Quote (bogie160 @ May 18 2020 11:52pm)
It's controversial because it highlights that Canada lacks adequate protections against double jeopardy. Allowing the prosecution to redo a trial because the judge omitted instructions that "may" have impacted the verdict is a pretty serious miscarriage of justice.
It represents the philosophical divergence in anglo vs american law and why a (real) constitution shouldn't be underrated
British/canadian/etc law assumes the interests of the government outweigh any personal rights, that safeguards are only allowances not guarantees. In Britain if you're acquitted at trial, the crown prosecutors can just say they have 'new and compelling evidence' to serve 'a public interest' by retrying a prosecution as many times as they want. And they codified it in a 2003 law which then applied ex post facto to allow reprosecutions of crimes before it was passed, because seriously, they have nothing even resembling the American 5th amendment or Article 1. The UK/CA/etc system assumes the crown's good faith and that the people only need to be protected by their government, not from their government. Why would you need a double jeopardy or ex post facto prohibition if all the hypotheticals about prosecutorial overreach depend on the malicious conduct of an infallible bureaucracy? Nobody has ever been persecuted by British law, I mean that's clearly evidenced by the lack of revolts against any abuses under British law by its subjects.