Miscarriage of Justice Review Commission Bill (David and Joyce Milgaard's Law)
Bill to Amend--Second Reading
October 10, 2024
Honourable senators, today I am thinking of my friend David, his sisters and his mum, who advocated, without rest, from the time of his arrest at age 16 and throughout his wrongful conviction for rape and murder and his 23 years of being held captive in prison.
David was introduced to me by another friend, Donald Marshall Jr. They both remained haunted even after their exonerations. Both, but especially David Milgaard, were devoted to redressing the miscarriages of justice experienced by others.
In our last communication before his death in 2022, David implored me to step up our fight for mutual friends, especially the 12 Indigenous women who are still awaiting exoneration.
Canada needs a commission that can independently investigate miscarriages of justice, so we must ensure that this bill bearing David’s name is worthy of his legacy and capable of delivering justice, including, and especially for, the Indigenous women and others who are most marginalized for whom David Milgaard was still fighting right up until his last days.
We must remedy the inadequacies of Bill C-40 so that it does not repeat the mistakes of the current ministerial review system in terms of not addressing and, indeed, too often becoming another instance of systemic sexism, racism and colonial violence. The 2022 report to the Department of Justice by Justices Harry LaForme and Juanita Westmoreland-Traoré, entitled A Miscarriages of Justice Commission, reveals the systemic racism and misogyny that Bill C-40 must overcome.
As of July 2024, 200 people have applied for miscarriage of justice reviews. Only 30 were permitted to return to court for a retrial, and a mere 24 were successful. Most were White men. Only seven, mostly reviewed in the last few years, were racialized men. Not one was a woman.
Justices LaForme and Westmoreland-Traoré call Bill C-40 “. . . an unnecessarily inadequate . . .” response to their consultations and careful and considered recommendations.
The Legal Committee must interrogate gaps identified by the justices and many other experts and advocates. These include the commission’s limited mandate and remedial options, inadequate resourcing and lack of measures to safeguard diversity on and of the commission. In particular, the lived experiences of Indigenous women, who represent more than half of those in federal prisons, need to be addressed.
In this regard, Bill C-40’s lack of group-review processes and sentence reviews is particularly troubling. In 2022, we issued a report providing a clear and cogent rationale for an en bloc review of the cases of 12 Indigenous women. The miscarriages of justice that they continue to experience arise from systemic discriminatory failures of the criminal legal and prison systems to adequately recognize, contextualize or address inequities occasioned by racism, sexism, violence and ongoing trauma.
Contextualizing women’s stories alongside one another helps ensure more fulsome identification and analysis of the intersection and patterns of systemic inequality, discrimination and violence.
To provide this crucial context, as I will only have time to speak about one or two women today, I ask leave of the Senate, pursuant to rule 14-1(4), to table in both official languages a document entitled Injustices and Miscarriages of Justice Experienced by 12 Indigenous Women.
Is leave granted?
I hear a “no.” Leave is not granted.
Like many others, the 12 women in this report embody the intergenerational impact of forcible removal from land, home, family and community, not to mention the consequent lack of economic, social, health and other supports. Each was victimized before being criminalized and left more likely to be persecuted than protected by state systems. Most faced ongoing and pervasive violence and danger.
Too many are deputized and abandoned to accept responsibility for protecting themselves and those in their care, but then swiftly and disproportionately charged and criminalized if and when they are forced to respond, especially if the response is characterized as violent.
Carol Daniels, 1 of the 12 women, died without ever seeing justice. She was a survivor of childhood sexual assault and still a teenager when she used force defensively, resulting in the death of a woman who procured her for sexual exploitation by a man known for abusing young Indigenous women and documenting the sexual assaults that he perpetrated in videos and photos.
Carol did not disclose, even to her lawyers, the childhood trauma that she experienced. She was ashamed. Her lawyers failed to inquire and consequently failed to adequately defend her or contextualize how Carol’s experiences of racism, sexism and violence affected her actions in trying to defend herself and other young women from further predation.
How many judges or lawyers can imagine trying to protect themselves because state actors may not intervene to keep them safe or, worse yet, may intervene to perpetrate violence?
Carol was convicted of second-degree murder. She was sentenced to a mandatory minimum penalty of life imprisonment with no parole for 10 years. The Saskatchewan Court of Appeal was not asked to consider whether Carol should have even been considered criminally responsible for trying to escape her predators. Instead, counsel focused only on whether being transferred across the country to the Prison for Women in Kingston — at the time, the only federal prison for women — would violate her Charter rights. As a result, in addition to her wrongful conviction, Carol was sent, at the outset, to serve her sentence in isolation in a prison for men in Saskatchewan.
