44th Parl. 1st Sess.
June 16, 2022 10:00AM
- Jun/16/22 10:48:02 a.m.
- Watch
- Re: Bill C-9
Madam Speaker, I appreciate my colleague. I work with him at the justice committee and always appreciate his interventions, but I am a little perplexed as to why we are not talking about the bill itself and are speaking about issues that are ancillary to the bill.
With respect to the bill itself, there is a process allowing different parties to be involved in the process. Ours is an outdated way of reviewing judges' conduct. It is 51 years old, to be exact. We look forward to a proper debate on this. We introduced this bill back in December of last year, and obviously our legislative calendar has been extensive. It has included the passage of Bill C-5, which we were able to get through yesterday. We are very much committed to moving this bill forward.
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- Jun/16/22 10:48:54 a.m.
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- Re: Bill C-9
Madam Speaker, everyone has heard about the case of Justice Girouard, who committed wrongdoing two weeks before his appointment in 2010. After all the appeals, his sanctions process took 10 years. I am wondering if the timeline could be tightened up drastically through the changes proposed by the Bill C-9. That would improve public confidence in the justice system.
I would also like to know whether my hon. colleague believes that the federal government will be able to make significant savings in this process, which is often too long and complex and, at times, undermines the confidence of Quebeckers and Canadians in the justice system.
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- Jun/16/22 10:49:39 a.m.
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- Re: Bill C-9
Madam Speaker, I fully agree with my colleague. We have heard from the Canadian Judicial Council about the delays, and we have heard the frustration from the public about the delays. One of the things this bill tries to do is streamline the process, make it more efficient and make it more cost-effective to ensure justice is served in a timely manner.
We have an incredible justice system and incredible judiciary, but for the odd time when there is a lapse, it is important to have continued public confidence in our system. We are grateful for the support of my friend opposite.
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- Jun/16/22 10:54:59 a.m.
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- Re: Bill C-9
Madam Speaker, I appreciate my friend's question, and I want to remind him that the Conservative Party does not have exclusivity on protecting victims. I think all of us in the House absolutely have a responsibility there, and we are very much committed to ensuring that the voices of those who are particularly impacted are heard.
Bill C-9 would allow for complaints to come forward, including from victims and other actors within the overall justice system. The bill would make it easier for these complaints to go through the process so they will not have to wait seven, eight or 10 years. They would be dealt with expeditiously. The levels of appeal that are available currently would be curtailed so that the process is more efficient.
I fundamentally believe that this would enhance the confidence that Canadians have, including victims, in coming forward with complaints. What we want to do is establish the space for people to come forward and have confidence that they can complain and still get a fair hearing in a timely manner.
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- Jun/16/22 11:21:40 a.m.
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- Re: Bill C-9
Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his steadfast support for victims.
It is always concerning to me. I currently sit on the justice committee and when we discuss a bill, for example Bill C-5, which we voted on this week, often the word “victim” does not come up in the conversation whatsoever. It is often said that justice delayed is justice denied, so one avenue of improvement with this bill is streamlining the process for offences that do not warrant removal from the bench so that we would have an outcome and have an impact on the judge who is the subject of the complaint sooner rather than later, as is currently the case with a too protracted process.
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- Jun/16/22 11:23:38 a.m.
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- Re: Bill C-9
Madam Speaker, my hon. colleague is quite right. There are many different judges and many different types of law in the cases that they are presiding over. However, the fact is that there needs to be a robust complaints process in place. Misconduct could take place both inside and outside of the courtroom and is not necessarily confined, as the member mentioned, to criminal cases.
We look to this bill as an improvement on the existing process, particularly for offences that do not warrant removal but warrant some type of sanction that could include training or otherwise. As I mentioned, justice delayed is justice denied, so we look at having a streamlined process as an improvement, but by no means is this the end of the conversation. As has come up many times now in questions and answers, victims have to play a more prominent role, both in this and throughout our criminal justice system.
