Justice committee  Well, in some jurisdictions, appeal courts have the power to set aside convictions when they have, as they put it, “a sense of unease” about the conviction. Our courts of appeal do not give themselves that power, and only legislative change would do that. It's something that we advocated for to Minister Lametti when he was considering this legislation.

Justice committee  Well, at the moment, the commission has the ability to quash convictions or refer to an appeal court. If sentences were introduced, you could give the commission the power to vary sentences and/or refer the sentence to an appeal court. You'd still have those same options available to you.

Justice committee  No, it's not, because sentences are not included within the jurisdiction of the commission. They can't look at sentence applications.

Justice committee  I don't think the lower standard will increase the number of applications. What it will do is increase the number of successful applications. That can only be a good thing, in my view. If someone may have been the victim of a wrongful conviction, they deserve a remedy. I think it's important to remember that the remedy they're going to get is not a final remedy.

Justice committee  First of all, we would be the only commission that doesn't allow sentence applications. If you look at the stats of the various commissions—the English and Scottish commissions in particular, because they've been around for more than 25 years now—you will see that approximately a sixth of their references are in sentence cases.

Justice committee  There will undoubtedly be a substantial number of applications when this legislation comes into force. If you look at the experience of other jurisdictions, the number of applications has soared at the outset, and that's not surprising. In terms of the new test, the lesser test, the “may” instead of the higher tests that we have to deal with now, the probability test—

Justice committee  Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee. I was last here on October 3, 2001, with the late Joyce Milgaard, when the committee was considering the enactment of the current sections of the Criminal Code that govern ministerial reviews of wrongful conviction claims. I looked up what we said on that occasion.