Bill C-14 And What Bail Can Not Fix

Interesting items on the show today, including Bill C-14 bail amendments in effect July 14th, what they are and what the B.C. Attorney General's office order to all crown to file a pre-prepared submission in every case means in terms of being every two months.

What's the story?

So, first of all, this piece of legislation, Bill C-14, just came into effect last week.

And it makes a number of changes to provisions dealing with largely bail.

And as we've spoken about before in some general terms, the issue of bail or judicial interim release has gotten sort of politically focused on as somehow an explanation for legitimate concerns about social disorder and crime, right? Yeah.

The thing to understand about bail is that it is really a function of the fact that we presume people to be innocent, right? Most people would agree that's kind of the foundation of our justice system.

And when you presume people to be innocent, one of the consequences of that is that you can't just start punishing people that might have committed a crime because you'll wind up punishing a bunch of people that didn't commit crimes.

Not everyone accused of a crime, of course, is guilty, right?

Yeah.

And that basic principle is constitutionally enshrined, along with the presumption of innocence.

And in 11E of the Charter, it guarantees the right to reasonable bail absent just cause.

And it's been interpreted, keeping in mind that just general principle I've just spoken about.

Well, there are, I should say, legitimate issues with the criminal justice system and things that could be done to improve it.

You know, for example, one of the reasons why we're having this show at a special time today is because of just how busy it is in court.

That's where I was at the regular time, court running over when it would usually run, and that's largely a function of things like an inadequate number of judges, for example, right? We've got communities that grow quickly, and if you don't add resources, which means not just judges, but you also need court clerks and sheriffs and crown and In fact, in many cases, you also need to have legal aid funding.

If you don't have those things, you wind up with courts unable to manage things and cases take longer and longer, all of which is unsatisfactory.

And that's just one example of how there are legitimate issues, many of which involve resourcing, both on the judicial end, on the police end.

There are real and pressing things that could be done to help.

As somebody who's in the system and sees it every day, one of the underlying problems is not generally how the bail system has been functioning.

And so this piece of legislation that came in appears to be intended to politically address the critique that really that's somehow the problem.

If we could just start jailing people before their trial, somehow that would solve the problem.

And the extent to which those basic principles could be modified by legislative change is, of course – not of course, but it is modest because, of course, we have a constitutional right to be presumed innocent, not to deny bail without just cause.

And so – Even if somebody thought it was wise legislatively to just say, well, we're just going to forget about those messy trials that take so much time and just start holding people in jail for a year, whatever it takes now to get to trial, somehow that'll solve our problem.

That's not even constitutionally permissible.

So what we instead have is this piece of legislation, which lists a bunch of things that that I think the best analogy to the medical state of affairs would be like a bunch of admonitions directing doctors that they shall carefully wash their hands before performing surgery.