Thank you to my colleagues for their comments prior to mine. I want to thank, particularly, the Attorney General and the Solicitor General for their tireless work and dedication to improving our justice system and making Ontario safer.

I’m pleased to rise this afternoon, on behalf of the residents of Simcoe–Grey, to speak to second reading of the Strengthening Safety and Modernizing Justice Act, 2023. Crime is on the rise in Ontario and across Canada, and we know this based on firm data. That’s why our government is taking action to train and attract new recruits, breaking down financial barriers and getting more front-line officers onto our streets. I am pleased to speak to the impacts of Bill 102 on our justice system and how, if passed, it will make Ontario a safer place for Ontarians.

Madam Speaker, as part of this bill the Ministry of the Attorney General is proposing a change to the Provincial Offences Act, or the POA, that will help clarify the existing process in the courts when the Provincial Offences Act proceedings are being judicially reviewed. The proposed amendment would make it clear that it is court staff and not judicial officers who file the judicial review application materials with the courts. I want to be clear: This particular change that we’re introducing is an administrative one and won’t affect any existing judicial review processes before the courts currently.

Along this theme, I would like to discuss some important work this government is doing with the municipal courts. This work includes amendments to allow greater use of technology to deliver justice systems remotely, such as allowing attendance at POA proceedings by audio and video links. Other changes include the authority for provincial offences officers to serve part III summonses on individuals within the province by registered mail, courier or email. Although this is administrative, it will do much to speed up and expedite the processes. Service of a summons on a recipient’s lawyer or paralegal with their advance consent will now be permitted.

We continue to support our municipal partners in the efforts to enforce and collect outstanding Provincial Offences Act fines. We have implemented numerous initiatives to help assist our municipal partners with the collection of these outstanding fines, including improvements to the notice of fine and due date form to encourage defendants to pay their fines on time to avoid additional fees and other penalties, such as a licence suspension.

The Attorney General is also working in collaboration with Bill 177’s municipal working group to implement other reforms to further modernize Provincial Offences Act processes, including implementing other fine enforcement initiatives.

These are just some of the more recent initiatives that the Attorney General has been working on to ensure the municipal court system works swiftly and efficiently to hear so many matters that affect Ontarians daily and to help to clear up the backlog that we have seen collect during the COVID pandemic.

Speaker, I welcome the opportunity to speak about some of the other initiatives the ministry has in the works to move justice forward across our province and to continue to drive change across the system, initiatives that have come to fruition thanks to the ongoing collaboration between all justice sector partners and that support our overarching goals of not only improving processes in the criminal courts system but also that will keep our communities across this province safer for our residents.

The first such initiative is the Criminal Justice Digital Design initiative. Speaker, these changes will help with the ongoing transformation that we are working on in collaboration with our partners across the justice system, from the police to the courts. For several years now the Attorney General has been working with the Solicitor General to transform Ontario’s criminal justice system and enhance public safety in the process. This initiative involves digitizing criminal case records and connecting IT systems so that data flows seamlessly from the police to the prosecution to the courts and, where appropriate, to correctional services.

Already we have implemented a number of processes to help share digital information in an organized, seamless and timely way. Since June 2022, criminal eIntake has been available province-wide. This system allows police and other investigative agencies to electronically send and receive documents and data so that a justice of the peace can consider all the information and allow charges to be laid, where appropriate. This initiative has greatly reduced the time and effort it takes to put information before the courts and has made for a much more seamless and expedited process.

Speaker, there is more. We have also introduced digital evidence management, which makes it possible for police and other agencies to manage, store and share digital investigative or evidentiary files using a consistent set of tools and standards. As of this January, more than 60% of police agencies across Ontario have on-boarded to use this digital system. There is much more work to be done, Speaker, but we have made great strides, and we are committed to continuing that work. The safety and well-being of our communities requires an agile and properly functioning criminal justice system that works efficiently and seamlessly for all Ontarians.

Speaker, as the Attorney General mentioned earlier, a huge part of creating safer communities is standing up for victims of crime, which includes victims of human trafficking. The Ministry of the Attorney General works very closely with the Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services on their anti-human trafficking-strategy and violence against women services. More recently, we have implemented a program that provides up to four hours of free, confidential legal advice to eligible survivors of sexual assault across the province. It is available by phone, it is available by video chat, and at any point after a sexual assault has occurred. Survivors of human trafficking can also access free legal support to obtain restraining orders against their trafficker and to get advice about using the civil lawsuit system as a tool to hold their trafficker accountable.

Another critical aspect that we’ve seen in our criminal justice system across the province and that is a critical priority for our government is combatting gun and gang violence. Speaker, this government is deeply concerned by the spike in gun crime in Ontario and the impact of gun violence in our communities, and as we heard in our recent debate about the bail reform initiative, this is something that’s become endemic across the province and is only on the rise.

