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Context: House Hansard - 232 - Oct/16/23

Oct/25/23 6:01:46 p.m.
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Re: Bill S-12

Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. member for the efforts he has put in within his community to help address the scourge of sexual assault in all communities across the country. I also thank all of the community-based organizations that provide support to survivors of sexual assault in particular but also to victims of crime. One of the things we concluded unanimously in the justice committee's report on providing better support for victims of crime is that the federal government has to do more to support community-based activities. Coming back to Bill S-12, I think one of the important aspects of allowing sexual assault victims to speak freely about their cases if they choose to do so is that it will help remove the stigma associated with sexual assault. This in itself will help improve reporting rates.

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Mr. Randall Garrison (Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, NDP)

Oct/16/23 11:17:50 a.m.
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Re: Bill C-325

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise in this debate on Bill C-325 today, and I am going to be brutally honest: It is disappointing to see the Conservatives bring forward a private member's bill that builds on their campaign to exploit public fears about crime and public safety by emphasizing tragic incidents and tragic impacts on victims and continuing to ignore the evidence about what actually works in criminal justice. Of course, members of the House will know that I spent 20 years working in the criminal justice field before I came here. We know what reduces crime and what improves public safety, but the Conservatives seem to have no interest in any of those measures. They repeatedly refer to the opinions of victims. I will, of course, agree with them that some victims are looking for harsh punishment for the perpetrators of crimes, but it is not all victims. The one thing that all victims of crime are looking for is that what happened to them does not happen to anyone else. If we look at all the scientific studies and academic studies of victims, we see that this is the one thing that all victims share in common. This means that instead of harsher measures, we need more effective measures to make sure that we do not have additional victims of crime in the future. The main impact of Bill C-325 is to undo the reforms that were made in Bill C-5. Those were aimed at squarely attacking the problem of high rates of incarceration among indigenous and racialized people, those living in poverty and those living with mental health and addiction issues in Canadian prisons. The overincarceration of marginalized Canadians is not only unjust but also ineffective at improving public safety. Even short periods of incarceration cause major disruptions in people's lives when it comes to loss of employment, loss of housing, loss of custody of children and stigma, all of which make involvement in anti-social and criminal behaviour more likely in the future, not less likely. The New Democrats have always supported measures that will be effective in improving public safety. This was true when we were talking about bail reform, which, again, is not the subject of Bill C-325, even though people would be surprised to find that out when listening to some of the Conservative rhetoric around it. We supported adding a reverse onus for bail in crimes involving handguns. We supported making community-based bail supervision programs more widely available in all communities, including in rural, remote and northern communities. Community-based bail supervision will require upfront expenditures, and we have been calling on the Liberals to fund those programs. The John Howard Society runs three of those programs now in Ontario, and they have a 90% success rate. What does that 90% success rate mean? It means 90% of people in community-based bail supervision programs showed up in court when they were supposed to, and 90% did not reoffend in the period before they appeared in court. Why is that the case? It is because they had support and supervision. This is in the bill the Conservatives voted for, and now the Liberals need to come forward with the funding. Community-based bail supervision programs are not the subject of Bill C-325, but I have to address them because Conservatives continue to act like they are. They save money in the long run because they are far cheaper: Putting people into community-based bail supervision programs is one-tenth the cost of putting them in incarceration. The problem in our federal system is that the federal government would bear the costs upfront of starting these programs, while the provinces would benefit from the savings in provincial correction systems. Again, Bill C-325 is trying to undo the reforms that were in Bill C-5. What Bill C-5 did was to eliminate mandatory minimum sentences for all drug offences and for certain tobacco and firearms offences, none of which are classified as violent crimes in the Criminal Code. Also, Bill C-5 widened the sentencing options available to judges by allowing them to use diversion programs and house arrest as penalties for a wider number of crimes. Why is this important? It is because there are direct victims of crime, but there are also the families of the perpetrators of crime. What we are talking about there is often spouses and children. The importance of diversion programs and house arrest means that oftentimes families are not deprived of the sole income earner in the family, or they are not deprived of the person who can provide supervision for children. By using diversion programs and house arrest in additional offences, we can help keep families together and prevent crime in the future by keeping people's ties to the community and the wider family active and alive. This is particularly important in rural, remote and northern communities, where the sentence to incarceration means not only serving time in an institution but serving it in an institution many hundreds of kilometres away from the family and supports people need to prevent them from falling back into the problems that caused them to end up as convicted criminals. According to the Conservatives' press release, Bill C-325 would “put a stop to the alarming number of convicted violent criminals and sex offenders who are serving their sentences in their homes.” This assertion is false. Even with the reforms in Bill C-5, judges are not allowed to sentence those who present any kind of risk to the public to serve sentences in the community. The statement that the many people who are convicted of the long list of offences the Conservatives like to cite are getting house arrest is not true. Judges are not allowed to grant diversion programs and sentences served in the community to those who present a risk to the public. That is very clear in our systems. The Conservatives also claim that Bill C-325 would go after offenders who repeatedly violate conditional release orders. It is important to note that the provisions in Bill C-325 are about parole violations, not conditional release orders. There is nothing about bail conditions in this bill despite the Conservatives continually mixing the rhetoric about catch-and-release bail provisions with the provisions of Bill C-325. What Bill C-325 would do is make all parole violations a new criminal offence and require parole officers to report all parole violations, no matter how minor, to the police and the Parole Board. This would only result in the early termination of parole. What does that mean? People say it is a good idea because people broke the rules and their parole should be revoked. With the revocation of parole, people end up back in institutions, and at the end of their sentences, they go into the community unsupervised. Therefore, by ending parole early, we end the period during which we supervise people's behaviour, which is to make sure they present less of a threat to the public, and let them out at the end of a sentence with no incentive to complete any of the rehabilitation programs, any of the mental health and addiction programs or any of the things that would keep them from being further involved in criminal activity. Let me conclude my remarks today by reminding people that what we need to do is support measures that are effective at reducing crime and reducing the number of victims in the future. Bill C-325 would do nothing to advance those goals and instead would further contribute to the overincarceration of racialized and indigenous people and those living in poverty in this country. The New Democrats were proud to support Bill C-5 to try to make sure that we do what is effective when fighting crime and reducing the number of victims in this country.

