Justice committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. Members of the committee, I am appearing on behalf of Alberta Justice. I am a prosecutor and am currently the director of the policy unit in Alberta Justice. I bring 20 years of experience as a trial and appellate counsel, so my perspective is ver

Justice committee  Actually, it's Calgary. Sorry.

Justice committee  Yes, we do. There have been a number of comments in the testimony and from the committee on the addition of those factors. We see them as additions to a very long list of sentencing factors. It's not as though they displace what is already there. It's as though you're conducting

Justice committee  I know there were the round tables in 2008, but my understanding was that those were pitched at a very high level in terms of conceptual... Certainly there haven't been any discussions with anybody at my level or anybody who deals operationally with the act from the prosecution s

Justice committee  I wonder if I could respond very briefly before my colleague. We saw that in the testimony of some of the witnesses. In fact, at least in Alberta, there is the same accessibility to treatment for someone in remand as a youth as there is for someone serving a youth sentence, so

Justice committee  The difficulty is that we're not simply leaving it open. We're dramatically opening the gateway to that. We're opening it to a whole new range of offences where it's not currently available. The comparison between the youth and the adult sentences is difficult, because the durati

Justice committee  I have bits and pieces of the existing act.

Justice committee  That is correct.

Justice committee  Yes.

Justice committee  Aggravating facts relating to the offence or the offender...yes.

Justice committee  Certainly. First of all, it's not just me who says that, it's the Ontario Court of Appeal, the Alberta Court of Appeal, and the Quebec Court of Appeal.

Justice committee  Well, the decision of the Ontario Court of Appeal was. The decision of the Quebec Court of Appeal straddled D.B. So the Court of Appeal in Quebec decided prior to D.B. There was, however, a leave application to the Supreme Court of Canada after D.B., and the Supreme Court refus

Justice committee  And the Alberta Court of Appeal was after.

Justice committee  It's a little bit more complicated than that. This is at page 4 of the paper, the second paragraph from the bottom on page 4. Essentially, the situation is this: if you're released on a very serious charge that you would be eligible for detention on but you're not detained, and t

Justice committee  Yes.