A non-lawyer writing in the
National Post has this to say about Friday's
Stillman decision of the Supreme Court of Canada:
No other group in society willingly signs up to a job that involves, if necessary, employing massively destructive weapons to blow stuff up and kill people in a purely offensive mission. No other group in society signs up for a job where they can be ordered to stay behind and die in a helpless fight if the overall tactical situation requires said sacrifice. No other group in society agrees to serve under a regimented chain-of-command that they can be imprisoned for violating. No other group in society agrees to tolerate the same level of dislocation to their personal lives as military members take on as a matter of routine. (Imagine how you’d react if your boss told you you were spending the next eight months in a primitive camp in the middle of a hostile foreign country getting shot at).
Might one not ask, as the dissenting justices in effect did, what this has to do with offenses that have no connection to military service and that, if tried in civilian court, would entail the Charter right to trial by jury?
Parliament could amend the National Defence Act to afford military personnel charged with a crime punishable by imprisonment for 5 years or more the right to choose between trial by court-martial and trial by jury before a civilian criminal court. In this way members of the military would be given the same protection the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms gives everyone else.
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