I’ll be splitting my time with the member from Mississauga Centre. I want to tell you why I’m supporting this motion. The member from Toronto Centre said that we had to listen to the experts that work within the system. I was part of the committee that came up with this report on bail reform. I performed bail hearings in Ottawa, Pembroke, Brampton, Oshawa, Brantford, Kitchener, Goderich, Guelph, Stratford, Walkerton and St. Thomas, just to name a few. At a conservative estimate, I’ve probably performed about 4,000 bail hearings and bail decisions in my time as a crown attorney. So frankly, I would consider myself to be an expert within the system. The reason that I ran for office was because of my experience as a crown attorney. I want to explain why this motion is so important and why it is the farthest possible thing from being a symbolic motion.

I would also like to specifically thank the member from Timiskaming–Cochrane and the member from Orléans, who is no longer here. Those members attended the days of testimonial on our committee, but also attended the days on which we debated the amendments and recommendations and therefore informed it very helpfully in that manner, not leading to last-minute amendments as we are seeing today.

When I began as a crown, began in criminal law, it was about—I was called to the bar in 2014. So this was before the original bail reform considerably and, at that time, it was a completely different landscape. What a lot of people don’t understand when they talk about calling for bail reform is that an aspect of bail reform already happened. What we are calling for is a reform to the reform.

So coming up on 2015-16, I was a crown at that point in time, and what we were seeing in Alberta, in Ontario and all across Canada was, I will full on say, an overreliance on utilizing sureties in Alberta specifically, and in Ontario, an overreliance on conditions that could not be complied with. For example, it was common to require an accused person to give their address, and then on their bail, include a term to reside at that address. Many individuals were homeless, could not possibly provide an address, and yet if they were found not residing at that address, they would then be charged for breaching their recognizance, arrested, brought back to court and very likely held for breaching. Those were issues that were widespread. Crowns were aware of it, defence counsel were aware of it, and police were aware of it.

As a crown, I myself started abandoning those conditions fairly early on, because as an officer of the court and a person with, I think, a strong moral code, I was uninterested in putting conditions on people that they could not possibly comply with that had nothing to do with the real purpose of bail, which was to reduce risk in our society. However, like many things that we see in politics, in society, when a pendulum swings too far one way, the swing back doesn’t stop in the centre. It continues on to the other side. Where we are now is the other side, the other swing of that pendulum.

You’ve heard about Antic. You’ve heard about the ladder principle. You’ve heard about C-75. What Antic did was—in many ways, when it first came out, it didn’t seem like a particularly revolutionary decision. It essentially copied and pasted the provisions of bail from the Criminal Code and said, “FYI, guys, that’s the law. Don’t forget you’re not supposed to be using conditions that are unnecessary or can’t be complied with. A surety is the highest form of relief. Remember that.” However, the federal government stepped in, codified that, and then we got the ladder principle. We got a term that persons identifying as coming from any theoretically vulnerable population should have custody considered as a last resort.

And not particularly gradually—actually, relatively quickly—after Antic and after C-75, I went from being able to—I’ll put it this way: When somebody would come into bail court and you’re making a bail decision, again, I’m an officer of the court and my role is to determine the risk that you pose. Quite frequently, certainly the norm, people are held for bail, and they are not held in custody. They go to the crown. The crown would make a decision, where I would be looking at, say, a domestic offender and decide, “You know what? He’s releasable, but I’m going to need these conditions: that he stay away from the victim, that he not possess any weapons. But he’s good to go otherwise.” And he would go in, he would present that to the justice of the peace, and he would have discussed it with Legal Aid counsel beforehand. It would be agreed on. The person would be released on reasonable conditions.

But what started happening is the justices of the peace, all of a sudden, were so frankly frightened of having some sort of judicial review, of being told that they’d overreached their powers, that the crown’s recommendations, as somebody who—the goal is never to step on the rights of an accused person. That is not the role of the crown. A crown goes in there to try to address risk.

All of a sudden, we wouldn’t be listened to. It got to the point where, particularly during COVID, I could no longer, as far as I was concerned, ever succeed in having the accused held in custody. And these are people with domestic offences, with significant related prior records, who were charged with choking a victim, choking to the point of unconsciousness. These are people with loaded handguns down the back of their pants walking through downtown Guelph at 2 o’clock in the afternoon.

We would do the bail hearing and I would present the evidence to the best of my ability, and then we would hear the justice of the peace decision and I would think, were we even in the same courtroom for this? Because from what I can tell, we weren’t. And I would go home every night feeling incredibly anxious, because I knew that I had done my best, but ultimately, I would be worried about that person who was now back out on the street.

The reason that we’re talking, as I said, about the feds here is because, really, the codification of Antic in C-75, that is federal legislation. They do have a very, very significant part to play here when it comes to, as I said, reforming that reform, when it comes to making sure that that pendulum comes back into the centre.

But, yes, the province, of course, also has a role. The idea that this motion somehow—because we are asking the federal government to take necessary steps, that we are somehow absolving the province of responsibility is entirely incorrect. Anybody who reads the report that we created can see that there are a number of clear recommendations set forward for the province—and again, recommendations that I’m happy to have played a part in: for example, the suggestion of training or having certain offences heard by a provincial court judge versus a justice of the peace.

In C-75, interestingly, one of the new offences that was added was the offence of, basically, choking or strangulation. The reason that it was added was because it was considered that strangulation, the act of manually choking somebody, is such a serious offence that it was deserving of its own specific category, its own section number. And yet—I will not name them—I would regularly present cases to a justice of the peace who would refuse to give me a no-weapons condition on any bail hearing where the offender had allegedly choked the victim because, and I quote, “Hands are not weapons.” And this is the type of training that we are dealing with.

So when we talk about femicide, when we talk about protecting women, I would go home regularly, every night, genuinely worried if, the next week, I would find out that the worst had happened. That is what we are trying to address here. That is why we are calling on the federal government to make these changes.

I am proud of the work that was done on the bail committee. As I said, I would absolutely not call this a symbolic motion. This is real, this is substantive and this is addressing something that I saw, day in and day out, in my career as a crown attorney, as I said, performing at least 4,000 bail hearings over the course of my career.