Another woman, 19-year-old Jamie Gladue, was pregnant with her second child when she stabbed her abusive common-law partner. He had previously moved them away from her community of support in Calgary to Nanaimo. Concerned about her safety, her father, a single dad, followed Jamie and Reuben to B.C. and lived in a neighbouring unit.
The night Jamie stabbed him, Reuben had first beaten her, then broken into her father’s house through a bedroom window and raped her sister. He then returned, bragged to Jamie about it, beat her again and attempted to return to the unit where her sibling and father lived. Jamie stabbed him as he attempted to gain entry through the front door of the unit.
This context was never discussed in open court. Worse yet, the racist and misogynist interpretation and treatment of Jamie meant her actions were not described as in defence of herself or her sister. Instead, in the case record, and therefore Canadian law, she was described as a jealous wife who killed Reuben because he was having an affair.
Jamie Gladue’s case represented the first time that the Supreme Court of Canada was asked to interpret section 718.2(e) of the Criminal Code, and therefore stands for the principle that courts must consider Indigenous history and alternatives to prison during sentencing. Unfortunately, the court did not interrogate whether the charges should have been prosecuted or laid at all, or why possible defences of self-defence or defence of other were never explored. Worse yet, neither Jamie nor too many other Indigenous women since have benefited from section 718.2(e). So many Indigenous women with a defence, but facing an automatic life sentence if that defence fails, are almost inevitably offered the option to plead guilty to a lesser charge and sentence, and almost inevitably, colleagues, they do.
As our former colleague the Honourable Murray Sinclair described in the 1991 Manitoba Aboriginal Justice Inquiry, wrongful plea bargains are the product of a legal system that has no faith in Indigenous Peoples’ truth telling.
In 1997, the federal government’s Self Defence Review further highlighted decisions by women to plead guilty. In addition to the concerns raised by then-Justice Sinclair, Justice Ratushny underscored an added disadvantage for battered women. Because of societal and legal resistance to trusting the accounts of women and children who are abused, raising defences of self or other in these contexts generally requires additional witnesses, as the victim’s perspective is too often not believed. Often, the only eyewitnesses are children, and most women are loath to subject their children to the trauma of testifying in court, so many abandon defences and enter plea bargains.
Some Indigenous women lack access to legal counsel. In many cases, however, even experienced lawyers struggle to recognize the relevance of, and centre defences on, experiences of violence, colonialism and misogyny in ways that meaningfully counter those still-too-common myths and stereotypes underscored again most publicly by the Mass Casualty Commission.
The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls describes the injustices that result from failing to contextualize women’s lived experiences as follows:
The Canadian justice system criminalizes acts that are a direct result of survival for many Indigenous women. This repeats patterns of colonialism because it places the blame and responsibility on Indigenous women and their choices, and ignores the systemic injustices that they experience which often lead them to commit crimes.
A new addition to Bill C-40 at committee in the other place provides the independent conviction review commission with the option of making recommendations to “. . . address systemic issues that may lead to miscarriages of justice to relevant public authorities and bodies . . . .”
This process still, however, appears to rely on being able to identify, from an individual case, underlying patterns of oppression of Indigenous women, something the criminal legal system has repeatedly failed to do adequately or consistently, if at all.
Without a group review process to put multiple cases side by side and throw their underlying patterns into sharp relief, we risk turning the review process into just another compounding layer of inequality and injustice.
A second glaring omission in Bill C-40 is the lack of measures permitting the independent commission to review unjust sentences. Justices LaForme and Westmoreland-Traoré recommended that Canada’s system allow for sentence review like its English, Scottish, New Zealand and Norwegian counterparts. The justices note that David Milgaard was adamant we must never close the door on anyone who has experienced injustices. They report that Indigenous peoples and Black Canadians are particularly likely to be sentenced on inaccurate facts or without adequate consideration of all relevant facts.
For Carol Daniels, we have discussed how lawyers failed to defend her by contextualizing her actions as a survivor of childhood abuse and someone who was trying to escape a sexual predator. The mandatory life sentence flowing from her wrongful conviction then meant the court could not consider alternatives to imprisonment.
For Jamie Gladue, the risk of a mandatory life sentence meant she was induced to plead guilty. The full facts of her case and the glaring injustice of her prosecution and conviction were never explored. The question of whether the conviction was never discussed in court and, therefore, never answered by a judge.
