MacKay slams court’s gun sentence decision
Minister says move based on hypotheticals
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 threeyear minimum sentences for gun crimes on the grounds that the law could unwittingly target lawabiding 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 lawabiding 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 meet 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.” Q You plan to argue beavers are “quite possibly the most important and powerful animals on the planet.” That sounds like hyperbole. Sell me.
A Ha ha, OK. First off, they transform habitats — they transform flowing water systems into still water systems. That sounds like an ordinary feat, yet when they transform it they also enrich the environment. These ponds they create are gathering bowls for nutrients. Beavers are always dragging in materials from the land, defecating in the water, and so on. Over the years, the soil becomes quite rich with nutrients. Q Wait — because beavers are defecating in the pools? A Well, yeah. They’ll crap on the land and they crap in the water. They add incredible nutrients to the water system, and these nutrients not only support lots of plants in the pond itself but also downstream. They’re also incredibly important for retaining water, which we know is becoming a scarce commodity. Studies have shown that in terms of their effect on hydrology, beaver ponds help maintain water tables. In some areas, the water table drops a metre or more during droughts. By a beaver pond, it’s only a few centimetres.
Q The beavers must be relieved to hear they’re finally getting some legitimate cred. But tell me about this long-held image of them being a total pest. I grew up in the Ottawa Valley and remember hearing about farmers blowing up dams because of the flooding.
A Exactly. There’s a balance there. Certainly in some areas where beavers are flooding farmland, it’s a different situation than an area where they’re not interacting with humans. There’s always this conflict going on whenever animals come back into the urban environment, but then again don’t forget we displaced them originally. Q Are you allowed to blow up beaver dams anymore? A Yeah, if the beaver is flooding roads or flooding farmlands, the owner of the property or farmland has full licence to deal with the beavers. If the land owner is smart enough, the pond can be used to his advantage — it could be a watering hole for cattle. Now they’ve developed these incredible flow systems they call beaver baffles that can be used to control water levels so they don’t get to the flooding point.