MacKay slaps top court for quashing mandatory minimums for gun crimes
Justice Minister Peter MacKay has publicly denounced the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down mandatory minimum gun sentences, arguing that the country’s highest court was relying on a “far-fetched hypothetical scenario” to mandate how Canada deals with armed criminals.
In a 6-3 decision last week, the Supreme Court quashed three-year minimum sentences for gun crime on the grounds that the law could unwittingly target law-abiding duck hunters who were caught putting away their shotguns with cartridges still in the magazine.
No such duck hunter has ever been slapped with a mandatory minimum sentence, however — and the scenario was dismissed as “speculative” by the three dissenting justices.
MacKay, writing in a Tuesday op-ed for the National Post, sided with the dissenters and argued that the Supreme Court had “used a far-fetched hypothetical scenario to stretch a law designed to take gang members and those who seek to commit violent gun crime off the streets into a law that could impact law-abiding firearms owners.”
The Conservatives’ 2008 Tackling Violent Crime Act — enacted in the wake of a string of Toronto gun violence — increased the minimum sentence for certain gun-related crimes to three years from one year for a first offence, and to five years from one year for a second.
The Supreme Court’s decision was based on the case of two Toronto men, Sidney Charles and Hussein Nur, who were both caught in possession of illegal handguns equipped with overcapacity magazines.
In the case of Nur, he was arrested in Toronto’s Jane and Finch neighbourhood carrying a loaded, concealed handgun capable of firing “24 rounds in 3.5 seconds.” According to police reports, Nur had been loitering outside a community centre waiting to “get” someone on the inside.
Oddly, the Supreme Court upheld the sentences of Nur and Charles, arguing that a mandatory minimum was “uncontroversial” in those cases. Charles even “conceded that a sentence of five years’ imprisonment … was appropriate,” according to court documents.
The April 14 ruling was the seventh Supreme Court decision to strike down a piece of Harper government legislation, but it was one of the few that did not enjoy unanimous support.
In this case, Justices Michael Moldaver, Marshall Rothstein and Richard Wagner all dissented, arguing that the Supreme Court was effectively overthrowing a law based on “loose conjecture.”
“With respect, I see no reason to second-guess Parliament based on hypotheticals that do not accord with experience or common sense,” read an unusually critical dissenting opinion drafted by Moldaver.
The opinion added “it is not for this court to frustrate the policy goals of our elected representatives based on questionable assumptions or loose conjecture.”
MacKay took particular umbrage with the fact that the Supreme Court had overturned the mandatory minimum provisions in a bid to protect legitimate gun owners.
The Conservatives have a sterling record on supporting “law-abiding hunters, farmers and sport shooters,” he noted, adding that he trusted Crown prosecutors “not to seek the mandatory sentences in cases involving only technical violations of firearms licensing laws.”