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- Jun/16/22 12:08:16 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-9
Mr. Speaker, the hon. member did a great job of outlining some of the gaps in justice reform. I know that he spoke at length about this bill, but I want to give him the opportunity, given his vast experience as a critic in justice, to talk about ways in which the government needs to move, going forward, to help close some of those gaps in some very serious needs for justice reform.
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- Jun/16/22 12:08:48 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-9
Mr. Speaker, I know the member for Hamilton Centre's dedication to ensuring that we reform the justice system to try to remove the systemic racism that exists.
As I said in my speech, Bill C-9 is important in that the public, from diverse backgrounds, has to have confidence in this system. The other things that we have talked about here, which are getting the opioid crisis out of the justice system and directly tackling the systemic racism that results in the over-incarceration of indigenous and racialized Canadians, are in crisis. We need to move further and we need to move faster in addressing those matters in our justice system than we have been able to do in this Parliament. We are making progress, but not enough and not fast enough.
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- Jun/16/22 12:13:12 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-9
Mr. Speaker, I also want to recognize my colleague for his work on the justice committee, particularly the recent amendments that would see the sequestration of records for those charged and convicted of simple possession. It is going to make a difference for thousands of Canadians.
My question is around this bill and the process moving forward. I have been listening to the debate, and there seems to be remarkable consensus that this a much-needed change and that we should move forward in a timely way. In the past, when we have had that kind of agreement and when bills before us have a history in the House of debate and deliberation, there have been ways for us to move them forward in an expeditious manner.
I would like my colleague's thoughts on what a path forward might look like for this bill that would see it passed into law as quickly as possible.
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- Jun/16/22 12:15:06 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-9
Mr. Speaker, I am very grateful to my hon. colleague and neighbour, the hon. member for Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, for giving us the full background and history on how long it has taken for this bill to come before us. I also agree with him that there are urgent priorities in other areas of criminal justice.
There is one area of judicial conduct that I would love to know his opinion on, and it is a growing concern. Retired Supreme Court of Canada judges and other judges from high levels carry with them an enormous amount of clout. If they say something it must be true. After all, they are former Supreme Court of Canada judges.
I am sure my hon. friend will recall that two former Supreme Court judges were hired by SNC-Lavalin and were used to undermine the opinions and work of the very hon. Jody Wilson-Raybould when she was our attorney general and minister of justice. There has been some discussion, including from Wayne MacKay, a professor emeritus at Dalhousie law school, which I was privileged to attend, that we should consider ensuring that when judges retire they remain constrained by the same ethical rules of conduct that applied when they were practising judges. I wonder if he has any views on that.
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- Jun/16/22 12:41:26 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-9
Mr. Speaker, as my hon. colleague likely knows, we agree on the principle of the bill. I completely agree that it is crucial that people be able to trust their justice system.
We have heard all kinds of allegations, especially regarding the judicial appointment process. We have heard about the Liberalist database and the possibility of political interference in appointing judges.
Does my colleague think the government should review the judicial appointment process sometime soon?
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- Jun/16/22 12:57:01 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-9
Mr. Speaker, one of the things my colleague talked about was the erosion of the rule of law at the same time as the erosion of the protection of victims. We have seen, time and again, a real soft-on-crime approach by the Liberal government.
I want to bring this to her attention. In my community of Kelowna—Lake Country, the City of Kelowna just released a report, a couple of weeks ago, called “Community Confidence in Justice: Advocacy Paper”. It talks about the increase in crime in our community, and it has a number of different suggestions and advocacy on protecting the public and moving forward with different policy ideas and guidelines.
Is the member seeing a similar increase in crime where she is from, such that we really need to look at both the rule of law and the protection of victims in her community as well?
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- Jun/16/22 12:59:59 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-9
Mr. Speaker, that was at the time when Jody Wilson-Raybould was the justice minister. I remember one member specifically, and there are records in Hansard. I would encourage people to go back and look at Hansard because there were specific cases cited, rape cases and murder cases, where people did go free due to Jordan's principle at that time.
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- Jun/16/22 1:00:30 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-9
Mr. Speaker, I join with my colleagues in discussing Bill C-9 today. I am appreciative of the bill and the fact that it would grant the premise that we have been advocating for a very long time, and that Liberals have been arguing against for a very long time, that judges need to be held accountable. There needs to be a remedy for egregious actions on the part of judges.