Since 2018, Ontario has invested approximately $187 million under the Guns, Gangs and Violence Reduction Strategy, which takes a comprehensive approach to community safety, with initiatives that deliver strong enforcement and prosecution, proactive gang disruption and intervention, and tailored youth and adult violence prevention. Despite this, gangs in Ontario are growing in strength and expanding across the province. Drug, human and gun trafficking are fuelling gang operations, and gangs continue to recruit at-risk youth and young adults. We are continuously working with municipalities across Ontario to enhance this strategy and are taking critical action to combat gun and gang violence on all fronts.

Madam Speaker, I can speak as a member for eight years of the Collingwood Police Services Board to the impact of this program within our community. We had signed onto that as an enhancement to our OPP contract, and within the first 18 months we had three of the largest drug busts that we had experienced in our community in which large amounts of drugs were seized, large amounts of cash were seized and large amounts of guns.

Speaker, through this work we’ve learned that law enforcement and prosecution efforts are more effective at reducing violence and increasing public safety when combined with meaningful intervention initiatives.

And this gives me an opportunity to speak about justice centres. We know that the traditional criminal justice system can, in certain circumstances, be limited in how it responds to the complex needs of the communities, the victims and the offenders. Justice centres are taking a transformative approach to community safety by moving certain criminal cases out of the traditional courtroom and into a community setting. Justice centres help provide wraparound supports for accused persons through coordination with on-site social, health, mental health, addictions, employment education and housing providers. That is why, since September 2020, our ministry has launched four justice centre locations. We’ve launched them in London, Toronto downtown east, Toronto northwest and Kenora.

The Kenora centre is the most recent and was launched in February of this year, and I had the great pleasure of going up to Kenora, Mr. Rickford’s riding, with the Attorney General for the opening of that justice centre. It is a groundbreaking initiative; in fact, the first of its kind in northern Ontario. It was developed, designed and delivered in collaboration with local organizations, Indigenous leadership and the courts. It was built on lands owned by the local Indigenous bands and is a critical part of our justice program moving forward, not only to address the outcomes of crime but also to look at the underlying causes of crime so that we can prevent recidivism and help to get lives back on track, both for the victims and the offenders. This is an initiative that is truly born from a collective partnership, and it represents a meaningful path forward towards creating safer and healthier communities across this province and in the north.

Madam Speaker, one of the other changes we’re looking at making in order to streamline our judicial processes and expedite matters—where appropriate—getting to trial, just to make sure that we separate and stream matters to the appropriate forum. This is why this government is proposing some changes to how low-value civilian claims are handled in the courts, including Small Claims Court.

We made changes to the claims threshold a number of years ago. The maximum amount of a claim in Small Claims Court is $35,000, and that is helping to separate them. However, we see in a number of cases certain plaintiffs or defendants trying to pursue a matter under $35,000 in our Superior Court, which takes up valuable time both for ongoing civil matters, matrimonial matters and criminal matters that properly reside in Superior Court. What we are now doing is preventing any claims under $35,000 from going to Superior Court and mandating that they go to the appropriate forum, which is Small Claims Court. This will make it faster, easier and more affordable for people and businesses across the province to resolve their disputes in the appropriate forum.

All of the changes I have spoken about and those before me in Bill 102 speak to the importance of the changes in it, how it will streamline our system, how it will make our criminal justice system and our justice system generally more accessible and more expeditious, as well as making Ontario safer for the people of Ontario, no matter where they live, whether that is through support and safety for victims of crime, effective and appropriate responses to perpetrators of crime or reducing the complexity of our justice system.

Madam Speaker, it has been a pleasure today to rise to speak to this matter, and I urge all members of the House to support this worthy act.

I want to thank the Solicitor General and the Attorney General for bringing forward this bill, which I think has a lot of great stuff in it. I’m particularly excited about the changes to intimate partner violence and judicial education. I just wanted to ask the Attorney General how this will work and how we expect it will make a difference for victims of intimate partner violence.

Thank you, Speaker. It’s an honour to speak after the member from Oakville North–Burlington. Her advocacy on this matter has been incredible. As a member of the private members’ bills committee, I was present when she presented about this issue and she presented with a great deal of passion and dedication. I want to thank her for being so dogged in her advocacy in making sure that we’re aware of this.

Applause.

For some who aren’t as familiar with the role of the judiciary or criminal justice, there may be a concern that this does not go far enough. Why is it not a mandate for specific training? Why are we not intervening in what that training would look like? Those kinds of concerns. And obviously I understand those concerns. We have very, very powerful examples of when notice of these important issues has not been taken. However, what we need to respect and what this legislation absolutely does respect is the role of judicial independence. It’s absolutely vital that, in our system in Ontario, in Canada as a whole, our judiciary be able to make decisions which are, to some extent, conscience-motivated, but ultimately based on the law, and make those decisions without fear of censure by a hysterical public or by the trends of political favour. It’s an incredibly important part of our judicial system and one of the most dramatic differences, frankly, between us and our neighbours to the south and across the border and something that I still believe is incredibly important.

