Justice committee  I certainly couldn't propose a percentage. The thought that strikes me is that it would be more child sexual predators and more drug offenders who are linked to organized crime and serious drug offences who would be in jail, and that kind of skews our view of it to the positive.

Justice committee  Absolutely. I resisted in my remarks using the phrase “crisis in confidence”. I prefer to see it as a glass half full and say to revitalize. But it's clear that communities--members of the public and average citizens--are very concerned about the criminal justice system. I thin

Justice committee  What types of services? Which types of services have they--

Justice committee  I'm very quick and proud to say that it's not simply over the last few years, but over the last number of years. Ottawa has always taken a very aggressive posture on youth activities. It has a large community program. You may have noticed that there was an advertisement in the pa

Justice committee  Thank you very much. I was going to point to a couple of other parts of the bill that we think are very important. There's the one the last questioner raised about the Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act. While I agree it's very important--and I suspect it may be a tad optimis

Justice committee  The simple answer is yes, and very strongly so. Normally I stand before this committee and argue that police could do without more complexity in the Criminal Code, but this is an exception to that submission. It's an exception because of the unique nature of the Internet, the u

Justice committee  Perhaps as a starting point, when Chief White came to Ottawa, one of the first things he did was create a street crimes unit that was specifically designed to go out to deal with street-crime-level drug trafficking. The drug section still exists to deal with project and larger, m

Justice committee  Absolutely. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, my name is Vince Westwick, and I'm the general counsel for the Ottawa Police Service. I appear this morning representing Chief Vern White and the Ottawa Police Service. Chief White would have appeared himself, but he is currently in C