I believe in the fallen nature of man and that the dividing line between good and evil runs through the heart of a person. I do not think anybody is above doing wrong or evil things, and we must all fight against that all the time. That stands for everybody, including judges. Judges can get it wrong and sometimes do evil things. Those things happen in the fallen world we live in. For that reason, there need to be accountability mechanisms for all individuals.
Accountability is baked into many of the things we do. It is baked into democracy and there are the checks and balances of democracy. In this place, we have one of the most obvious checks and balances, which is the vote when it comes to getting re-elected or being elected. We run on our record and on what we plan to do, and that is an accountability mechanism. That is being accountable to the people back home.
There are other checks and balances in our system. We have the Constitution, and all the laws we bring in this place must be checked against our Constitution, making sure that individual freedoms and liberties are maintained. We have provincial jurisdiction and federal jurisdiction, and both of those are guarded jealously. That is one of the checks and balances in our system. Then we have a thing called judicial independence, where politicians and the political sphere are not supposed to influence judges, so to speak. However, every now and then judges will have personal failures, where whatever they have done is beyond the pale of public activity and they would be deemed unfit to be judges any longer. This bill puts out a mechanism in order to deal with that.
I will read some of the reasons for removal that this bill lays out: “(a) infirmity; (b) misconduct; (c) failure in the due execution of judicial office; (d) the judge is in a position that a reasonable, fair-minded and informed observer would consider to be incompatible with the due execution of judicial office.” I think this is a fair bill, and it would put in place a due process for the removal of judges from their position.
As I said earlier, I am appreciative of this bill because it grants the premise that judges need to be held accountable. I do not know about others, but where I come from there is a growing dissatisfaction or mistrust, or “lack of confidence” is probably the best term, for folks back home around the judicial system and holding criminals to account. We are starting to see this spill over into urban areas, where criminals operate with impunity. They steal things in broad daylight and commit acts of violence in broad daylight, disobeying the law in general and violating local communities. In rural Canada, theft is a real challenge, and it is somewhat a crime of opportunity. Where I live, the police getting to my door is a matter of perhaps hours, so criminals can do their criminal activity and be long gone before the police show up.
While I think this bill is an important starting piece, there is an entire sentiment that the current Liberal government drives, which starts perhaps with its tacit support of the “Defund the Police” movement, but also this general idea that the justice system will allow people to get out of jail more easily and will not penalize people. These kinds of things, which we often hear from the government, have led to the police not being able to make arrests, and when they do make arrests they are not able to get convictions, which becomes a major challenge. It demoralizes the police, the lack of political support from movements like “Defund the Police”. It undermines the political support police think they have.
They know that if they are going to pursue criminals, they need to have public support for their actions, and we are seeing more and more the police telling folks that they probably will not get a conviction or that they will have to go through all that effort and the criminal would be back out in six months. If what is missing from the victim's place is a small thing, they are not going to put the resources toward that, because they have a major case they are working on and they are diverting the resources to that, as they are likely to get a conviction there. Individuals' lives are devastated. When people come home to find that their fridge, washing machine and dishwasher are missing, that basically all of the appliances in their house have been stolen, it is a violating thing. To have somebody come into their house and steal things like that is unnerving. Perhaps it is not a great monetary loss, but it is extremely disconcerting for the folks who are missing those things.
Pollsters will track this kind of thing, the trust in our institutions, and generally Canadians' trust has been going down over the last seven years. We saw that under Conservative governments, trust in institutions, trust that institutions were doing what people expected them to do, was going up. Now we have seen a dramatic decrease in the trust in institutions, which bears itself out in two ways. One is that now people do not even call the police when their stuff goes missing. I hear that over and over again. People say that the police cannot do anything about it and therefore they do not even call. The other side of the coin is that criminals operate with increasingly brazen activity. We saw it in Calgary recently: two cars blazing down the road, shooting at each other while driving down the road, with no apparent fear that the police would show up, apprehend them and put an end to this firefight. It ended in the tragic death of a mother of five. That was in Calgary, just recently.
