Colleagues, I am delighted to be here with you this morning.
[English]
I'm pleased to appear before this committee to answer your questions regarding items in the main estimates. I note this is my 45th appearance before a parliamentary committee, which is a very important part of our parliamentary accountability process.
Mr. Chair, joining me today eventually will be Brian Saunders, George Dolhai, of course my deputy minister, William Pentney, and Marie-Josée Thivierge.
Chair, in my role as Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada I'm responsible for helping and in some cases shepherding our justice system through various iterations of our efforts to remain relevant, fair, accessible, and of course, to support Canadians in many ways. Justice must not only be done but be seen to be done, as the old well-worn legal maximum says. This is what Canadians expect.
The items that the Department of Justice has submitted to be tabled under main estimates will further our work to ensure just that—that our justice system continues to evolve, to be fairer and more inclusive, and enhances the personal safety and security and confidence of Canadians through our criminal laws, policies, and programs.
To turn to the numbers, the Department of Justice is estimating net budgetary expenditures of $630.6 million in the year 2014-15. Of these slightly more than half is allocated to grants and contributions, 38% is allocated to operating expenditures, while the remainder is allocated to statutory expenditures.
This spending will support the wide-ranging and important services that the government provides to all of government. That is to suggest that the Department of Justice provides those legal services across many departments, which includes a large number with respect to litigation, legislation, and advisory services.
These figures also represent a net spending decrease of $26.9 million from the 2013-14 main estimates. The decrease I can note is mainly attributable to the cost savings found through the strategic operating review as well as sunsetting of several initiatives.
Mr. Chair, while the choices that facilitated the cost saving required the prioritization of programs, it illustrates the department's commitment to supporting the government's economic action plan and to achieving savings for Canadians, where possible, through innovation and modernization to ensure that we better meet the needs of today, never losing sight of the importance of providing meaningful support and access to justice for Canadians.
One important area of expenditure, representing an increase of $1.4 million, enhances the victims fund and expands the reach of the federal victims strategy, specifically for time-limited operational funding to non-governmental organizations serving victims of crime and in particular the child advocacy centres. These centres, which now span the country, are one of the most innovative, compassionate, and important contributions that I have seen in my time as both a practising lawyer and as Minister of Justice. These centres provide crucial services to young victims of abuse and their families. I believe their contribution is offering front-line services day to day that make a real difference in the lives of youth.
[Translation]
Mr. Chair, there has also been an increase of $3.98 million, in addition to the initial funding of $40.17 million under the Roadmap for Canada's Linguistic Duality 2013-2018 for Access to Justice in Both Official Languages.
The initiatives described earlier will enable the Minister of Justice to build a justice system that is more equitable, that will improve access to justice in both official languages and that will meet the ever-changing needs of Canadians across the country.
In addition to our current success, the future is promising. The Government of Canada has taken action with respect to a number of criminal justice priorities in order to guarantee rights and make communities safer for us to live in, thrive and raise our families.
[English]
Mr. Chair, on April 3 of this year, the and my predecessor, , announced historic legislation that would transform the way victims of crime are treated in our country's justice system. After extensive cross-country consultation with numerous individuals and stakeholder groups, I had the honour to table in the House of Commons the .
This is intended to establish statutory rights for information, protection, participation, and restitution, and to ensure that a complaint process is in place to deal with breaches of these rights. This legislation would entrench the rights of victims of crime at the federal level. Protecting victims and providing them with a more effective voice in our justice system is a key priority for our government. Victims of crime deserve to be treated with courtesy, compassion, inclusion, and respect—basic rights, in my view, necessary for public confidence and trust in our justice system.
Chair, colleagues, above all Canadians expect that their justice system will keep them safe. Public safety is a fundamental and foremost responsibility of any government. The government understands this expectation and is committed to protecting Canadians from individuals who pose a high risk to public safety. Our laws and current legislation reflect our commitment to this responsibility.
To that end, the government introduced Bill , which received royal assent on April 10, 2014. The bill helps protect Canadians from persons who are found to be not criminally responsible on account of mental disorder, and who pose a higher risk of committing violence if released. This, I should note, is a very small percentage of individuals who are actually deemed not criminally responsible, and is somewhat akin to the dangerous offender applications and findings in our Criminal Code.
The legislation enhances the safety and confidence of victims specifically by considering them when decisions are being made about mentally disordered accused persons, making sure victims are notified when accused are being discharged, and where they intend to reside, if the victim desires, and allowing for non-communication orders between the accused and the victim.
In addition, Mr. Chair, our government will continue to take action to protect the most vulnerable through the , as well as Bill , the cyber bill. We are working to maintain the safety and security of our communities and our streets by ensuring that legislation responds to the evolution that naturally occurs, and that includes, of course, the Supreme Court's ruling in Bedford, which struck down Criminal Code sanctions as they pertain to prostitution.
