The Bail Conundrum, with speakers Ingrid Hess and James Rouleau

Our talk is meant to help people understand the Canadian Bail System better and to explain the newest changes to the system that the government is proposing. We also hope to provoke a discussion as to whether, when we tinker with these systems, we are really achieving the intended goals. Will the public really be safer? Are the proposed changes going to make a real difference in terms of public safety? Will there be other ramifications that might be unfortunate from a public policy perspective? Speaker: Ingrid Hess and James Rouleau Moderator: Violet Meekma Ingrid Hess is a Lethbridge lawyer. She grew up on a farm in the Sunnyside area, between Lethbridge and Coaldale. She is a first generation Canadian born to a mother from the Netherlands and a father from Germany. She left the area at 19 to study at UBC and later to go on adventures around the world, living in Germany, Japan, Toronto and Montreal during her twenties. Ingrid came home to Canada to study law at the University of Calgary with the dream of doing International Human Rights law, concluding her legal studies in the Netherlands at the University of Leiden. But the draw to home was strong and once she started a family, she decided to postpone her dream. She has three sons whom she raised as a single parent. They are all now grown up. Ingrid has practiced law in Lethbridge for 28 years, focused primarily on criminal defense work. Her most important and memorable cases involved representing people with serious intellectual disabilities in criminal cases. Her career took a detour for 7 years while she represented over 350 claimants from across Canada in the Residential School lawsuit claims process. In that process Residential School survivors participated in hearings to determine the appropriate compensation for the abuse they experienced and the harms they suffered. This work took Ingrid across Canada, including Nunavut and the Northwest Territories. This experience has shaped her as a lawyer and a human in many ways for which she is extremely grateful. In her free time Ingrid gardens, knits, walks her dog and cooks. James Rouleau is a Crown Prosecutor.