Crime, clemency and calls to action: The CBA resolves to…

  • July 05, 2016

The 18 resolutions for this summer’s CBA Council meeting break down into a number of interesting groups: four deal with diversity, there are three each on criminal justice and medical assistance in dying and two on corporal punishment of children.

The most important resolution for the CBA is the one dealing with a new governance model for the association. The CBA board approved the model in June, and Council must now debate whether to accept and implement it. The purpose of the new model is to streamline the governance structure in order to better implement the strategic direction adopted by Council at the Mid-Winter meeting in February. We encourage all members to study the resolutions and the information on the Re-think website, for a deeper understanding of the changes being recommended.

The four diversity resolutions come from a variety of sources: the Women Lawyers Forum has a resolution calling for pay equity in the legal profession; SOGIC’s resolution calls for laws to be amended to give LGBT parents equal recognition. The Equality Committee calls for the creation of a working group that would develop a strategy to improve the diversity of speakers in CBA PD programs. The first resolution from the new Law Students Forum would see more inclusive gender identity categories on CBA membership forms.

The CBA End-of-Life Working Group has offered up three resolutions to inform the next round of legislation on medical assistance in dying. The first urges the federal government to amend the Criminal Code to allow advance requests for medical assistance in dying. The second would have the CBA urge governments to amend their respective laws to make people with psychiatric conditions eligible to receive medical assistance in dying. The third would have the CBA urge the federal government to commission a child rights impact assessment that would, after consultations, make recommendations for legislation permitting medical assistance in dying to competent minors.

The Criminal Justice Section has presented four resolutions for consideration: the first, developed in cooperation with the Privacy Section, would have the CBA ask federal, provincial and territorial governments to adopt legislation to restrict the disclosure of information gathered by police and held in police databases that did not result in a conviction. It also asks that those about whom the information was gathered have a mechanism to review and correct the information in those databases. The second resolution expresses a wish to see the current record suspension system replaced “with a pardon system designed to end the stigma of a prior conviction and encourage effective reintegration” of offenders in society. The third calls on governments at all levels to “clearly restrict the use of pretrial detention.”

The fourth is one of a pair of resolutions dealing with corporal punishment of children. The one from the Criminal Justice Section, titled Protecting Marginalized Families, supports maintaining section 43 of the Criminal Code and using “more productive measures to address problems in the use of disciplinary action toward children.” The resolution from the Constitutional and Human Rights Law Section, on the other hand, would have the CBA urge the federal government to remove the section 43 exemption.

The Aboriginal Law Section has two resolutions for this meeting: one calls for the CBA to commit to advancing the goals laid out in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s calls to action. The second calls on the CBA to urge the Justice Minister to discuss with her U.S. counterpart the possibility of granting clemency to Leonard Peltier, 71, who was convicted on false evidence and has served more than 40 years behind bars in the U.S. for murder.

That leaves a smattering of miscellaneous resolutions: one from the Access to Justice Committee calling for the government to endorse the legal aid benchmarks proposed by the CBA and the Association of Legal Aid Plans of Canada as part of a renewed approach to legal aid in Canada; one from the Family Law Section seeking to have the government fill longstanding judicial vacancies in superior courts, and to “maintain a full complement of judges as a critical component of a properly functioning justice system.” A final resolution comes from the Bankruptcy, Insolvency and Restructuring Section (which would herewith like to be known as the Insolvency Law Section) and the Military Law Section (which wishes to adopt a law reform process consistent with that of other CBA Sections).

Please see the resolutions page for more information on all of these resolutions.