SoVote

Decentralized Democracy

Randall Garrison

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
October 3, 2023
Context: Committee Evidence - JUST-75 (JUST) - Oct/3/23
Mr. Randall Garrison (Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, NDP)
  • 05:27:29 p.m.
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Thank you very much, Madam Chair. I'd certainly like to welcome you to your role as chair in our first public meeting. Of course, I'll echo the comments about welcoming the minister here today. With his previous experience on the committee, I'm sure he'll be willing to come back and speak to us many more times. As he's a new minister, there are several things I'd like to talk to him about, such as decriminalizing HIV non-disclosure, decriminalizing sex work, reforming our extradition laws and the bill that's before the House, Bill C-40, on the miscarriage of justice. However, I do accept the urgency with which we're dealing with Bill S-12, so I will limit my comments and questions to Bill S-12 today. I fully accept the urgency of maintaining the sex offender registry, but I thank you, Minister, for emphasizing that Bill S-12 not only preserves the registry but also improves the registry. We have had some cases in my riding where people have been added to the sex offender registry and no one in the community would reasonably believe that they should have been added. Sometimes those are people who are neurodiverse or who have intellectual disabilities and have ended up in the sex offender registry. I have spoken with advocates and those people. This bill will provide an opportunity, or that's the way I see it, for a judge to decide whether all those people should automatically be added. I just wondered if you were aware of those kinds of cases.
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Context: Committee Evidence - JUST-75 (JUST) - Oct/3/23
Mr. Randall Garrison
  • 05:30:02 p.m.
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One of the results we've seen is that, sometimes, the limited resources we have and the limited resources law enforcement have are wasted when they're applied in a universal kind of manner, rather than picking out those who are at most risk of reoffending. I also want to say the second aspect of this bill is also urgent. Certainly, in the study on victims in this committee, we heard from the victims of sexual assault about what, I think, people haven't really thought about, which is people who were prosecuted for talking about their own sexual assault cases. Sometimes, this is a question of agency for them. They feel there's nothing shameful for them in what happened, and they would like to be able to speak about it. Sometimes, some of those victims felt it was a matter of public safety and that other members of their family or community needed to know about the case. By “publication ban”, we think of putting it on TV or putting it in a newspaper, but the publication ban meant that they couldn't talk about it with other people. I wonder if you're familiar with those prosecutions and restrictions on victims.
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Context: Committee Evidence - JUST-75 (JUST) - Oct/3/23
Mr. Randall Garrison
  • 05:32:07 p.m.
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Again, people are somewhat surprised by the number of cases. I wonder if you have any figures on the number of times publication bans have been imposed in Canada.
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Context: Committee Evidence - JUST-75 (JUST) - Oct/3/23
Mr. Randall Garrison
  • 05:32:58 p.m.
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I kind of knew the answer to that question. It's something I wish we had. We tried to find out before. I'm not quite sure why that's such a difficult problem, but I guess if we have some more time with the officials, we will be asking about it again. Certainly, the number of people I've talked to and we've heard from at the committee is quite large in terms of publication bans. Most of those people argue that publication bans were really informed by an archaic view of sexual assault being shameful for the victim. Therefore, there is an urgency that these bans not be imposed going forward. I wonder if you share the sense that not only is the sex offender issue urgent, but it's also urgent that we make the other half of the changes in this bill.
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Context: Committee Evidence - JUST-75 (JUST) - Oct/3/23
Mr. Randall Garrison
  • 05:48:15 p.m.
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Thank you very much, Madam Chair. We've heard a couple of times around the table today about what victims want from people. I think that if we listen carefully to our victims study, and if we look at the literature on victims, it's not always tougher sentences that victims are looking for. Certainly, in my previous work in criminal justice, it was almost always that victims were looking for the same thing to not happen to someone else. Mr. Minister, I'd like you to talk about the two parts of this bill as they contribute to public safety through the prevention of future offences.
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Context: Committee Evidence - JUST-75 (JUST) - Oct/3/23
Mr. Randall Garrison
  • 05:49:55 p.m.
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That's great. Thank you, Madam Chair. I'll end my questions there.
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