Recently retired Alberta provincial court judge John Reilly will run as a Liberal candidate in the Wild Rose riding in the upcoming federal election.
The outspoken judge of 35 years had his last sitting day March 24 in Airdrie and recently penned a book, Bad Medicine: A Judge’s Struggle for Justice in a First Nations Community, sparking a maelstrom of controversy.
Much of his malcontent stems from the current justice policies of the Harper government. He points to poverty as a reason so many natives are populating Canadian jails and wants a sober examination the issues on reserves.
“I’m disgusted by the Conservative justice policies,” he said. “Their policies will incarcerate a lot of people that don’t need to be incarcerated. That’s going to cost the people of Canada billions of dollars.”
Incumbent MP Blake Richards champions tougher sentences and Reilly knows it will be an “uphill battle” to unseat him.
“I’ve just spent most of my life swimming upstream and I guess I’m going to do that again,” said Reilly, who worked the Airdrie-Cochrane-Didsbury circuit from 1981 to 1986. “Whether I win or not, it gives me an opportunity to speak publicly about issues that I know a lot about.”
He wrote his book to expose the rampant abuses on the Morley reserve over the last three decades and said Aboriginal affairs and justice are the two biggest issues on his agenda.
“I strongly disagree with Conservative policies and couple that with the fact that they misrepresent the cost of those policies to the people of Canada by giving false information to Parliament,” he said. “I just have to be in a position to talk about that. I can’t do that from the bench.”
In 1997, Reilly launched an investigation to find out why so many First Nations people were living in squalor and suspected mismanagement of band funds.
