How Canadian politicians fight crime
The proposal of the opposition leader looks too radical.
In just two years Canada will be re-electing Prime Minister. Trudeau's biggest opponent is conservative Pierre Poilievre. Even though the election is still a long way off, he is vigorously resisting the current government and proposing solutions to issues ranging from health care to crime control, from international relations to education system.
The leader of the Conservative Party said this week that if he was a prime minister, his government would bring in legislation denying repeat violent offenders.
Seems that his statement is related to the crime problem in today's Canada. Poilievre regularly says crime has gotten worse during Trudeau's time as prime minister.
"If someone has committed seven or eight repeat violent offences and then is newly arrested on a new violent charge, then it's clear that they are a danger to society and should be kept behind bars until the trial is over and their sentences complete," Poilievre told reporters in Ottawa this Tuesday.
Experts have already dubbed this proposal radical, because it is likely to be unconstitutional.
The opposition leader's comments came in response to the federal government announcing its own plans to reform Canada's bail legislation. They plan to introduce measures that would make it harder for some repeat violent offenders to be released on bail.
The current government is under pressure from all political sides: victims' organizations, police associations, provincial leaders. The reason for this is the upsurge of crimes actively reported in the media.
Poilievre called for firm and decisive measures. This is where the experts came in.
Boris Bytensky, a criminal defense attorney, believes that legislation that would deny some defendants access to bail hearings would fail the constitutional test, because such approach does not take possible innocence into account.
"Somewhere in there, there should be room for a person to be found not guilty. Because presumably, we don't actually sentence people until and unless they've been found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt," he said.
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Danardo Jones, an assistant professor at the University of Windsor's law school, said that from a constitutional-legal perspective, the promise doesn't make "much sense."
"I'm not really sure what society these folks are imagining, if it's a society where there is no risk, or a society where there is no crime. I would love to live in a society like that, but I don't know if draconian criminal measures are going to usher in a society like that," concluded Jones.
According to Jones, about 70% of the people who are already in Canadian detention facilities are there because they have been denied bail.
Recently the Ontario government announced a simplified recruitment process for police service. This is partly what Pierre Poilevre is talking about, the need to increase crime control not only in Ontario, but across Canada.
