I'm certainly sympathetic to the objective that Mr. Housefather has. Perhaps my decision would be different if we were dealing with our amendment first and his amendment second, but we have to look to the remedy section of this legislation. This, in many cases, will involve a new trial or the court of appeal hearing an appeal that it hadn't otherwise.
The commission doesn't decide whether someone is guilty or innocent. It restarts the process or continues the judicial process. I have to go back to the evidence we've heard around victims and victims' families being revictimized by the process. That's why I feel that with the passage of this legislation, we are going to end up with a flood of applications. It makes abundant sense to me not to require someone to avail themselves of an appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada before availing themselves of the wrongful conviction process. My concern is that Mr. Housefather's amendment is going to further open up what will be a floodgate and a very painful time for victims of crime and their families.
I'll just quickly make the point that before the decision from the Supreme Court found unconstitutional the consecutive sentencing requirement for those convicted of first-degree murder, if they had convicted multiple murders, they would have had consecutive periods of parole ineligibility. We heard testimony at this committee from victims' families, who said they thought the process was over, that this was horrifying for them, that they had begun to heal and now a scab had been ripped off. We heard from Tim Bosma's widow. She said the one good thing that came out of this was knowing that her daughter would never have to face the convicted at a parole hearing. Now with this decision, her daughter will have to face her father's killer at a parole hearing.
I hope you can understand my concern about flooding our already overstressed justice system with potentially frivolous cases. Who among the convicted wouldn't want a second shot? Everyone would want it. Then we turn to the legislation and ask how we can prevent frivolous applications. What are we as parliamentarians telling the commission to look at? If we look at the current law, the Minister of Justice has to feel that a miscarriage likely occurred. If we look at the U.K., they have to feel there's a real possibility of a miscarriage of justice. If we look at North Carolina, they have an even higher threshold of factual innocence, so it's not fair to compare their non-requirement to appeal to ours, because our thresholds for someone to avail themselves of this process are so dramatically different.
I think Mr. Fortin's suggestion is a good one and I would support it. It would make what could be a bad situation a little better. However, overall, as to Mr. Housefather's amendment, I still can't support it because of how flawed I feel the system as a whole will still be unless we amend our threshold.