Randall Garrison

[National Defence Act, December 7th, 2021]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-206, An Act to amend the National Defence Act (maiming or injuring self or another).

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to introduce a bill that I had hoped would be adopted in the 42nd Parliament and again in the 43rd.

This bill would remove a significant barrier for members of the Canadian Armed Forces needing mental health assistance. We need to remove section 98(c), the archaic section of the National Defence Act that makes self-harm a disciplinary offence under the military code of conduct. This means that those who risk their lives for this country can end up subject to disciplinary action as a result of suffering a mental health crisis. Often this means our troops suffer in silence.

Canada is still losing more than one serving member each month to death by suicide. Removing self-harm as a disciplinary offence would mark a significant change in the way mental health challenges are addressed within the Canadian Armed Forces. The Liberals had a chance to fix this when they amended the military justice act in the 42nd Parliament. In the last Parliament, the defence committee studied how to improve mental health services in the Canadian Armed Forces, and I believe the government would have had all-party support to proceed at that time. Both these opportunities were lost, and as a result we continue to lose dedicated women and men of the Canadian Armed Forces to self-harm.

Today, I am reintroducing the bill in the hope that the House will finally listen to the families who have lost loved ones to death by suicide and come together to address this challenge by adopting this bill and taking other necessary measures to make sure we provide our troops with the mental health support they need.

(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)

[Resumption of Debate on Address in Reply, December 1st, 2021]

Madam Speaker, it is nice to see you back in the chair.

I want to congratulate the member on his re-election to the House. I note his regret that we did not make it harder for him. I assure him we will try to do better in the future.

Like me, the member has a lot of constituents who are in receipt of the GIS and who may have accepted the government's advice that they could take the CERB without negative consequences. I know he has a lot of families, as we do in my riding, that collect the Canada child benefit and did not realize their benefits would be clawed back. I wonder if the member and his caucus will be joining us, and I know the Bloc has talked about this, in pressuring the government to not just say it is working on this, but to get the job done so that seniors and families are protected from these clawbacks, because they are the most vulnerable among us.

[Resumption of Debate on Address in Reply, November 30th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, I would first like to start by congratulating the member for Hochelaga on her re-election to the House and also by taking this first opportunity to thank the voters of Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke for returning me to the House for a fourth term to advocate on their behalf.

I was very glad to hear the member for Hochelaga raise the issues of housing and homelessness in Montreal. We have the same issues in my riding. I was also glad to hear her raise the issue of the opioid crisis and also for her awareness of the struggles families face every day trying to make ends meet.

What I did not hear from her or anywhere in the throne speech is the concern about the clawbacks that are taking place on GIS for seniors who have collected CERB and clawbacks of the Canada child benefit. What we have here is government action that is literally taking food off the table and threatening the roofs over the heads of families and seniors in both our ridings.

Has the minister raised this concern about the clawbacks from seniors and the Canada child benefit with her government?

[Criminal Code, November 25th, 2021]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-202, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (controlling or coercive conduct).

Mr. Speaker, today I rise to reintroduce my bill to make coercive and controlling behaviour in intimate partner relationships a criminal offence. This new offence would allow victims of coercive and controlling violence to get desperately needed help and would allow earlier interventions in problematic relationships rather than having to wait for physical violence to occur.

During this pandemic, we have heard reports from police and frontline service providers that domestic violence calls for assistance spiked by more than 30%, an alarming intensification of what was already a serious problem in the country.

In the last Parliament, the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights studied this issue, and all-party support resulted in a unanimous report, calling on the House to take action within a year, either on my bill or a similar government bill.

I thank the member for Port Moody—Coquitlam for seconding the reintroduction of my bill today.

Addressing the issue of coercive and controlling violence is not a matter of partisanship. It is a necessary step toward addressing the shadow pandemic of domestic violence that has hit women and families so hard during this pandemic.

I urge all members to support quick action on this challenging problem that will literally save lives.

(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)

[Committees of the House, June 23rd, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order.

I am rising virtually to ask for unanimous consent to make a few short remarks in tabling an NDP supplemental report to the justice committee's report on elder abuse just tabled by our very able chair, the member for Mississauga—Erin Mills.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2021, No. 1, June 22nd, 2021]

Madam Speaker, I know that in the member's riding lots of workers in tourism have not been able to get back to work yet. I would like to know if the member supports the cut in CRB by 40% that is going into place on July 1. What kind of incentive does it provide for those people? They have not been able to get jobs. There are no jobs available, so why cut their benefits?

[Petitions, June 21st, 2021]

Madam Speaker, the second petition, e-petition 3412, was signed by more than 600 Canadians, and it asks for the government to support Alexis Smecher, who has not seen his young daughter since November 2019, after she was abducted and taken to Paraguay by her mother despite a B.C. court order requiring joint parenting. Unfortunately, this case is but one example among dozens where parents are denied their parental rights and contact with their children as a result of international abductions.

The signatories call on the government to engage directly with Paraguay and with the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to get Mr. Smecher's daughter brought back to Canada expeditiously, to offer him every assistance and to keep him informed of the progress on his case.

[Petitions, June 21st, 2021]

Madam Speaker, it is my honour to table two e-petitions today.

The first is e-petition 3411, which was signed by more than 1,000 Canadians and calls on the government to act quickly on the recommendations from the justice committee report, entitled “The Shadow Pandemic: Stopping Coercive and Controlling Behaviour in Intimate Partner Relationships”. Signatories ask the government to recognize the urgency of legislation to add coercive and controlling behaviour to the Criminal Code, to recognize that this behaviour is in itself a form of violence and to recognize that coercive and controlling behaviour, more often than not, is a precursor to more direct forms of violence.

[Health, June 14th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, here we are in National Blood Donor Week, again, with the ban on blood donations from gay men, men who have sex with men, and trans women still in place. As always, I continue to call on friends and family to step up and donate in the place of those of us who remain banned.

On Friday, the Liberals lost in federal court in their attempt to have themselves excluded from responsibility for the ban. The Minister of Health claims she is waiting for Canadian Blood Services and Héma-Québec to give her a recommendation to lift the ban.

On what date did she explicitly request a new policy from CBS and Héma-Québec, and what deadline did she give them for a response?

[Criminal Code, June 7th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, I cannot let another speech that grossly misrepresents Bill C-6 go by without commenting.

The speech by the hon. member does so in two ways. First, it equates conversations with practice, treatment or service. There is no reason for such an equation. There is no case in law that he could cite in which a conversation is treated as a practice, treatment or service.

The second way it misrepresents the definition in the bill is that it tries to create a division between someone's sexual orientation or gender identity and the way they live their lives: the way they behave. If the member would like to talk to clinicians, they can talk to him about how repression of sexual orientation and repression of gender identity have been fundamental parts of conversion therapy over time.

This really is a misrepresentation of the bill. I will not speculate on the member's motives.