SoVote

Decentralized Democracy

Member of Parliament

Randall Garrison

  • Member of Parliament
  • Member of Parliament
  • NDP
  • Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke
  • British Columbia
  • Voting Attendance: 66%
  • Expenses Last Quarter: $148,586.11

  • Government Page
Context: House Hansard - 133 - Nov/23/22
Mr. Randall Garrison
  • Nov/23/22 5:57:01 p.m.
  • Watch
  • 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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Context: House Hansard - 133 - Nov/23/22
Mr. Randall Garrison
  • Nov/23/22 5:55:23 p.m.
  • Watch
  • 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 - 88 - Jun/14/22
Mr. Randall Garrison
  • Jun/14/22 12:15:19 p.m.
  • Watch
  • Re: Bill C-5 
Madam Speaker, I am going to take a moment here to do what the Conservatives like to do and use an anecdote. What about the case of a woman who is travelling with her boyfriend and he is involved with drug trafficking and he puts the drugs in her bag? When they come across the border, she is caught. Does she deserve a mandatory minimum sentence for importing drugs, or can the judge take into account the circumstances here that she may have been financially dependent on her boyfriend, or she may or may not have known he was trafficking drugs? As the law currently stands, she is going to end up in serious custody and do serious time in detention. Just like the Conservatives like to give those extreme examples, there are many examples of where the law right now catches people and sentences them to mandatory prison time, when it is obviously not in the interest of the public to do so.
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