Subseries 2 - Government Projects—Federal

0.4 m of textual records

This Subseries contains various federal projects that I was involved with over the years. Other federal projects can be found in other boxes, such as Securities Regulation, National Security, Gun Control, the Law Reform Commission of Canada, and Bail Reform.

File 2 contains material on a conference held in 1964 at Osgoode Hall Law School to examine how criminal statistics could be improved.

Files 3 to 6 set out my involvement with the Canadian Committee on Corrections, known as the Ouimet Committee, which reported in 1969. I did a background study for them on the functioning and facilities of magistrates courts. This required a number of trips in 1967 across the country and to the United States. My major recommendation was that there should be only one level of court for serious criminal cases, a recommendation which was not, however, reflected in the Ouimet Report itself, but is still being debated across the country. The study was published in the Criminal Law Quarterly and was also printed in three installments in the Globe and Mail.

While on sabbatical in 1969 I had studied the process of law reform and when I returned to Canada I became involved in the subject for the Department of Justice (files 7-10). I set out a series of recommendations in a memo dated October 20, 1969 and met with senior officials and the Minister, John Turner, in Ottawa. In December 1969 I gave a lecture on the machinery of criminal law reform in a series sponsored by the Centre of Criminology (see boxes on Law Reform), which was commented on by the press and the Department. In 1971 I was appointed (as set out in other boxes on the Law Reform Commission of Canada) to be a full-time member of the Commission.

In the 1980s I did considerable work for the Department of Justice on Codification of the Criminal Law. This is set out in files 13-17.

In 1985 I completed a Study for the Canadian Sentencing Commission on Sentencing Structure in Canada, which was published by the Department of Justice for the Commission (see files 20-25).

The Supreme Court of Canada had stuck down the Criminal Code’s abortion provisions in the Morgentaler case in 1987 and the Department of Justice planned to introduce new legislation that they hoped would be consistent with the Charter. In 1988, the Department asked John Robinette and me to give separate opinions on the proposed legislation (see files 27-31). My opinion is contained in file 31. I’m not sure if Robinette ever did an opinion -- I never saw one-- but perhaps he simply based his opinion on my memo. Frank Iacobucci, the deputy minister, was no doubt responsible for involving me. The following year, John Tait was the deputy and again I was asked, along with Robinette, to give an opinion on further proposals. I gave a series of opinions on various drafts (files 32-34). In the end, of course, no amendments got through Parliament.

Open