So to conclude, Mr. Chair, our government is committed to maintaining the integrity of our criminal justice system. We are strengthening that commitment with the level of funding that the Department of Justice portfolio has received, and the funding that Justice has received delivers concrete results for Canadians. I'll continue to do my best to see that those taxpayer funds are spent wisely, while ensuring that Canadians have a fair, relevant, and accessible justice system.
I want to thank you and the committee members for the essential work that you do for providing our department with the opportunity to make these comments and to interact in a way that I hope is meaningful for all.
I thank you, Mr. Chair.
Minister, unfortunately, we will not have a full hour with you. While we would like to be able to discuss a bit more in depth the major issues we are studying, the members in the House are debating another time allocation motion on a democratic reform bill. That is more than 60 time allocation motions introduced by the government.
It is quite a strange process. We are studying the main estimates, which are quite voluminous, and there are some aspects that fall under your responsibility since they concern the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, the Commissioner for Federal Judicial Affairs, the Canadian Human Rights Commission, the Supreme Court of Canada, the Department of Justice's entire budget, the courts administration service and the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. However, we have to study all that with only five minutes for questions each.
I will try to be brief and I would like the answers to be brief as well.
My first question has to do with the budget of the Supreme Court. Are we to understand that you are going to appoint someone to the Quebec position that is still vacant? Is that part of your main estimates? When are you going to start spending those funds? In other words, are you going to proceed with the appointment as soon as possible?
I have a second question for you.
In these estimates, the Department of Justice funding for transfers to provinces for legal aid services drops significantly. That funding comes from t. We know that the provinces are asking for a bit more funding in that area because the needs are huge. I don't understand why savings are being made at the expense of legal aid.
Here is my third question.
Bill is creating a new administrative tribunals support service as an act. Do you expect this service to involve spending? I am not sure your estimates list the financial impact of the 11 tribunals that will fall under this service. Do you expect to save money with this service? Or do you expect to have a period of transition?
I would have liked to have more than five minutes to have an intelligent discussion. I doubt I will be able to have answers to all those questions. Perhaps you can promise to provide us with the answers later, if you don't have time to answer all my questions.
I assume that I will have to ask your colleague, the Director of Public Prosecutions, about his mandate, as described in the main estimates, and about his role in the RCMP. I will come back to that later.
Mr. Chair, are we going to come back to committee after the vote?
:
Thank you very much, Mr. Goguen. I know that you've also had a long-standing interest in this particular area, as does Mr. Dechert. This bill, we believe, does strike the proper balance, but to be clear, what we're attempting to do here is not to in any way create a new protection for criminal or civil liability for those who voluntarily assist law enforcement. What we are very much attempting to do here, obviously, first and foremost, is to protect people from online criminal activity.
You highlighted, as would I, the importance of protecting children. We know there has been a massive proliferation of hand-held devices and online activity, which, quite frankly, leaves children vulnerable. We've seen extremely insidious behaviour, including luring of children, including the type of very detrimental behaviour that led to the incredible tragic circumstances around the loss of life of Rehtaeh Parsons, Amanda Todd, Todd Loik, and other youth across the country who have suffered tremendous distress, to the point where they took their own lives. I've met with a number of those family members, as I know you have, and the ramifications for this are still being felt certainly in those families and communities.
We've introduced this bill, which is now in a place where it will receive rigorous examination. We have done so after tremendous consultation, not the least of which included a report from my provincial counterparts. We heard quite definitively from our provincial and territorial counterparts about the need to move in this direction.
Again, I want to stress that the provisions here provide protection for those who participate in the provision of information and do so voluntarily, but still they must do so in a way that is consistent with other Criminal Code provisions and other provisions with respect to the handling of information. PIPEDA plays a very important role in determining whether those provisions have been followed to the letter of the law.
Again, I would suggest to you that persons who disclose personal information without a warrant have to do so in accordance with the law. This does not create new protections or in any way afford some sort of blanket protection for individuals to provide private information. That is not the intent of this bill. The intent is to, in fact, buttress the protection for those who may fall prey or may fall victim to online criminality.
By and large, it's safe to say that all parties appear to have accepted the necessity of curbing Internet crime, and of course, sexual abuse online. A number of parties and a rather wide spectrum have backed the government up on this bill. For instance, according to Lianna McDonald from the Centre for Child Protection, Bill :
...will assist in stopping the misuse of technology and help numerous young people impacted and devastated by this type of [crime].
You mentioned Amanda Todd. Carol Todd, the mother of Amanda, who was a victim, declared to Canada AM on November 22, 2013:
I see this as a good step forward because there has to be consequences for actions and instead of this being a grey area; it’s more black and white.