Especially as courts continue to strike down mandatory minimum penalties as unfair and unconstitutional, we must acknowledge the reality of unjust sentences. Challenging a sentence, not only a conviction, as a miscarriage of justice could be particularly important given the sense of responsibility too often pushed onto Indigenous women in particular. Their reasonable responses to unreasonable violence are rarely contextualized, and too many police officers, lawyers and judges fail to inquire further when they hear someone take responsibility, whether for personal, familial, community or cultural reasons. Too many consequently face barriers to grounded claims of factual innocence and are thus often rejected by lawyers and organizations, not to mention the Department of Justice, when they seek to challenge a wrongful conviction in the current system.
As Justice Greckol noted in the Naslund case:
. . . a woman subjected to 27 years of egregious abuse may be accustomed to seeing herself as worthy only of harsh punishment. That does not mean the justice system should follow suit.
David Milgaard advocated a review body to remedy unjust convictions and sentences. Let’s fix this bill so that we may honour his dream.
Meegwetch, thank you.
Honourable senators, I rise today as opposition critic to speak to second reading of Bill C-40, the miscarriage of justice review commission act, which would create a body to review and investigate potential wrongful convictions.
Before I begin discussing the substance of the legislation, I wanted to address how difficult it has been to get answers from the Trudeau government about this bill. I asked Department of Justice officials questions at my critic’s briefing on this bill three weeks ago and still have not received full answers to some of them. I received only a couple of minimal answers by email.
I asked the sponsor of Bill C-40, Senator Arnot, questions after his relatively brief speech three weeks ago, but I finally received those just a few hours ago today. Unfortunately, these answers are not especially responsive. I am certain that is not the fault of Senator Arnot; instead, it is the fault of the Trudeau government, which is supposed to provide him with those answers.
Additionally, this fake feminist Trudeau government lauds itself for providing a Gender-Based Analysis Plus, or GBA+, document for every bill, but this government document has not been posted online on the government’s website, on the parliamentary legislation portal nor was it provided as part of the government’s briefing to senators on this issue. I had to request a copy from Senator Arnot, and I do thank him for ensuring I received that earlier this week.
But all of this illustrates a larger problem in Trudeau’s independent Senate: There is no connection between senators sponsoring government bills and the government caucus. The Government Representative in the Senate is allowed unlimited time to present a significant, detailed speech prepared by the government to give senators an opportunity to hear the rationale behind the major policy supporting the legislation. Sadly, it has become commonplace for the Senate government leader and his Trudeau government Senate caucus to refuse to speak on government legislation before the Senate. Senator Gold has not given any second or third reading speeches yet since we returned last month. Therefore, senators also do not have the opportunity to ask questions to the government about these government bills. Instead, senators are left to only ask questions to an independent senator sponsoring the bill.
Too many times, no answers are given to even basic questions about a bill. There is also no real accountability process for us to get the answers from bill sponsors.
Independent senators too often make merely brief sponsor speeches at second and third reading. The speeches are sometimes so lacking in details that senators cannot extract enough for robust debate.
There was a time in the not-so-distant past when the Senate had significant and substantive debate on government legislation. Now, we usually see sponsors’ speeches that are 15 minutes at most. One government bill sponsor last week spoke only for seven minutes at second reading and only three minutes at third reading, yet the government demanded the Senate pass the bill in only two days from introduction to Royal Assent.
Independent senators sponsoring government legislation have even delivered their speeches in the chamber before they’ve been briefed on the bill. Some sponsors have refused to answer questions. Meanwhile, critics of bills are told we need to hurry up and give our speeches so we can get the bill into committee and passed.
That is not good governance, that is not good parliamentary debate and that is not sober second thought to ensure that bills are tested and well considered to be the best they can be for the benefit of Canadians.
Turning to the substance of this bill then, Bill C-40 creates an independent commission to review and investigate alleged miscarriages of justice. The commission will have the ability to refer the matter back to the courts for a new trial. The commission will take the place of the minister’s current role to review an application and order an appeal based on a potential miscarriage of justice. Bill C-40 broadens and clarifies potential applicants, including those convicted under the Young Offenders Act and the Youth Criminal Justice Act, those not criminally responsible and those who have received pardons or an absolute or conditional discharge.
The bill ensures that the applicant and the relevant provincial attorney general are both notified of the admissibility of an application. Further, in the interests of transparency, the bill stipulates that the commission must publish its decisions online.
