They are. It’s quite difficult. Again, there are good reasons for it to be difficult, because that’s what that judicial independence is, in that we’re not supposed to have the mob rule of the public making these decisions.

But again, the issue there is that it’s difficult to appeal because it’s not exactly a mistake in law or in fact. There’s criminal legislation that specifically prohibits justices and judges from making certain inferences. In sexual assault cases, for example, past sexual history you can’t ask about. You can’t draw an inference about a delay between an assault and actually reporting that assault as the likelihood that the assault happened. That’s enshrined in statute.

But no, something like this is quite difficult to appeal because in some ways, the reasons given are almost an obiter. Again, this is why I think this idea of training is important, and also simply the message that it sends, because our judges are not elected, which is a good thing. But because our judges are not elected and we are, we are the voice of the people. As the voice of the people, this is us flagging this as an issue and saying, “Please pay attention to this and understand it in making your decisions.”

When a person in Ontario is charged with a domestic violence offence, the police complete the ODARA report, but also what they do for bail and going forward is literally every single occurrence report that we can find that exists about that person being involved in a domestic incident if they are charged with domestic assault is included in the prosecution package, which we can actually see. So we are doing a lot of that.

When it comes to Clare’s Law, frankly, I support the concept behind it. It’s not likely to be found constitutional by the Supreme Court, to be perfectly honest, but that’s a discussion for a different time and a different jurisdiction.

Obviously in this case, we are maintaining judicial independence. We are not going so far as to say these theories are absolutely the case, but what we are talking about here is making sure that we are filling in some of the gaps of experience so that in making decisions in these cases, there’s a little bit of a space between judicial notice and simply being aware of a trend, because, as I said, otherwise we are entirely limited to actually bringing in live testimony and evidence, which creates a very significant burden, so this really helps inform our judges.

We’ve talked today about community safety, community policing, which is an incredibly important aspect. However, you need people in order to do that. My answer to that would be, frankly, for the NDP and the member to be loud and vocal in their support of our police officers because, ultimately, having them feel like they’re doing a job that is valued in society will help with our recruitment, whereas if we vilify them, I wouldn’t want to join the police either.

I had a couple of other questions that I wanted to ask, but after listening to the member from Kitchener South–Hespeler, I have to ask, first of all, is there a judicial review in a case like that, where the crown could appeal the judgment of that judge? He obviously—I’m assuming it’s a “he;” I shouldn’t. That justice would be subject to—that they could review that on appeal? Are they still on the bench?