Justice committee  No, there is not.

Justice committee  Certainly not. To put it bluntly, that's really not the case. You have to come with a comprehensive plan. Again, these things are always on a spectrum. If you have someone who has a series of recent serious violent charges, that's more than an uphill battle to release. That's alm

Justice committee  That's an excellent question. Previous speakers, Dr. Nicole Myers and others from various organizations, have talked about the statistics and the impacts of pretrial detention. For individuals with those types of concerns, pretrial detention centres are harrowing places. They ar

Justice committee  I think I want to come back to one way in which I have described the bail hearing—it's not my own description, but it's a common description—that it is an imperfect risk assessment. I tried to find the actual transcripts, but I couldn't find them before this. As I understand it,

Justice committee  Just for reference, there was a previous policy whereby the Crown prosecutor would consider, if someone were unlikely to face a jail sentence, whether they should seek detention. I would say that this should give us some concern. The fact that someone could be detained on extreme

Justice committee  I think it's such an individual exercise to see who will follow their conditions, and how and why. One of the challenges that I think will face this committee is that a lot of this is in the provincial jurisdiction, but what we need is co-operation between governments, because th

Justice committee  My short answer to those is yes to both. I'll say that in B.C. we don't have quite the robust kinds of programs that we have in Ontario, with the John Howard Society. Just to speak anecdotally for a second, I've had the privilege of liaising with the John Howard Society for a cl

Justice committee  It's hard to say what's missing. It's a difficult question to answer. I would repeat some of the points you raised, such as knowing how long a person on average will spend in pretrial custody. I think, importantly, we talked about the culture of adjournment. That and the questio

Justice committee  Is that about whether this would help reduce the rates of overincarceration?

Justice committee  Thank you very much for the question. To make sure my answer is clear and coherent, I will answer in English. I'm glad you asked this question. I heard you ask this question of another witness earlier, and I thought it was a very important one. You address the issue of bail

Justice committee  The impact is that it recognizes the different circumstances that can lead to that offence. It's not at all saying that broadly this offence is less serious. It's explaining that, depending upon the circumstances leading to this commission, including the actual facts that led to

Justice committee  No. I don't think I'd be very successful if I were to do that. I'll say that.

Justice committee  No, I would not. I don't think so.

Justice committee  Certainly, and what we do for those extremely serious types of crimes has to be a focus of this committee. I think that the difficult balance is going to be in striking the right approach of targeting those crimes, which are clearly dangerous to society, while not having what I

Justice committee  That's right. Just to briefly conclude on this point, one of the proposed reverse onuses is for section 95(1) offences. The courts have clearly said, at that spectrum of the offence, that a tool of a criminal's trade is a serious and dangerous offence, but not every offender wi