- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- NDP
- Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke
- British Columbia
- Voting Attendance: 67%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $148,586.11
- Government Page
- Feb/2/23 12:00:18 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I think it is a concern that we sometimes do not pay enough attention to. A large number of Canadians who are never found guilty of anything have ended up spending a long period of time in detention before they were found not guilty of those offences. In particular, this falls heavily on indigenous people, racialized Canadians and Canadians who have low incomes. Unfortunately, it also falls heavily on new Canadians and on immigrants and refugees.
The first solution to that, of course, is to have adequate funding for the justice system, so that we do not have such large delays before cases get dealt with in court. That is probably the easiest thing we could actually do. For a long time the appointment of judges was slow. The Liberal government took a long time to get going on this, but it has now been filling those vacancies more regularly. This will help cut those delays before people reach trial.
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- Nov/23/22 5:55:23 p.m.
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- Re: Bill S-4
Mr. Speaker, I think the first thing we need to address is that many first nations have their own ways of dealing with things we tend to send to court and prison that are much more effective than the methods we use. The problem is that those traditional communities and traditional systems are under-resourced, so we need to make resources available to first nations that wish to pursue their own justice initiatives, which in the end would be far more effective than the adversarial and correctional system we tend to support as a whole.
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- Nov/23/22 5:52:57 p.m.
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- Re: Bill S-4
Madam Speaker, I am going to have to say that I cannot speak extensively on that. I know that certainly the previous provincial attorney general, David Eby, and the current Attorney General in British Columbia have both had access to justice front and centre, and I know they have expanded access to legal aid as one of the main concerns about people having to go to court unrepresented.
Also, it is not just in criminal law, but also in family law, where we have a large problem in all provinces. Quite often one partner of a dispute, and it is usually the husband, has access to much greater legal resources than their partner in those kinds of cases. I know British Columbia has been both trying to encourage mediation processes in family law to tackle that problem and trying to right that balance between parties in those difficult cases.
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- Jun/14/22 12:21:03 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-5
Madam Speaker, while I might not use quite as broad a brush in condemning my Conservative colleagues as the hon. member did, I think he draws attention to an important ancillary benefit of these changes in Bill C-5.
We certainly heard that one of the problems that comes from the existence of mandatory minimums is that they prevent the ability to plea bargain and keep cases out of court that take up valuable space in our courts that could be used for tackling, without delay, the more serious crimes. They increase court delays. They increase court costs.
Of course, when we keep someone in custody, as I talked about in my speech, for only a short period time, it is very expensive to do so and, at the same time, guarantees that they will not get the rehabilitation and training they need to successfully rehabilitate into society. It is not a good economic deal, as well as being not a good justice deal, as well as being not a good public safety deal.
Eliminating mandatory minimums will help us make progress on all of those fronts.
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Madam Speaker, I want to ask the member about the Ontario Court of Appeal ruling of May 2019, in the case of the Christian Medical and Dental Society of Canada versus College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario.
In this case, the court very clearly said that the obligation to provide a referral to procedures physicians might personally object to, including abortion, gender reassignment surgery and medical assistance in dying, was found constitutional because patients have a right to access information and to access health care services.
When the courts have decided quite clearly that the referral is not a matter of conscience, why is the member proceeding with this bill?
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