Justice committee  As you may or may not be aware, bail provisions in the Criminal Code had not been comprehensively amended since the Bail Reform Act of 1972. There were a lot of inefficiencies in the bail system, with police release or the forms of release, so Bill C-75 tried to improve some of t

Justice committee  Yes, there is.

Justice committee  It is found under subparagraph 515(6)(viii). Actually there are two reverse onuses that link to firearms. Subparagraph 515(6)(vii) says, “an offence under section 244 or 244.2...that is alleged to have been committed with a firearm”. Then, under subparagraph 515(6)(viii), it's

Justice committee  Reverse onus departs from the general approach to bail in two respects. First, there's a presumption that the accused ought to be detained, and second, the accused has to prove, on a balance of probabilities, that they ought to be released having regard to the statutory grounds.

Justice committee  Yes. The code says “justice”, but “justice” is defined under section 2 of the code to include a judge of a provincial court, so it could be a justice of the peace or a judge of the provincial court.

Justice committee  As I mentioned, a risk assessment is done at the bail hearing. There is a provision under subsection 515(3) of the Criminal Code that was added through former Bill C-75 and that now requires judges, before making any bail decision, to look at the criminal record of the accused an

Justice committee  Any law that has discretion built into it is going to, unfortunately, result in situations that you simply cannot predict. We can't legislate to remove any and all risk unless we detain all the time. The thing is that the charter says there must be just cause to detain someone; t

Justice committee  In this particular case, I believe there was a warrant out for his arrest at the time.

Justice committee  We don't have any national statistics with respect to bail at this time. Individual provinces and territories, as I'm sure you know, are responsible for collecting criminal justice system data, including bail data. Sometimes they publish this data on their websites. Statistics C

Justice committee  The provinces and territories.

Justice committee  Thank you for your question. During a bail hearing, the judge often has a copy of the offender's background. It is a way to truly see whether... If I may, I will continue in English. It helps the court to see if there are any past convictions of violence on the accused's recor

Justice committee  Absolutely. Under the tertiary ground, the court must consider the circumstances surrounding the offence, including whether a firearm was used. It signals to the court that the tertiary ground is relevant to the case when there's a firearm being used. We have a reverse onus at b

Justice committee  We have a number of Supreme Court of Canada decisions that have been released over the past decade talking about what we just talked about, which is the cardinal rule that release ought to be the norm and detention ought to be the exception. That principle really derives from th

Justice committee  Sure. Under section 11(e) of the charter, there's a right not to be denied bail without just cause, so there are two aspects of this. There's the just cause aspect of it. Bail can be denied only in narrow circumstances that are tailored to the specific purposes of bail, the p

Justice committee  The ladder principle sets out a presumption for most bail hearings that an accused ought to be released on the least onerous terms and form of release. We're really looking at subsection 515(2) of the Criminal Code. You will notice that from paragraphs (a) to (e) it progressively