Justice committee  It's not happening as often as it should. It's codified in the bail protocols that Ontario drafted as a result of the COVID pandemic, but they continue in place today. It specifically incorporates the ladder principle, as of course Antic does, as does the Criminal Code. Bail co

Justice committee  Yes, I do—

Justice committee  I'm a lawyer. I can't say yes-or-no answers.

Justice committee  Yes.

Justice committee  That's the philosophy behind Myers, to make sure we haven't forgotten about you while you're in jail and that your case is moving through system. That's the backbone of that 525 power.

Justice committee  To be perfectly candid, if there are deficiencies in the original decision, I don't need to wait for a 525 hearing. I can bring my own bail review, and I won't wait for a 525 hearing to be convened. To be perfectly blunt, 525 hearings are not regularly used to review and change b

Justice committee  No, because 525 hearings are not properly funded by legal aid almost entirely throughout Canada, and lawyers don't have the resources in most cases, or detained people don't have the resources, to put together great plans. The better plans come through the defence-initiated 520 b

Justice committee  I think the bail system can do a lot to do better. I'm trying to find the right words to say it politely. In many ways, the bail system is broken, but not in the way that I think much of the public thinks it is. It's not broken because dangerous criminals continue to get bail. Th

Justice committee  Yes. They're tied together, though, because what happens today—and it happens almost always in Crown onus offences—is that a prosecutor will say to an accused, with a complete absence of a balance of power, “We will agree to bail on the following terms,” and they will ask for a s

Justice committee  Sure. Jail is highly criminogenic. You spend a day in jail and you're going come out worse off than the day before you went in. You're going to become “hardened”, to use a word that may not fit everybody. Anybody who spend six months in jail without bail is not going to commit a

Justice committee  That's one of the main areas I spoke about. Yes, you're right. It doesn't happen nearly as often as it should.

Justice committee  I actually think that adjournments happen because we have a culture of adjournment in Ontario. People default to adjournment for all sorts of reasons. It's a complex issue, but ultimately it's a failure of the state to provide the resources to have timely bail hearings to the peo

Justice committee  Yes, it doesn't happen in my experience correctly in the summary conviction arena. We don't do a very good job of keeping those timelines in place. It definitely does happen and really is as a result of the Myers decision by the Supreme Court of Canada for indictable offences. It

Justice committee  They're outstanding, but they're limited in terms of the number of places that offer them and the number of people they can supervise. With declining budgets, there are fewer and fewer people who qualify. The eligibility criteria become tougher and tougher to meet. The short ans

Justice committee  Unfortunately, one of the real problems we have throughout Canada is gathering data that's reliable. Data has been notoriously poor, but I can tell you from the cases that I've litigated, only, and some of the cases we know of. We have two cases in Ontario. I did one and it was a