Justice committee  It was in that specific context. We're not having difficulties generally across the board with recruitment, except, I would say, in certain areas of the country. You can appreciate that recruiting a senior lawyer to work in Nunavut is quite difficult. In some areas we have taken

Justice committee  Thank you very much. Have a good evening.

Justice committee  We are lagging behind in a few things. Some of them the numbers don't show, and I'll give you a concrete example in a minute. That is something which I'm committed to working on. Certainly we're lagging behind on visible minorities, and I think we're slightly behind on persons w

Justice committee  Let's keep in mind that I overlapped with Brian Saunders for four years, so what he heard, I heard. I think the case he referred to is in one of my regions. A judge refused to take a guilty plea on simple possession on the basis that he didn't want to be the last judge in Canada

Justice committee  You're really in my bailiwick, because in my spare time, I love to have good information. To me, good information comes from a good case management system. We've been using a case management system that Justice Canada developed for itself years ago. It's called iCase. Because i

Justice committee  I co-chair something called the heads of prosecutions committee. It's a committee that brings together the heads of every prosecution service in Canada—provincial, ours, and the military's. We get together and discuss issues of common interest. We have very frank exchanges on is

Justice committee  Let me start by saying that I've managed people now for the better part of 15 years, and as a manager you're always concerned about how your staff are doing. You're concerned about burnout. I think in our profession there are lots of signs of burnout and mental health issues and

Justice committee  I've been acting since, I believe, March 7 of this year, so it is a few months now. It has flown by. A typical week of an administrator in any department involves a lot of meetings, so I think that's the first thing you would see in my calendar. Every week I receive a number of

Justice committee  The statute essentially set up the position of the Director of Public Prosecutions in order to make clear the independence of the function. Arguably, for those of us who remember when the prosecution service was part of Justice, there was functional independence being exercised,

Justice committee  I sometimes use them in the same sentence, but certainly, when it comes to departmental services in Ottawa, every meeting is held in both languages. In addition, I still hold the roles of deputy director and acting director. I'm also overseeing our bilingual offices in Ottawa, M

Justice committee  I'm going to start by letting you know where we are in terms of collective bargaining. Of course, you all know that what we pay our prosecutors is not up to me. It's a function of the Treasury Board to negotiate collective bargaining agreements. At the moment, we are going to bin

Justice committee  We actually had a discussion at the management table about that today. In the last few years, we put a real emphasis on training all of our staff on prevention of harassment in the workplace, because if you follow the employee surveys, it comes up as a theme every year. The train

Justice committee  Thank you, and of course I appreciate the importance of the budget, so I'm not at all concerned about the delay. That was obviously important. It's a pleasure, of course, to meet with the committee today and to discuss my candidacy for the office of Director of Public Prosecutio

Justice committee  Certainly I would say that at the moment we have sufficient staff in order to meet our obligations. The addition of judges is something that we're going to have to keep an eye on. As new judges are appointed, it may have an impact on the resource requirements of the Public Prosec