Justice committee  I'll speak to the restitution comments you made at the end. You have accurately summarized my comments with respect to that issue, with one exception, and maybe I didn't make this clear in my opening comments. There are cases in which restitution is appropriate and victims seek

Justice committee  My view is that without the resources to investigate and prosecute these cases, this bill will have little impact.

Justice committee  I have no comments with respect to the partisan aspect of how the bill has made its way through the House. With respect—

Justice committee  And I have no comments with respect to the delays.

Justice committee  With respect to the one-sixth sentence issue, the perception with respect to sentencing and white-collar crime needs to be maintained: that we are tough on crime, and in particular white-collar crime. To the extent that the bill can be considered in that light, I would support it

Justice committee  A lot of that already goes on. As Mr. Groia said, when a crown is on the case, they're cooperating and dealing with the victims, so already a lot of that is happening. Some cases do fall through the cracks, if the law enforcement investigator or the crown has not been in touch wi

Justice committee  No.

Justice committee  I can answer that. Clearly, yes, we have. I have had a number of corporate clients with large-scale losses well in excess of $1 million. We're talking about tens of millions of dollars. Financial institutions have lost large amounts of money. They've hired us to go after the mone

Justice committee  No. All we hear is that the case is not being prosecuted and that the charges will be withdrawn because too much time has gone by. They don't proceed with the case.

Justice committee  I can't think of any. Maybe Mr. Groia can think of some.

Justice committee  If I understand the question correctly, sometimes the criminal process does work quite well when there is a small number of victims, and the rest—

Justice committee  So you mean the impact with respect to repaying victims and its impact on the criminal sentencing?

Justice committee  With respect to the distribution of the proceeds of the fraud that you do get and who gets them and how, you are correct that it's my view that the criminal procedure and process are ill-equipped to do it. The process Mr. Groia was talking about is quite often done in a receivers

Justice committee  I'm not sure how you'd work it into the Criminal Code, other than with respect to the national regulator that has been proposed. To the extent that it doesn't go ahead, the local securities regulators have the power to seize assets. In civil litigation, victims have the power to

Justice committee  Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me here today. I'm a commercial litigation lawyer, so I'm a civil lawyer, not a criminal defence lawyer. I practise, as the chair said, at Bennett Jones, a firm in Toronto. The focus of my practice is commercial fraud litigation, so I