Thanks, Chair.
Thanks, witnesses.
The biggest problem we have in this entire discussion, in my opinion, is the rhetoric that surrounds it. It's appalling, quite frankly. We're trying to deal with important policy here.
I think I'm on solid ground when I say that everybody in this room and everybody I know wants bad guys in jails and wants the system to function properly. The problem is that you take these individual cases and sensationalize them, and it blows up. Every time you turn on the news, people get the wrong impression. A number of times, I've seen, daily almost, some heinous crime happen in the city of Toronto, where I live, and some politician says, without even knowing who committed the crime, that the person was probably out on bail. The whole community thinks this has something to do with bail when it probably doesn't.
I'm tempted to ask how we stop that, but it's an unfair question because unless you take it out of the hands of politicians, you can't.
What we have to do is find a way to tone down the rhetoric, find a system that works and find a solution that creates an environment where everybody is confident that it works. What we're really talking about, in terms of the political side, is making sure that the general public has confidence in our system.
Most of the people around this table are lawyers. I think it's safe to say as well that they have confidence in our judges, in our lawyers and in the system as a whole.
I think it was you, Mr. Bytensky, who was talking about the delay and a mandatory right to a bail hearing in 24 hours. I'm not quite sure if I understood that. I didn't get it in my notes. What would you say is the biggest cause of delay in getting a bail hearing right now?