Locking up murderers slam-dunk issue for Tories
Presents opportunity for serious change
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre added three items to his policy book this week, each of which is likely to generate significant discussion. He supports the idea of online porn sites having to establish users’ age ... though his office quickly clarified that he’s dead-set against any form of “digital ID,” so what that means in practice I have no idea. (What we do know is, kids will continue to access online porn unless their parents are vigilant about it.) And he supports the idea that “female sports, female change rooms (and) female bathrooms should be for females, not for biological males” ... though he also conceded he wasn’t sure how many such “female spaces” were in any way federally regulated.
The third item is the best one, very doable and completely within federal jurisdiction. But I suspect also the one we’ll hear the least about, because it’s pretty much impossible for the other parties to use as a wedge issue.
This week we learned that Robert Pickton, almost certainly (and one must hope) Canada’s most prolific serial killer of women, had become eligible to apply for day parole on just the 22nd anniversary of his arrest — which was Thursday. In response to this objectively outrageous situation, Poilievre vowed to reintroduce legislation that would allow for longer sentences for multiple murderers than for one-offs — an idea so sensible on every level that only the Supreme Court of Canada (unanimously!) could possibly have given it the kibosh.
It also highlights one of the most maddening things about the Pickton case: Upon his six second-degree murder convictions in 2010, the Crown stayed 20 other first-degree murder charges.
Practically speaking, that was defensible. Many famous serial killers have only been convicted of a few of their suspected (or even admitted) crimes, because once they’re serving the maximum sentence, there is an argument to use finite justice-system resources elsewhere and to spare victims the trauma of relitigating the horrors every few years. (Families of those 20 alleged Pickton victims were divided on this front, as you can imagine: Some were happy not to relive the trauma, with Pickton locked up nominally “forever”; others yearned for justice for their friends specifically.)
It’s one thing not to charge “extra” murders in the United States, where someone like Pickton — or Paul Bernardo, or Russell Williams, or Terri-lynne Mcclintic — would have no chance of walking free ever again. It’s quite another in Canada, when a man who fed women to pigs is eligible for a day-parole hearing on horrific crimes for which he was convicted while Ratatouille and There Will Be Blood were playing in theatres.
Suggest that this is an insane situation and you will quickly fall down one of Canada’s craziest rabbit holes.
“Oh relax, he’s never getting out.”
“Then why make him eligible?”
“Corrections experts say it’s beneficial for rehabilitation to have some light at the end of the tunnel.”
“But you just said there was no light.”
The Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling striking down the socalled “stacked sentencing” leeway the Harper government had offered judges, and which a Quebec judge used to sentence Quebec City mosque killer Alexandre Bissonnette
to 40 years without parole, is one of the daftest, most offensive documents it has issued in recent years — and that’s saying something. The judgment rests on buck-naked falsehoods: that “the imposition of excessive sentences that fulfil no function, like the 150-year parole ineligibility period initially sought by the Crown in this case, does nothing more than bring the administration of justice into disrepute and undermine public confidence in the rationality and fairness of the criminal justice system.” It found such sentences “contrary to the fundamental values of Canadian society.”
It’s pure fantasy. The polar opposite of the truth. Deranged. It’s one thing to say Canadian public opinion shouldn’t matter — in matters of fundamental justice, it shouldn’t. But judges can’t just be making up public opinion on the fly. A Research Co. poll conducted last year asked respondents to choose between “life imprisonment without the possibility of parole” for murder convictions, which the Canadian judiciary considers nauseatingly harsh, and capital punishment, the mere mention of which would send the judiciary to its fainting couches ... and 54 per cent of us chose capital punishment. On social media this week I saw everyone from radical feminists to hang-’em-high types deploring Pickton’s parole eligibility as an affront to reason and an insult to the families of Pickton’s victims.
Poilievre’s proposal might well have to involve the notwithstanding clause, and R v. Bissonnette cries out for its invocation. That’s not an ideal solution, University of Guelph political scientist Dennis Baker argues compellingly at The Hub, because the clause has to be reviewed every five years, and criminal sentences ought not to be. But he also argues there might be ways to offer judges more discretion in egregious cases without offending the courts. Poilievre should be leading that charge, and the charge for justice-system reform in general.
On porn and bathrooms, the Conservative leader is appealing to majority opinions and effectively goading his opponents into apoplexy. It would be nice to see him focus more on issues where he, as prime minister, could really drive serious change.
JUDGES CAN’T JUST BE MAKING UP PUBLIC OPINION ON THE FLY.