Justice committee  Is that a question you'd like me to answer first or Mr. Paterson?

Justice committee  What I would say is this: we're hypothesizing a situation where you have someone who has served 25 years in the penitentiary and is remorseful, has admitted culpability for their offence, has engaged undoubtedly in extensive treatment and rehabilitative efforts, and has been dete

Justice committee  Right. As Mr. Paterson alluded to, it's always a difficult balance, but ultimately we need to make an individualized assessment about the person in question, and that needs to be based on the dangerousness level that they present at the present time. I can't comment on how a gi

Justice committee  I'm hesitant to comment on too much because I'm certainly not an expert on the parole system. It may be there may be ways for a parole board, again as Mr. Paterson alluded to, to take an individualized look at the person in question after 25 years and be able to make a judgement

Justice committee  I didn't, no.

Justice committee  To my knowledge, the last time anybody challenged the constitutionality of the sentence for first-degree murder was in the 1990s. There were two appellate decisions, one from Alberta and one from Quebec, but that was at a time when the faint hope clause was in place, and both cou

Justice committee  No, that's outside my bailiwick.

Justice committee  I didn't read the bill looking for that specifically. If there were any potential for retroactivity, it would be unconstitutional under section 11—I'm going to say (h)—of the charter. I might have the letter wrong, but it's somewhere in section 11.

Justice committee  One thing I would add is that it's really difficult to look retrospectively at the people who have been convicted of these three offences arising out of the same transaction, because again you would rarely see a person charged with first-degree murder along with any other offence

Justice committee  I think there is always going to be a temptation by prosecutors to try to find clever ways to hold extremely serious sentences over an accused's head and prosecute them, obviously within reason, but with any plausible threat of an exceptional sentence they can muster. So I don't

Justice committee  I have some knowledge about how the faint hope provisions work. As you say, they don't work for anybody convicted of offences from 2011 onward, but it used to be that the success rate on faint hope applications was a little over 75%. For people who got a reduction of parole eligi

Justice committee  That's right. They had to apply for it. One imagines that people convicted of extremely serious offences might not have put themselves in the pool, because they would have realized that they were not going to get parole after 15 years from a jury—

Justice committee  I don't know.

Justice committee  Certainly this provision adds a complexity to an already quite complex system. You'd have to add additional counts to an indictment. You would normally charge somebody with first-degree murder; you wouldn't charge them with several other offences in addition. It creates a potenti

Justice committee  I think that's right. I'm sure you could find somebody from CSC who could give you better information than I could. My understanding is that nobody has to.