Paula Simons, Alberta, Treaty 6 territory.

Minister Sharma, you used a phrase a couple of times in your opening comments about people who commit multiple violent offences. This, I think, cuts to the heart of one of my uneases about Bill C-48, which is that we’re assuming the person is guilty before trial. We’re penalizing them based on past actions which may not be germane to a criminal trial. This is somebody who has been charged with a violent offence but who has not legally committed the violent offence. I wonder how you feel, from a civil liberties perspective, about the fact that we are making bail much harder to get for people prejudicially based on past criminal action.

This leads me to my next question. Much of your practice before you went into politics was working with Indigenous peoples specifically around issues of reconciliation and compensation. Are you worried at all about the implications of what this might mean for Indigenous people when they are already grotesquely overrepresented in our jail system?

I want to return to Senator Jaffer’s questions about legal aid. I recall that, in 2019, B.C.’s legal aid lawyers organized a strike because of their pay conditions. They argued that funding for legal aid in B.C. was tenth out of 12 per capita in the country. Since this is a shared responsibility, can you tell me a bit more about what your department is asking for from your treasury to support legal aid?

There is a very new-fledgling lawyer doing family law, legal aid work some of the time, in Vancouver. If I could say that without conflict of interest, that would be good. But what I am really wondering is, what kind of increase are you hoping for from your own government?

For people incarcerated under Bill C-48, my real concern is, with the reverse onus, there will be a greater call for legal aid. It is lovely that you are funding the family law work that my own daughter is doing or you are doing work with immigrant communities, but will there be enough funding to deal with the people who are faced with the challenge of presenting a reverse onus case?

I have been thinking about an incident that happened in Edmonton last summer, in May 2022, when an Indigenous man was charged after two older men in Edmonton’s Chinatown, in separate instances, were beaten to death. The defendant was out on bail, but the CBC later discovered, through investigative reporting, that at the time he was out on bail, his conditions were that he could not be in the city of Edmonton and that he was to remain with friends in rural Alberta. When the defendant allegedly became violent and threatened those friends, they called the RCMP. The RCMP picked up this gentleman and dropped him alone in the city of Edmonton, where he was subsequently charged in the deaths of two people.

This makes me wonder. People have a distrust of the bail system, but how much of that is because people who are out on bail are not being appropriately supervised and the people who breach their conditions are not being appropriately re-arrested. If the problem is that people don’t trust the bail system, what do you three think needs to be done to give people confidence that the bail system is working the way it is supposed to?

Yes, until we run out of time.

I was a journalist for many years. Most bail hearings are routinely subject to publication bans. It is absolutely unusual to be able to report on what happens. Sometimes I would sit in the courtroom and listen to the bail hearing and go, “All right. I can see why that person is getting out.” But I could never explain it. Do you think we need more transparency in how the bail system works to enhance public confidence?

I want to start by asking Mr. Field and Mr. Pratt some very specific things about the impact this bill will have on legal aid. What percentage of provinces rely on duty counsel? Can you give me a sense of who is using duty counsel and who is using assigned legal aid lawyers?

What would be the impact on your duty counsel system if you had to be doing more reverse onus work?

What is the risk that somebody, especially not in a major centre, may have to self-represent in a bail hearing?

Thank you. That’s very helpful.