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Context: House Hansard - 221 - Sep/20/23

Context: House Hansard - 219 - Sep/18/23

Sep/20/23 5:43:36 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, here is the important message that I think we got from My Voice, My Choice: It is up to the victims to make the decision about whether they wish to have the publication ban. It is not really up to me, the prosecutors or the judges to make that decision for them. Yes, I share concerns about the way victims of crime are still treated in the courts, particularly victims of sexual assault. However, sexual assault is the one area where we take away that agency and say that they are not allowed to talk publicly about what happened to them. That is the message we received quite clearly in the justice committee from My Voice, My Choice. It is to give that agency to the victims, to let them make that decision for themselves.

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Context: House Hansard - 214 - Jun/15/23

Sep/18/23 1:41:09 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-48

Mr. Speaker, once again, the member is mixing bail with all kinds of other questions in criminal justice and the Criminal Code. What I do have to say, and I want to emphasize it once again, is that while there are a few cases, and they are not very numerous, of repeat violent offenders reoffending, they are serious and we need to act and take care to make sure those do not happen again. Bill C-48 addresses those. The police associations across the country say that it does. Premiers are satisfied that it does. I am not sure why the Conservative Party is not satisfied that it would deal with that problem.

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Context: House Hansard - 214 - Jun/15/23

Jun/15/23 12:03:51 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, my friend raises a very important point, and I want to give a very specific example, because I think often restorative justice is not taken seriously, which is why it is not funded seriously. We had a very horrific incident of anti-Semitism in my riding, where some horrible graffiti was inscribed on The Chabad Centre for Jewish Life and Learning. It was done by two non-rocket scientists who were fairly young. It was done on camera, which they apparently did not notice, and they were fairly easily apprehended. The police worked with the Chabad Centre for Jewish Life and Learning to create a restorative solution to the problem, which was that these two young people, who had been influenced by online publications and who I think had no real idea of the harm they had done, sit down with the members of that congregation to understand the harm they had caused. I really commend that community for taking a very horrific incident and, as a whole, trying to turn it into something positive.

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Context: House Hansard - 214 - Jun/15/23

Jun/15/23 11:59:30 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am going to stick to the member's question a bit more about what we heard from victims, because it is important to remember that this report is based on what we heard from victims of crime. There are two general themes in what we heard. One of those was that victims wanted to ensure that justice was done, absolutely. However, there is a second theme of victims that gets missed in some of the debates in the House of Commons. That second theme that was almost always there was that they wanted to ensure that no one else would become a victim of the same thing that happened to them. That compassion for others that almost all victims have displayed is how their trauma and terrible experience can be used to inform public policy so that this does not happen to any other family and does not happen to any other community. That is an important part of this debate and it is an important part of what is reflected in the report, which I hope we all respect.

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Mr. Randall Garrison (Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, NDP)

Jun/15/23 11:28:04 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, it has been a great pleasure working with the member on the justice committee. It is important to note that the justice committee has done an enormous amount of work unanimously in trying to move things forward for Canadians, despite sometimes being in a minority Parliament that is quit divisive, My question for the member has to do with recommendation 3, which talks about the establishment of national standards for minimum levels of support for victims of crime. It calls for the federal government and the provinces to work together to establish those standards. Right now there is no right to victims' assistance and there are no common standards among the provinces.

