Justice committee  Thank you.

Justice committee  Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I thank you for your invitation and for the privilege of testifying before the committee. I have a couple of caveats. I'm no lawyer and I come at this strictly as a political scientist. I've also been asked to comment specifically on the issu

Justice committee  Look, I think it would be— Sorry. Go ahead.

Justice committee  I've done an entire book on the Canadian Constitution and issues arising from it. I'm also a scholar of federalism and an associate of the best-known institute in the country that deals with issues of federalism and intergovernmental relations. All that is to say that I speak wi

Justice committee  They're not my numbers. They are Statistics Canada numbers that are submitted as an addendum to my brief.

Justice committee  As you know, and your own legal experience in this field testifies to that, we already have different types of standards when it comes to warrants, for instance, so introducing these types of standards would make good sense. It also is in line with the practice with which complex

Justice committee  I have a 20-second intervention here. As I've stated in several fora in recent days, one of the issues with gun violence is that this is a multivariate problem, precisely because we've reintroduced discretion into a process that previously had a mandatory 10-year minimum senten

Justice committee  Right, but if you as a criminal know that you might end up with a choice in how you're going to be prosecuted—there might be various reasons—I think that particular element of the law would serve as less of a deterrent than when you know there's no choice and you face a particula

Justice committee  Right, but the offender realizes that the prosecution has that choice. That, I think, has an impact on the incentive structure that offenders use, and we do have research to that effect.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Madam Chair, thank you for the opportunity to appear before the committee. I look forward to answering questions in both official languages. I will start with some ad hoc remarks about cybersecurity in the current context, and then pass to some broader remarks about the continui

Procedure and House Affairs committee  All right. The events of recent weeks appear to validate the resilience, adaptability and vitality of Canada's constitutional system. I shall be on the last page, for the translators, and I shall make my remarks quick. The Government of Canada has long taken a laissez-faire

Procedure and House Affairs committee  This is an opportunity for all parliamentarians to realize—which those of us who have worked on cyber for years have been trying to push on members in Ottawa—that cyber is not just one policy domain among a series of others, and that cyber touches every aspect of our lives today.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  We are building the plane while flying it, and we especially want to be prepared for these types of eventualities. We should be having this conversation, but it is suboptimal to try to figure out what those procedures look like as we're trying to navigate the crisis and the emerg

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I want to say two things. When you talk about cybersecurity, there's always a trade-off between convenience and security. The more security you want, the more inconvenient it will be for people to engage at that level. It is unlikely that we will be able to convince parliamentar

Procedure and House Affairs committee  If I may, I would encourage the member to read the report by the Cyberspace Solarium Commission that was released by the bipartisan U.S. congressional commission in February, which is very thorough on all the challenges that the cyber domain poses for democracy. While we're hav