Justice committee  That's been my experience. I've walked into courthouses, and despite the fact that I think I look the part, I'm stopped and so on. It's quite endemic, and it's not something that's peculiar to me. It happens to a lot of other racialized lawyers.

Justice committee  That's right. As the member said, we are seeing the courts signalling to lawyers in cases like Morris and Le—

Justice committee  You know—

Justice committee  I was just going to say I have a pretty thick skin. I know that talking about race is difficult—

Justice committee  The Supreme Court of Canada has said it over and over and over again, and also there's the—

Justice committee  I've written on it.

Justice committee  This is not my language. The courts have said it, and the courts have mentioned it from 1993 in the case called R v. Parks. This is not my language, that the system is profoundly anti-Black. That's Justice Doherty's language.

Justice committee  Race talk is always uncomfortable. Whenever you raise issues of race, there are going to be people who think you're singling out particular individuals or particular institutions, but my data is quite sound. The Supreme Court of Canada backs my data—it's not my data. It's data th

Justice committee  That's no problem. Race talk is difficult. It's just one of those things. All of us stand to have that or sit back and get that talking-to. It's not just Crowns, but defence lawyers and all of the people who work in ensuring that the administration of justice is fair.

Justice committee  Indeed. We've seen that the bail system, unfortunately, has been almost co-opted to be used as some kind of proxy for punishment. That's a perversion of the bail system. It's also an affront to our Constitution. It's an affront to section 11(e), definitely. It is this attempt, I

Justice committee  Indeed. What we're talking about is not only a loss of liberty but also a loss of dignity, and we're talking about populations who have already historically been stripped of dignity. They have no more dignity to be taken away, and this is what happens when people are presumed gui

Justice committee  I have, yes.

Justice committee  I worked in criminal law.

Justice committee  It was criminal defence. I worked with legal aid organizations across Canada, in Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia and Ontario.

Justice committee  I got called to the bar in 2013, and I practised up until 2020.