Justice committee  I think a lot of the issue stems from caseload. The caseload of crown prosecutors is four times that of defence counsel, so off the bat they're fighting an uphill battle. While we may be doing well enforcing and arresting and bringing people in, all things considered it seems to

Justice committee  For cases at trial.

Justice committee  Generally, it is higher, and I'll provide you with a copy of the report, which will show what progress or what lack of progress we've been making. You'll see that for cases going to trial the conviction rate will range from 42% to about 75%, so some jurisdictions are doing better

Justice committee  I would have to say the Atlantic provinces are doing better, and the jurisdictions struggling the most would be Ontario and Quebec.

Justice committee  We looked at all the jurisdictions across the country in terms of their individual caseloads, in terms of their conviction rates, and we found Quebec had the lowest conviction rate of any other jurisdiction of the cases going to trial. We didn't look at how the costing was done f

Justice committee  We didn't look at other countries; we just looked at what was going on in Canada. But anecdotally we've learned--given that we do research in a lot of different countries--that even if they have a 0.05 criminal sanction, it's not necessarily enforced as a criminal offence. That m

Justice committee  I think we're optimistic that those changes will have an impact, but it's important that we see whether they do have an impact before we continue adding more to the justice system.

Justice committee  It's because they have the luxury of more time to prepare for a case.

Justice committee  Right.

Justice committee  Could you rephrase the question?

Justice committee  What we found was based on a study we did here. I think with some of the studies Mr. Solomon is talking about, we don't have a sense as to what their justice system was like or how efficient they were in processing cases. It's very different from country to country. Our positio

Justice committee  That research actually comes from the national survey we did of crown and defence counsel, where we looked at how it's taking longer to process these cases than it did 10 or 20 years ago. You're seeing vastly more people going to trial and challenging the charge. You're seeing

Justice committee  Yes.

Justice committee  Right. I think the immediacy with which the sanction is applied is important. At an administrative level, they can apply the sanction much more quickly, whereas in a criminal setting it can take more than a year for these cases to get to trial. Usually during that time these peop

Justice committee  They have an effective justice system. They also have the ability to enforce it with the random breath testing.