Again, this is why we need to make sure that we are maintaining this. This training will be developed by the judiciary itself, so you don’t want to, for example, have an excessive reliance on social science theories as versus social science data. I believe that, in the way that this is worded and by leaving it to the judiciary, we will be able to have them strike an appropriate balance between providing that type of relevant data and lived experience as versus, as I said, that political trend or social science trend that can be damaging, and that is why we have judicial independence as such an important part of our system in the first place.

However, as I said, there are, again, those who may feel that this goes too far as versus not going far enough. Again, I’m very confident that this government understands the role of judicial independence, and I said that this is why it’s been worded as such. However, in, for example, a criminal case—or really any case before a judge, but I’m more comfortable with the criminal realm—one of the absolute key rules of evidence in a trial or a proceeding is that you can’t bring anything before the court that isn’t brought out through evidence. So the fact that there may be a great deal of data or trends about domestic violence, family violence, coercive control, that type of thing, as a crown attorney, the crown is not permitted to simply make submissions to a justice that that is the case. You are not permitted to provide academic materials or articles in order to support that position. The only way that you can do it is by having an expert in the field actually in court to testify and be cross-examined and, perhaps, introduce it that way.

This is a huge burden on the system. It’s, frankly, impossible for the most part to find somebody that’s able to do that. It’s also completely beyond the powers of the system when we’re talking about, for example, the bail stage. Having anybody able to testify at the bail stage about some of these matters would be very challenging. And, again, this isn’t about in any way forcing the judiciary to be swayed one way or the other. This is about trying to make up for some of the gaps in lived experience that they have.

I can speak very directly and personally about what that can look like. I said this before and, again, I won’t be naming any names, but I have experienced a justice of the peace that, as a result of the Antic ruling, in any domestic violence, even choking, would not award a no-weapons condition as part of the release terms because he said that hands were not weapons and was adamant about that.

In another case there used to be—well, there still is—a mandatory minimum for human trafficking. That’s been ruled unconstitutional a number of times. I was involved in a case where the judge, again, found that it was unconstitutional and went dramatically below the two-year mandatory minimum. In that case, it was a human trafficking case with an extremely violent habitual offender who had been charged and convicted of this type of offence before. He targeted a young woman who was a crystal meth addict. He took her car and her bank cards and her driver’s licence. He brought her to a hotel, and he posted photos of her on back pages. Over the course of the next 24, 30 hours or so, he had about, I think, 25 men visit her in succession. There were times when he was not at the hotel, when he had left, and he never assaulted her himself.

The judge in that situation, in ruling that a two-year mandatory minimum would be cruel and unusual punishment, pointed out in his written reasons that at the end of the day the girl in question, the victim, was able to leave. He wasn’t there. There wasn’t a guard on the door. She was able to leave. And then he went on to comment that, well, because she was able to leave, she didn’t have to be subjected to this unimaginable night of sexual torture and assault, and because this specific accused had not in fact himself raised a hand to her that he had not perpetrated violence on her directly, basically leading up to the decision that, in the scheme of human trafficking, this was more minimal in nature and that, as I said, the two-year mandatory minimum was unconstitutional.

Again, as a crown in that case—you would have to bring an expert in in order to actually testify about the experience of a victim of human trafficking. But unfortunately, as we have all heard, human trafficking, domestic violence, intimate violence continue to be a rampant problem throughout the province of Ontario, and, frankly, our system would crumble if that was a requirement for all cases.

So, what this requirement does is it essentially, I think, flags to the judiciary that we as the representatives of the public, the elected members of the public, feel that this is a significant issue that we would like them to be better informed about, and then when it comes time for them to rule on the merits of the case or make a decision in bail, that that element of conscience and lived experience that judges bring to all of their decisions also includes some of that information that, absent exposure, would not be available to some of our judiciary otherwise.

In summation, I think this is incredibly valuable legislation and it perfectly balances the competing interests here.

My understanding of how this is to be rolled out—as I said, judicial independence remains an absolutely essential feature of Canadian justice and not something that should be trifled with, altered, treated with any less than the seriousness that it requires. This training is to be developed by the judiciary. I can say, as somebody who has a great deal of experience with a number of members of our bench, both justices of the peace and judges, the vast majority are extremely caring individuals who already take a lot of this concern on their own initiative. The concept of an evaluation—again, I believe that would remain with the judiciary.

However, the idea here is not that we are attempting to force anybody to ascribe to a specific social theory, but simply that we expand some of that lived experience and that conscience that may otherwise be lacking, simply because of having had dramatically less exposure and experience with this.

In answer to your question, I think it will be left to the judiciary again.

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?

Speaker, through you to the member from Barrie–Innisfil: Empowering and supporting education in our courts is very important, but so is understanding the weight and the cost and rewards of those decisions. One of the recommendations from the Renfrew county inquiry was just that, studying judges’ decisions in inter-partner-violence-related crises. Both the community and the judicial wing can learn, and that is training.

My question: Why was the recommendation not actioned when amending the Justices of the Peace Act, considering the measures taken to encourage education within the courts?