Justice committee  It's interesting, because to my knowledge journalism is not regulated in every province in the same way that a solicitor is. A solicitor is defined. You have to be a member of the bar. It's defined, so we know what a solicitor is. I actually think the concern is—and our child e

Justice committee  Sure. I'll be as quick as possible. I have a case in front of me, and there's an important part of it where the Ontario Court of Appeal, I believe, in that case restated that “a ‘privilege’ is an exception to the fundamental proposition that everyone has a general duty to give e

Justice committee  May I add to that? I'd answer your general question more directly, sir, in this way: we believe the common law works well now. We don't believe it's necessary to codify this. We don't believe it's necessary to change the presumption, but we're also pragmatic; we realize that if t

Justice committee  With your permission, Mr. Pichette will answer that. I was on a plane during your testimony, so I didn't get a chance to see it.

Justice committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair and honourable members. Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today. Many of you will know that CACP appears before your committee and before the Senate on a wide range of bills. In fact, members of our association have appeared before this committe

Justice committee  If I may, Mr. Chair, my colleague Mr. Pierre-Paul Pichette, from the Montreal Police Service, is here as well. Our presentation, as before with this committee, will be in both French and English. He'll commence the presentation, if that's okay.

Justice committee  First, with respect to the possible anomalous result of more suspended sentences, etc., I could envision that. The only thing I'd say to that is we can only slay one dragon at a time. With respect to the second part of your question, I think that really ultimately goes to our po

Justice committee  We can take notice of the fact that criminal investigations are expensive, the trial process is expensive, policing is an expensive activity, and the time they spend dealing with people who violate conditional sentence orders or convicting them of further crimes could be spent do

Justice committee  I don't think there's a jurisdiction where a crown counsel wouldn't review that, and they would not necessarily proceed differently from the police officer who may have laid the charge originally.

Justice committee  I doubt very much, Mr. Chair, that I'd agree with all those adjectives. I think it's a reality of the Criminal Code that trying to take a broad-brush approach with certain provisions runs into anomalies such as as we've suggested with respect to the criminal enterprise provisions

Justice committee  It would be difficult to answer with precision without reading the definitions of personal injury offence, etc., etc., but for all of the above, certainly in our view we wouldn't support a conditional sentence. Whether there's anything excluded, I don't know.

Justice committee  It would appear to.

Justice committee  It would depend on the jurisdiction. For example, in British Columbia, as I mentioned, we have a charge approval system, so the police would submit a report to crown counsel and recommend a charge, but not recommend whether to proceed by indictment or summary conviction; crown co

Justice committee  I have two points on that. The first is a point of clarification on our opening comments about the public's perception of the justice system. We suggest it isn't simply the result of the perception of sentencing, and I would agree with you, sir, that some extraordinary cases are

Justice committee  I'll be brief, Mr. Chair. The point is that we have difficulty with the idea of what would be viewed as being less serious offences and other offences being captured by the ten-year level. It perhaps underscores our overall point that it's pretty difficult with this Criminal Cod