The short title of this bill is “David and Joyce Milgaard’s Law.” I’m sure most Canadians will know the reference to the Milgaard case. David Milgaard was a 16-year-old from Winnipeg, wrongfully convicted of the 1969 rape and murder of Gail Miller, a nursing aide, in Saskatoon. Milgaard spent more than 22 years in prison for crimes he didn’t commit. He steadfastly maintained his innocence, even though he recognized that, without an admission of guilt, parole was unlikely. Violently abused in prison, Milgaard made several suicide attempts. He escaped twice. For more than 22 years, his mother, Joyce, advocated tirelessly for the overturning of David’s conviction. She rallied others in support of her son’s cause, mounting a public crusade for her son’s innocence.
The Milgaards applied to justice minister Kim Campbell for a wrongful conviction review in 1988. In 1991, Joyce Milgaard even spoke briefly with Prime Minister Brian Mulroney on a street in Winnipeg to plead her son’s case. I remember that well as that meeting happened when I was just beginning my first year of law school at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. We even studied the Milgaard case in my first year criminal law class that semester.
Justice minister Kim Campbell eventually referred the Milgaard matter to the Supreme Court of Canada. The Supreme Court recommended setting his conviction aside, and Milgaard was released from prison in 1992. Minister Campbell ordered a new trial. However, the Saskatchewan government did not do this. Instead, it stayed the proceedings against Milgaard without proclaiming his innocence.
Joyce and David Milgaard continued their fight to clear David’s name. In 1997, DNA evidence from the clothing of murder victim, Gail Miller, was tested. It exonerated Milgaard and led police to convicted rapist Larry Fisher. Fisher was charged with and stood trial for Gail Miller’s rape and murder. My husband, Dave Batters, attended part of the Fisher trial in Yorkton, Saskatchewan, where Al Johnston so expertly led the prosecution of Fisher. A jury convicted Larry Fisher of Miller’s rape and murder in 1999, 30 years later.
In 2003, the Saskatchewan government initiated a formal inquiry into David Milgaard’s wrongful conviction. Years later, I worked as the chief of staff to Saskatchewan justice minister Don Morgan, and I served in that position in the fall of 2008 when Minister Morgan released the results of that Milgaard Inquiry. I even had the honour of meeting Joyce Milgaard before the press conference that day.
One of the recommendations of the Milgaard inquiry was the creation of an independent commission to review wrongful convictions, similar to the entity proposed in Bill C-40 before us today. The creation of a criminal case review commission was contained in former Trudeau justice minister David Lametti’s 2019 and 2021 mandate letters. In March 2021, Minister Lametti announced the appointment of two retired judges, the Honourable Harry S. LaForme and the Honourable Juanita Westmoreland-Traoré, to conduct consultations on the creation of a criminal case review commission. They released a report at the end of that process containing recommendations for the structure and function of an independent commission.
The Trudeau government failed to follow several of the report’s recommendations, but I will address that in more detail later. First, let’s review the structure of the commission that Bill C-40 would establish in this bill.
Under this new regime, the miscarriage of justice review commission would consist of a full-time chief commissioner and four to eight other full- or part-time commissioners appointed by the Governor-in-Council on the advice of the Minister of Justice. No less than one third of the commissioners, including the chief commissioner, but no more than half of the commissioners, must be lawyers with at least 10 years’ experience in criminal law. Bill C-40 mandates that the other half of the commissioners must not, if possible, be criminal lawyers with 10 years’ experience.
I must say that I find the insistence on non-lawyers really surprising for a justice review commission with investigative powers that can refer cases back to the courts for an appeal or a new trial.
In this chamber Tuesday night, Senator Dalphond confirmed that, under the current system, the Criminal Conviction Review Group within the Department of Justice Canada that reviews those cases sent to the Minister of Justice are, in fact, all lawyers. This is important given the severity of what we are dealing with here.
One reason the Trudeau government gives for its new commission structure is, ostensibly, to address overrepresentation of certain groups in the criminal justice system. Yet, I also note that Bill C-40 does not include the recommendation from the judges’ report that one third of the commissioners should be drawn from those populations, including Indigenous peoples and Black peoples. The bill only says the minister must “take into account” factors such as overrepresentation, gender diversity considerations, et cetera, when considering appointments to the commission.