David Butt, counsel for the Kids Internet Safety Alliance, in The Globe and Mail, November 21, 2013, said:
...the new bill is a great improvement over trying to fit the round peg of this particular problem into the square hole of our existing child pornography laws.
This is from Wayne MacKay of Dalhousie's law school:
The Criminal Code is our biggest sanction and making it an offence sends a clear signal.
Allan Hubley, Ottawa city councillor and father of a bullied teen who took his own life, said on Canada AM:
When we were younger, you always knew who your bully was, you could do something about it. Now, up until the time this legislation gets enacted, they can hide behind that.
They have the anonymity. He continues:
Not only does it start to take the mask off of them, through this legislation there is serious consequences for their actions.
So victims are saying it's time for this law to be enacted, and of course, there has been some fear that there would be intrusion into privacy. How is this act and the ability to gather information and evidence on Internet crime balanced with the need to protect privacy?
:
I'm sure you will. Thank you, Minister.
I want to welcome everyone to the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. We were tight on time, so I didn't announce the meeting properly at the beginning because we wanted to get to questions of the minister and his statement as soon as possible.
This is meeting number 23 and it is televised. The orders of the day are regarding the main estimates of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, the Commissioner for Federal Judicial Affairs, the Courts Administration Service, the Justice department itself, the Director of Public Prosecutions, and the Supreme Court of Canada.
We've had the minister for, unfortunately, a broken-up first hour, but the second hour we're treating as a second panel. It is the officials—I'm getting it right now instead of calling them staff—the officials from the department coming to answer any questions. We're going to start the process all over again as if it's a new panel.
Do you have any opening statements? Do you want to introduce anybody, Mr. Pentney?
:
My thanks to all the witnesses for being with us today.
Clearly, as the chair of the committee said, we are here to look at the main estimates a little. As I was saying to the minister just now, this exercise is sort of phoney to some degree because of the short time we have and the amounts you have in your budgets, whether at the Department of Justice or the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions.
I am going to look at some items that are of interest to me regardless of the numbers. The figures will probably be readjusted three times over the year anyway. That is what I was told about the legal aid.
My first question will be a bit more general and it is for the officials from the Department of Justice. That is part of your role.
I was looking at the main estimates 2014-15 and each of your categories that are being studied. When I look at what the Department of Justice needs to do, a large part of its role is to provide legal advice to the minister in terms of his responsibilities to ensure legislation is consistent with the Charter and constitutional, and so on. It also has a role to play for other departments.
We know that the issue of appointments to the Supreme Court of Canada is making the headlines a lot. Legal opinions from outside have also been requested. However, Mr. Pentney, have your services also been used by the department to issue specific legal opinions on eligibility?
My second question is for the Director of Public Prosecutions. A particular matter has caused a stir in the House of Commons. It has to do with the rather large sum of money paid by an employee from the Prime Minister's Office to reimburse the perhaps questionable expenses incurred by a senator. An investigation was conducted on the issue.
One of the roles of the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions is to advise investigators of what is happening. Let me read what it says in the document attached to the main estimates:
Where required, the ODPP also provides prosecution-related advice to investigators for all types of prosecutions. Such advice continues to be crucial to ensure that investigative techniques and procedures are consistent with evolving rules of evidence and protections under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The advantage of early prosecutorial advice is that it reduces the risk that operational decisions, such as those about methods of obtaining evidence, will detrimentally affect the admissibility of evidence at trial or the constitutional rights of Canadians.
In short, that is what we usually see with crown prosecutors in trials other than yours. In those cases, the police is in constant contact to see if there are grounds for prosecutions.
Is it safe to say that your services have not been contacted at all so that you can express an opinion on the matter of laying charges in a given context, such as Mr. Wright's case?
:
I will lead off, and then others will join.
The government is obviously committed to reinforcing and doing what it can within its jurisdiction for the importance of both official languages and the importance of the capacity of those who are involved in the justice system one way or another, whether as judges, as defendants who come before the courts, or obviously as crown attorneys, whether on the public prosecution side or on the civil justice side, to ensure that we're respecting official language rights.
The road map is a continuation of a reasonably long-standing program that's looking at doing a couple of different things. One is providing practical support, and we can speak more in detail, if you'd like, about the support, for example, that's provided to allow judges to increase their linguistic capacity to manage proceedings in both official languages and also to support communities and community outreach, especially community information. Here I'd underline two specific things.
[Translation]
Sometimes, it is difficult for them to understand technical terms, be they in English or in French. However, we use those terms a great deal. We have supported programs aimed at helping lawyers and the public understand and use the correct terms, in both English and French.
[English]
So we have directed some program resources to support that sort of building of tool kits, if you like, that aid lawyers, judges, or others in the community to use the proper terms.
