Michael Bryant, executive director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, speaks at a press at Queen's Park, in Toronto, Monday, July 16, 2018. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Mark Blinch

TORONTO — The Canadian Civil Liberties Association is accusing Doug Ford of turning the right to a fair trial into a casualty of his plan to tackle gun violence.

“We don’t have a police state, we don’t have a prosecution service that’s decided by the premier or by the popular opinion,” Michael Bryant, the association’s executive director, told reporters at Queen’s Park on Thursday.

He was responding to Ford’s announcement earlier in the day that the government will establish a “legal SWAT team” at each of Toronto’s five courthouses with the sole purpose of “keeping violent gun criminals behind bars and away from bail.” According to Bryant, the message is that people who have not yet been convicted of a crime still belong behind bars.

“How can anybody feel like they’re getting a fair hearing at bail court if they think that the juggernaut of the state is out to lock them up, no matter what,” he asked.

People charged criminally are ALL innocent until proven guilty says Constitution. Queens Park says the opposite. Unconstitutional fear mongering? We think so. https://t.co/uJAdsR4UhP — Canadian Civil Liberties Association (@cancivlib) August 9, 2018

The government is promising $7.6 million will roll out over four years to establish the SWAT teams. They will each be headed up by a crown attorney and have a bail compliance officer assigned to them.

“We are going to make sure that when these criminals are caught they aren’t getting off on bail and back on the streets the next day,” Ford said.

Bryant said he had never heard a premier “stick his nose” into the justice system in the same way and warned it border on “abuse of process.”

Attorney General Caroline Mulroney later clarified that prosecutors aren’t being given new directions on how to handle bail applications for people accused of gun crimes. Instead, she said the announcement was about giving prosecutors more resources.

“In cases involving firearms, crowns are directed to seek a detention order,” she said. “We have not made any changes to the exceptional circumstances.”

As it stands though, Bryant said exceptional circumstances — like a veteran who doesn’t have proper a gun license — are rarely used.

“For 99.9 — if not 100 — per cent of those cases where somebody’s been charged with a gun offence, they’re not getting bail period,” he said. “So the point of this presumably is to fear monger, but it may have an adverse effect. It may affect a justice of the peace or a duty counsel or a prosecutor. And certainly, it affects the perception of the person that’s at trial.”

Mulroney maintained the SWAT teams were solely designed to help with the workload prosecutors are under.

“This is not about interfering with the presumption of innocence in anyway,” she said.

“The evidence is complicated, there’s more digital evidence, it’s more time consuming. So this is not about making any changes to the system, it’s just about providing more resources where the police chief has identified a very high need.”

While it may not be the government’s intention to interfere with the courts, Bryant, a former attorney general of Ontario, said the language used by Ford at the announcement could still have that effect.

“If this is a mirage then it’s a very dangerous mirage because the government is putting out the message that people are guilty until proven innocent,” he said. “At the same time, we’ll have to see how justices of the peace and prosecutors respond.”

Toronto Mayor John Tory issued a statement on Thursday congratulating the government on the new legal teams. He said he’s been calling on the province and Ottawa to “toughen up bail for gun offenders” making the news from Ford “particularly gratifying.”

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