Folks will now come into rural yards and start stealing things. When the homeowner shows up and asks what they are doing, they say they are stealing things. He says, “I am standing right here”, and they just say, “What are you going to do about it?” We have that increasingly. We have just brazen activity by criminals because they see the lack of the system's ability to hold them to account, and therefore operate with complete impunity and brazenness that we have never seen before.
I would say that in my own life, I have witnessed the deterioration of trust in the community, trust in general. When I was growing up in my community, no one had a chain-link fence, no one had a gate at the end of the driveway, but these sorts of things are more and more common.
I lay this at the feet of the current government and the fact that it does not take this seriously. It does not provide the political support and tacitly supports movements like “Defund the Police”, which undermines our way of life, our quality of life and our ability to live peacefully in this country, and has led to a deterioration of the interactions we have as a society.
I look forward to questions on this.
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- Jun/16/22 1:14:56 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-9
Mr. Speaker, the member had spoken about Canadians losing trust in their institutions. One example we could look at is the CMHC, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, Canada's national housing agency. It has one single reason for existence, and that is to make housing more affordable for everyone in Canada. Of course, it has failed miserably in that regard.
We also know that through the justice system, we have a revolving door. Legislation like this that we see here today, and also the private member's bill that I tabled this week dealing with addiction treatment in penitentiaries, could help with the revolving door. Could the member comment on those types of initiatives, and whether they could help with restoring confidence in our justice system?
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- Jun/16/22 1:42:59 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-9
Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the question, but I am reflecting more on some of the other comments the member made reference to. He talked about Liberals being soft on crime. Not that long ago, on Wellington Street, which was open at the time and has not opened since, a rally took place that shut down downtown Ottawa due to all the activities that were taking place. The Conservative Party of Canada members, like the member for Carleton, were doing very little, if anything, and maybe even encouraging the occupation to continue. On the other hand, they say we are the ones who are soft on crime. That is a side issue that I wanted to throw in.
Bill C-9 is the reason I started by quoting the chief justice, who recognizes that there is a need for us to change the system. They are very much following the legislation. This is not something that was done overnight. It has taken a while. We believe we got it right, and that is why I say we should send it to committee if there need to be some changes. It would reinforce public confidence, which is what the member is getting at in his question. We want to reinforce public confidence in our judicial system because unfortunately, at times and in a limited number of cases, a judge will say the wrong thing and it is likely because something inside needs to be changed, maybe through an educational program or something of that nature.
We have recognized it in the past. Let us recognize it today and see if we can get the legislation passed.
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- Jun/16/22 3:49:39 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-9
Mr. Speaker, that is a very good question and I intend to work with my colleague on judicial appointments.
I have been troubled, as I think a lot of Canadians have been, by some of the news stories. It appears there is some connection or correlation between donating to the Liberal Party and being appointed as a justice. I appreciate this question.
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- Jun/16/22 4:40:41 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-9
Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for his vast contributions on the justice file in this place. He is very knowledgeable, and I certainly always appreciate our collaborations.
The vacancy of the ombudsperson for victims of crime is actually appalling. This is such a crucial aspect of our judicial system and of confidence in that system being fair and just. I am sure there are many worthy candidates, and I am sure there have been many worthy applicants, which means the government simply has chosen not to move forward with that appointment. It should be done. It should be done quickly. It should have been done a long time ago, but I would love to see it done quickly for all victims in Canada.
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- Jun/16/22 5:13:47 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-9
Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Saanich—Gulf Islands for her speech.
I agree that the fight against climate change is very important. It is the greatest existential challenge of our generation. I hope that she will also agree that everyone needs to work together to fight climate change, and that doing so takes social cohesion.
It is very important, especially for minority groups, such as racialized people, that a bill like this one is passed. Canadians of all backgrounds will then have confidence that, if they appear before a judge or a court, they will be respected and judged on the merits of the case. They will not be concerned that a judge may have an unwarranted bias that may undermine justice.
I would like to hear my colleague's comments on this.
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