In any case, the commissioners serve up to rather lengthy seven-year terms, which can also be renewed. The bill states commissioners can be removed “for cause,” a high standard, and it fails to detail precisely how that process would work. Quorum consists of half the commission’s members, but Bill C-40 does not state whether that quorum would need to include the chief commissioner or even any lawyer commissioners.
In fact, Bill C-40 leaves quite a few details undefined. For example, the bill mandates that the timeline for the commission to handle applications is “as expeditiously as possible,” but it fails to define any parameters for what that means. Second, the bill states that applicants must be updated on their applications “on a regular basis.” Again, the bill does not define the term “regular basis,” which may lead to confusion.
Bill C-40 creates the position of a victims services coordinator but doesn’t indicate whether that will be a full- or part-time employee or a contracted position. It also does not stipulate the pay of the chief commissioner and the other commissioners, only indicating the compensation will be “fixed by the Governor in Council,” that is, cabinet.
Earlier today, I finally received the following minimally responsive government-prepared answer to the question on compensation that I asked Senator Arnot three weeks ago. It states:
The salary range minimum is between $180,500 (minimum) and the maximum is $464,800. The salary range for the other four to eight commissioners will use the same “2024-25 Compensation for GC Group,” but beginning and ending at lower levels.
This is a range of $284,000.
Bill C-40 does not indicate how many commissioners should be bilingual or hear cases in both official languages. While the bill indicates all Canadians should have easy access to the commission, it doesn’t provide details or resources for facilitating communication with Canadians from northern and remote communities. Furthermore, the bill does not provide details on how the commission is to refer questions regarding an application to a court of appeal for a decision or what the commission is to do with the court’s response.
Here is another so-called answer prepared by the Trudeau government that I received today — three weeks later. My questions to Senator Arnot were the following:
How long will it take before this commission can start its work? Will it be months? Will it be years? What’s the anticipated time frame?
The government-prepared answer states:
After the passage of Bill C-40, initial start-up will require the hiring of the chief commissioners, commissioners, staff and the establishment of building(s) or a base(s) of operation. As well, the commission will need to establish internal policies, practices and engage with stakeholders to establish protocols.
No time frame was stated. You would think if the government is going to take three weeks to send an answer to the Senate critic of their bill, they could at least try to respond to the question.
To return to my other concerns with the bill, while the commission can suggest an appeal to court, it does not have the power to refer an applicant for a pardon or record suspension, as the original judges’ report had recommended. Bill C-40 states that the minister must take into account “the overrepresentation of certain groups in the criminal justice system,” but it only specifically names Indigenous and Black offenders.
The Charter Statement that the government provided on this bill is fairly scant, as is its Gender-based Analysis Plus document. Oddly, the Gender-based Analysis Plus document doesn’t even have much to say about women. The document is silent on even basic statistics about the number of women who are victims of crime, even though it lists similar numbers for other specific groups.
Senator Arnot stated in his second reading speech that of the 30 out of 200 cases over the last 20 years that were referred back to the courts for wrongful convictions, none were women. He noted that this meant women as a group were being underserved by the current wrongful conviction system. The Gender-based Analysis Plus document doesn’t even mention how many women are convicted in Canada. Honourable senators, even a quick Google search determines that, in fact, women comprise only 6% of federal offenders in Canada. So how many applications would we expect from that group?
The factors that bring vulnerable Canadians in contact with the criminal justice system are many, varied and complex. Especially given that it is Mental Illness Awareness Week and given that today is World Mental Health Day, I particularly want to draw this chamber’s attention to the dismissive wording of the Trudeau government’s GBA Plus analysis about Canadians with mental illness. It states:
According to the 2012 Canadian Community Health Survey, Canadians with a mental health or substance use issue are ten times more likely to come into contact with police for problems with their emotions, mental health or substance use, and four times more likely to be arrested than Canadians without such an issue.
Problems with their emotions and mental health? And more likely to be arrested? This language trivializes the experience of people with mental illness and promotes harmful stereotypes linking mental illness with criminality — a stigmatizing trope I have fought against for years as a mental health advocate.
In many ways, this bill creates a host of new questions. Why, for example, did the Trudeau government opt to lower the threshold required for a finding of a miscarriage of justice? Currently, the Minister of Justice may order a remedy if he or she is “. . . satisfied that there is a reasonable basis to conclude that a miscarriage of justice likely occurred . . . .” Bill C-40 contains a much lower standard where the commission will have to determine if they have:
. . . reasonable grounds to conclude that a miscarriage of justice may have occurred and considers that it is in the interests of justice to do so . . . .