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Context: House Hansard - 168 - Mar/10/23

Mar/10/23 12:28:29 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the report of the justice committee does not just deal with the legislative part, it also make serious recommendations about increasing the supports, in particular, for frontline community and women's organizations that provide assistance to the survivors of domestic violence. So, it is a package of measures that is in the report and not just adding to the Criminal Code. However, I do want to emphasize what I think is very important here, which is that we need to move that intervention point, or that help point, forward. When we can do that, it will not be really about prosecuting more men, it will be about making sure that the violence does not occur, which ends up in prosecutions.

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Feb/2/23 12:06:27 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, as I have said a couple of times this morning in the debate here, I was pleased on Monday when the Conservatives put forward a very reasonable motion to have us work in the justice committee to find practical solutions that would contribute to community safety across the country. I am disappointed in the Conservatives today with a motion that seems designed to divide us in the House. Maybe the purpose of the motion today is to contribute to the Conservative line, which we hear every day, that everything is broken, and it is kind of embarrassing for them to have to admit that on this question we had actually reached agreement among all parties to work together to find solutions. I do not believe the House is broken. I believe the justice committee can find real solutions to the two problems, and, let me say, there are two problems. One is the problem of serious violent offenders, and the other is the public disorder problems that result. Bail affects both of those, and we need to separate those two issues and look at how to solve each of those problems. I know the justice committee will do great work in doing so.

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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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Feb/2/23 11:58:47 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for that question, which I will not take seriously. However, I think he raises a concern. We have seen this rhetoric about “tough on crime”, and we saw it implemented in Canada under the Harper government. Two things resulted from that. One was that, as the Supreme Court pointed out, most of the measures on the tough on crime agenda were unconstitutional and violated the charter. The second was that they were in place for a time in this country. What was the result of them being in place? Did crime rates plummet? No, they did not. Did the costs of the justice system and correction system skyrocket because of those measures? Yes, they did.

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Mr. Randall Garrison (Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, NDP)

Feb/2/23 10:40:16 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, there is no disagreement from New Democrats that we have some very serious issues with the bail system in this country, especially when it comes to violent offenders, and we have public order problems, which a few repeat offenders cause. However, I am a bit perplexed, because on Monday, the member for Fundy Royal, at the justice committee, presented a motion to have the committee work on effective and serious solutions to these problems. Three days later we are here in the House with a sensational, heightened rhetoric motion that is trying to divide us on this issue. Which is the Conservative Party here? Is it the one that wants to take serious action at committee to find real solutions to the problem or the one that wants to fundraise off this issue and motivate its base?

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Context: House Hansard - 145 - Dec/9/22

Mr. Randall Garrison (Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, NDP)

Dec/9/22 10:44:26 a.m.
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Re: Bill C-9

Madam Speaker, it is hard for me to thank the member for his speech, which was essentially a long recitation of the Conservative's commitment to tough-on-crime policies, which have clearly failed. However, my real disappointment with his speech is that we have done some work in this Parliament, particularly on the study on the rights of victims where parties have worked together to try and improve the justice system. My question is about the bill and confidence in the judicial system. I wonder whether the Conservatives actually believe that the justice system and judges, in particular, have to look more like the face of Canada for the public to have confidence in that system.

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Nov/23/22 5:58:35 p.m.
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Re: Bill S-4

Madam Speaker, I think the question brings up an important point. In this bill, we are looking to adopt a broader use of technology, not just for the sake of a broader use of technology, but to provide greater access to justice, as part of this, and that flexibility. I think we had the important suggestion made by the member for Timmins—James Bay about how sometimes using technology allows victims to participate more freely in these kinds of systems than if they have to appear in front of someone who has caused them great harm in person. I think that there are lots of advantages, in addition to the efficiency advantages, in Bill S-4.

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Nov/23/22 5:57:01 p.m.
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Re: Bill S-4

Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his compliments. I do not think I share the same view of the system. I do not think there are a lot of people within the system who are there just to make money. In my experience with the legal community, certainly in my own community, there are some who make more than a good living out of the legal system, but most people are there because of their commitment to justice, whether they are working as prosecutors or as defence attorneys. However, I do agree with the hon. member that, as I just said about first nations, there are alternative methods to the traditional arrest, send to court and send to prison process that we have tended to overly rely on in Canada. That is appropriate for some people. That is the only way to deal with some criminals in our system, but for most people, that is not the underlying problem and not the real solution. I agree with him that we need to look at alternative methods of dealing with things such as drug addiction and poverty, which cause a lot of people to end up in the court system.

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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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Context: House Hansard - 132 - Nov/22/22

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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Mr. Randall Garrison (Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, NDP)

Nov/22/22 3:12:38 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, two Saskatchewan first nation sisters have served nearly 30 years of a sentence resulting from a wrongful conviction. Tomorrow, the Quewezance sisters face a bail hearing, but Saskatchewan appears to be using every trick in the book to keep them in custody. Nearly 50,000 Canadians have signed a petition calling for their release. What is the Minister of Justice doing on this case, and how much longer will Canadians have to wait for the wrongful convictions commission we need for bringing an end to these injustices?

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Context: House Hansard - 94 - Jun/22/22