Justice committee  I don't have anything to add to what Mr. Friedman said. I think he's been involved in lots of jury selections.

Justice committee  There are provinces that are currently doing it with great success. I also agree that Mr. Friedman makes a great point, that if you can challenge the array based on an absence of representativeness, that would hold the provincial government's feet to the fire. I think the conce

Justice committee  Yes. I will also say that there is Supreme Court case law. I didn't come prepared with it, but it's possibly the Bain case, where the Supreme Court itself acknowledged that sometimes the Crown misbehaves. You give the Crown the power, and as with any power, sometimes it will be m

Justice committee  My first recommendation would be that all provinces use the health card lists, because those are the most comprehensive lists available in the provinces for drawing jury rolls. That's more representative than voter lists and property assessment databases. Those lists include perm

Justice committee  It's a national problem, and I'll tell you, it's a national problem that goes back 30 years. This is not a new discussion, but there are challenges for the federal government. I think the federal government has ways of bringing governments to the table and can certainly deal with

Justice committee  If I may, just on this particular point, the difficulty I have with what Mr. Friedman is saying is that the jury selection process, as the Supreme Court has said, is not actually intended to be adversarial. In the Yumnu case, the Supreme Court of Canada made clear that the collec

Justice committee  I don't know what the impact has been of abolishing peremptory challenges in the U.K. What I do know is that through the uses of peremptory challenges that Mr. Friedman suggested he makes, we're really just chipping away at the margins of what is already, I think, a very flawed p

Justice committee  As I said, if you start out with a flawed list, you're going to end up with a flawed list. If you draw jury lists from municipal property assessment lists, you start out with a list that represents only a fraction of the population. There's very good evidence. The Toscano Roccam

Justice committee  When you have a peremptory challenge, where there is no obligation to explain why you're excluding a juror, there is a potential for both Crown and defence to seek an advantage. In particular, if you're dealing with an indigenous or racialized accused, and you have the sense that

Justice committee  That is very difficult. This is actually one of the problems associated with peremptory challenges: to know why it is that the Crown and defence exercise their peremptory challenges. It's one of the reasons why the Batson-type challenge has been adopted in the U.S., where you try

Justice committee  Thank you for having me here tonight. As the chair said, I am a law professor at the University of Ottawa. I have taught criminal law, constitutional law and the law of evidence since 2010. I also practise criminal defence part-time. I've written extensively about the jury sele

Justice committee  Thank you.