Justice committee  I don't know if that's true.

Justice committee  I don't believe that to be true—depending on the type of vehicle they have. But there are a lot of people who don't necessarily have a lot of resources, who have vehicles and rely on them to work and that sort of thing. We know from all of the work done on drunk driving that if s

Justice committee  If they're not impecunious and they can afford to pay, then the judge already has a discretion to impose a higher surcharge.

Justice committee  It's not a real question, because taxpayers pay in the end anyway to fund the criminal justice system, to fund the creation of these laws, to provide victim services ultimately because—

Justice committee  The challenge I have, and especially this week, quite frankly, is when we have a situation of who is responsible for the years of sexual abuse in institutions, of males and females, whether it's residential schools, orphanages—

Justice committee  Well, I don't think we are actually. We're talking about victimization created by the state.

Justice committee  I think you need to back up a bit, because part of the concern we have is that there are people who—and it's great that you had people who could pay—

Justice committee  One of the challenges—and it's painfully clear to me, in the process I've been going through and in being in Toronto yesterday at the inquest into Ashley Smith—is that the false dichotomy of people being victims or offenders is just that; that when we have prisons filled with peo

Justice committee  Unfortunately you may have misunderstood, because we certainly are. We have shelters for battered women who are fleeing violence for which their partners may very well have been charged with violence; we work with residential school survivors who have been victims of abuse—

Justice committee  It's certainly true across the board. We know that the majority of people, by the time they reach adulthood, have done things for which, if these had been detected and pursued, they could have been criminalized.

Justice committee  We certainly support services for victims. We don't necessarily support their being merely set up as victim services. When I was working with the John Howard Society many years ago, one thing the police victim services used to do, in the province we both worked in, was to routi

Justice committee  As a fundamental, we're supportive of the universal application of services so that we don't have victims, and when we do have victims, yes, of course we support them.

Justice committee  There are very few people I know who are in the system who would rather have been in the position of committing a criminal offence to start with.

Justice committee  I know you didn't ask that, but it's necessary for me to be able to fully answer your question, and I don't want to shortcut my answer. The reality is that it would. It's part of the reason that historically I was involved in setting up those sorts of programs, because many of

Justice committee  I think my logic professor would not have liked that slipping through of a few of the suppositions first, before you get to that conclusion. I'd like to be clear: of course, accountability, where there needs to be accountability, is important, and sometimes that accountability