Justice committee  I don't think I said that the status quo was accepted. The question was what was the effect on indigenous women. I said that the effect was going to be status quo. Whether or not there are things that I would change, I think I answered this. There were two options. Both of those options led to the same outcome.

Justice committee  That's right.

Justice committee  What will the impacts be on indigenous women and girls? It's a little bit of a difficult question. We need to understand that there are two competing interests here. On the one side, we have the overincarceration of indigenous women. On the other side, we have the overrepresentation of indigenous women and girls being victimized by violent crime.

Justice committee  Well, I definitely don't have enough time for that one. I would just say it needs to be done at a community level and at a nation-to-nation level because we can't paint with too wide a brush. We need to understand that the communities and the organizations are in the best position to explain what services and supports they need.

Justice committee  I'll try to be as brief as I can. Is what we've done here a good thing? I think essentially two options were available. Both of them resulted in the same outcome. The court had basically said it's a stand-alone offence or fix section 33.1. For reasons that were echoed in the consultations through the 1990s on this with women's groups, there was a risk that a stand-alone offence could undermine other types of plea deals—like, somebody could commit a sexual assault then plea out to a lesser offence of extreme intoxication.

Justice committee  Yes. I'm not entirely sure that I understand the question, but I think it's about what is extreme self-induced intoxication in this context. The bill does spell it out for us in subsection 33.1(4): “extreme intoxication means intoxication that renders a person unaware of, or incapable of consciously controlling, their behaviour.”

Justice committee  We were consulted. It wasn't a great deal of consultation. I think we understand that the government was under a lot of pressure and that there were some misunderstandings about what the SCC decision meant. There was a concern that the public was under the impression that becoming intoxicated was essentially a “get out of jail free” card.

Justice committee  We had a meeting with Department of Justice where they had invited us to discuss the legislation. They invited us to provide our input, and they had explained to us the processes that they had gone through before that point to consult other stakeholders.