the further five years, given that the inmate has a great deal of lead time to start to gather the material they'll need for that application process.

Justice committee  I'm sorry. I apologize--

Justice committee  I don't have that with me today, and I don't know how easy it would be to determine what the Standing Joint Committee for the Scrutiny of Regulations has looked at, but subject to not stalling this bill, we could discuss with our drafters what regulations, in their experience, have been enacted under other federal statutes.

Justice committee  I don't have an example with me today of a piece of legislation, another federal statute, that has that provision and that also has regulations that have been enacted and have gone to the committee--

Justice committee  Yes, I apologize. It was an inappropriate use of language. I had heard you indicate earlier that you wanted to move ahead with the bill.

Justice committee  You are right. I do not have those examples with me, because it was not something that we had expected we would be required to prepare. Most of our legislation deals with the Criminal Code. This is a stand-alone statute, so I don't have personal familiarity with the range of other federal statutes that have had regulations promulgated that have been considered by the committee.

Justice committee  My colleague has noted that the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, which has a similar provision in English, uses exactly that terminology en français.

Justice committee  The legislation isn't translated from one language to the other. Two versions of the legislation are drafted simultaneously, one in English and one in French, so it's not always an exact word-for-word translation. It's for the meaning and the content, so that the section flows. The comment I made earlier was only to note that this particular term is used quite often in the French-language version to convey the same notion: that for the purposes of carrying out the act, other regulations can be made.

Justice committee  We can give you some examples. Is your question whether there are acts that don't have that kind of provision or acts that do?

Justice committee  I couldn't say whether every act has, but I could direct you to, for example, the Fisheries Act and the Environmental Protection Act—and we can provide you with copies of those—which have very similar provisions to paragraph (f), which is a more general clause. I would also mention for your consideration that this provision is circumscribed in some way, because it says it's “for carrying out the purposes and provisions of this Act”.