Again, the bill fails to define the “interests of justice,” nor does it indicate what possible situations might require an appeal due to a possible miscarriage of justice but would not serve the interests of justice.
Furthermore, Bill C-40 was originally drafted to require that all appeals must be exhausted. However, Liberal government MPs at the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights amended the provision so that, in fact, this commission would no longer be a last resort and that all appeals do not necessarily have to be exhausted. Applicants could apply directly to the commission if they receive a court outcome they don’t like rather than having to apply to the court of appeal — it’s likely a more expensive route for an accused.
After promising a commission on wrongful convictions since 2019, after years of consideration, the government drafted Bill C-40 to require exhausting all appeals. Former justice minister David Lametti spoke in favour of that requirement during his second reading speech. He stated unequivocally:
It is important to note that the miscarriage of justice review process is not an alternative to the judicial system, nor is it another level of appeal. Rather, it provides a post-appeal mechanism to review and investigate new information or evidence that was not previously considered by the courts.
His successor, Minister Virani, also testified in favour of the requirement at the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. When asked if he was concerned that this bill would “open the floodgates” of new and unwarranted applications, Minister Virani replied:
. . . there are built-in factors to avoid them getting all the way through the floodgates. You still need to meet the threshold criteria. You need to have exhausted your appeals, at least to a court of appeal or, in some instances, all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada.
If the requirement to exhaust appeals were a safeguard against frivolous or baseless applications, why would the government remove it? The Trudeau government and its justice minister will need to justify that.
In his speech to the House of Commons, former justice minister Lametti said that from 2003 to 2023 — a period of 20 years — the justice minister received only 187 applications in total. Under the miscarriage of justice review commission created by this bill, the Trudeau government anticipates 250 applications per year. That will be a huge jump.
If the commission doesn’t grant one of the only two possible remedies — either a new trial or hearing or referring the case to a court of appeal — then the commission must dismiss the application. Again, Bill C-40 contains no provision allowing the commission to recommend a pardon or record suspension.
This miscarriage of justice review commission should remain an extraordinary remedy. If this commission recommends many new trials before cases have completed all available appeals, the Trudeau government’s court delay crisis will only be worsened by a deluge of cases in the system. Compounding this problem, the Trudeau government has been utterly negligent in appointing judges in Canada. I’ve sounded the alarm on this for the last eight and a half years. These appointments are solely under the control of the Trudeau government, yet they still can’t get a handle on this. The number of judicial vacancies peaked to outrageous levels under former justice minister Lametti, but the number continues to be stubbornly high. This month, it is still at 52.
Last year, Chief Justice Richard Wagner of the Supreme Court of Canada even took the extraordinary measure of writing to Prime Minister Trudeau, calling the current situation “untenable.” He warned that judicial vacancies are contributing to the court delay crisis that can lead to the release of dangerous criminals and undermine confidence in the justice system. He said:
We are seriously concerned that, without concrete efforts to remedy the situation, we will soon reach a point of no return in several jurisdictions. The consequences will generate headlines and will be serious for our democracy and all Canadians . . . .
If the Trudeau government truly wants to prevent the miscarriage of justice in this country, they should begin appointing judges to fill courtrooms and ensure that justice can be served.
In closing, Bill C-40 gives the commission the power that currently belongs to the Minister of Justice, with the objective of making the process faster and more efficient. This is a laudable aim, particularly when we consider the immense suffering of people like David Milgaard — people who have been deprived of their freedom and potentially spend decades of their lives wrongfully imprisoned for crimes they did not commit. No one wants to see innocent people found guilty. Clearly, Canada has a duty to rectify these situations as expeditiously as possible.
My major concern with this legislation is that Bill C-40 is short on details and leaves many questions unanswered. Further, I find the Trudeau government’s lowering of the threshold for determining a wrongful conviction to be ill-considered. It may ultimately lead to a host of problems the government has failed to anticipate.
Clearly, Bill C-40 will require close scrutiny in committee, and as the Deputy Chair of the Senate Legal Committee, I intend to make sure it gets it. Our goal in the Senate should be to make bills the best that they can be. Thus, I hope all senators will join me in carefully reviewing this legislation before passing it through this chamber. Thank you.
Are honourable senators ready for the question?
Is it your pleasure, honourable senators, to adopt the motion?
Some Hon. Senators: Agreed.
An Hon. Senator: On division.
(Motion agreed to and bill read second time, on division.)