The other aspect of funding has gone to try to support the sharing of best practices and what is working and what can work better.
So, practically speaking, these are resources to ensure that there can be an enhanced respect for the use of both official languages in the court systems. A significant amount of the resources go to supporting judicial training or other kinds of training to provide the practical tools on the ground to enable that to become a reality. The resources that we're administering are largely program resources that are out the door. We have a small team in the department that administers that and coordinates with other experts, provincially and territorially, to try to ensure that we're understanding what the needs are. But the vast bulk of those resources, I think it's fair to say, is money out the door to communities' programs, and a part of it goes to judicial training.
Barb, is there anything we should add?
:
Thank you for the question, Mr. Chairman. It's a very good question.
I sit before you with a giant binder that wasn't typed and photocopied. It was input into a system, other documents were reformatted, and then it was printed. If you or I go back to our office and look at an existing file we will find the draft, the final draft, the final final final draft of some documents. Most of us are not operating with systems that regularly purge drafts.
If you look at the number of emails that you received this morning that have a cc on them in terms of document disclosure, what we're seeing—and corporate Canada and private lawyers are seeing—is an absolute explosion. The first task in dealing with that avalanche of documents is what's affectionately known in our line of work as de-duping. So how many duplicate emails do you need to go through to get to the final one that represents the email train?
Given the nature of disclosure rule, that has lead to an exponential increase because of document management, because of the ways in which information is generated and the need to look at electronic information and paper information. The fact is that the court system has not made the transition that other systems have made to go online, neither federally nor provincially.
So we are working very hard to look at document management within government and document management within our own department and then using more electronic sources to do an initial screen so that we can get to the final email in that chain, because that's the one we need to focus on. It's not the 27 emails that lead to it. Unfortunately right now a lot of that is being done in the affectionate term “handraulically”.
I just want to say that it is fortunate that we do not do our household budgets the same way the government does its budget. I honestly think that we would all end up bankrupt. I personally like to have a budget. It helps me see where I am going and what I am going to spend money on.
Over the past few years, we have been led to review the main estimates. The government starts by tabling a budget and then the main estimates are revised three times. At the end of the year, we look at what happened. It is not easy to ensure consistency.
I don't know how each of you manage to do a good job in your departments with the funding you receive and to conduct your activities in line with bills that might change the situation in midstream.
As you so well said, Mr. Pentney, if the Canadian victims bill of rights is passed, it will clearly have a financial impact. If a number of other pieces of legislation are passed, there will be consequences, which will force us to make changes, without forgetting about the existing programs already in place. Think about the people who deal with the Minister of Justice and are making requests for those programs.
I have met with groups that do an outstanding job on the ground to help victims. Here are some of the issues they are dealing with:
[English]
human trafficking, supporting victims and survivors, Inuit women and girls who have been trafficked in Canada, Justice Canada's victims fund, denied; understanding the vulnerabilities of Inuit women and girls to violence, Justice Canada's access to justice fund, submitted for 2014-15, denied.
[Translation]
I do not know how we go about coming to an arrangement with the department on this.
Yesterday in the House, I asked the minister a question about the Winnipeg Drug Treatment Court. Basically, the minister’s reply was that he believed in it, but, as for all programs, the government was in the process of reviewing it.
How long will you be in this review process? How are you conducting the review? Let’s say that you decide to continue, where is the budget to do so? I do not see it anywhere.
I am a little concerned about how you find money and how you say no to groups. We need some general clarification about this. How long are you going to think about it before you renew budgets as a result?
:
Thank you for that question.
The first part of the question deals with the planning process and the parliamentary process that approves funds. To fully understand the whole, you have to read certain documents together.
We tabled a report on plans and priorities in the House; it lists the expenditures planned for the next three years. We do the planning to the best of our knowledge and we work with professionals like Ms. Thivierge and her team so that we can properly manage our resources internally. We forecast our expenditures for the next three years, we establish our priorities, and we make sure that we can fulfill our commitments and meet our priorities with the resources at our disposal. That is the burden of financial management.
We have a lot of interaction with external people. We have websites that contain a lot of information and we work with experts. We work closely with the provinces and their experts so that there is good dialogue with various groups.
Some programs, like the program for victims, depend on good applications. We work closely with people, but, ultimately, funds are limited and choices have to be made from among the various requests. But I can assure you that we work closely with the provinces, their experts and with community organizations in order to help them better understand the terms, conditions and technical aspects when the time comes to submit an application. The goal is to know what they want to achieve with the funds they will be allotted. There is give and take, but…
[English]
Barb could speak to the applications that have been approved and the amount of money that's been approved for worthwhile programs in communities to support victims, to support efforts in communities to address the problem of murdered and missing aboriginal women, and all of those other things that are approved.
[Translation]
But some applications just cannot be approved.