The Canadian justice system is being simultaneously undermined by the promotion of the modification of sentences because of the race of the accused, at the same time that religious liberty is being compromised by legislation curtailing freedom of speech in religious matters. These are obviously delicate issues, and the desire to make allowances for people of traumatized or severely disadvantaged personal backgrounds is commendable. So is the wish to discourage anything that could be construed as promoting hatred or uncivilized attitudes for sectarian reasons.
But as Canada and other sophisticated societies have often discovered, the attempted cure for these tendencies can often aggravate them.
In British Columbia earlier this year, the sentence of an African Canadian with a long criminal record who murdered his girlfriend was reduced because of “systemic anti-Black racism.” The accused benefited from the IRCA finding of “early exposure to violence, chronic instability, poverty, systemic anti-Black racism, and untreated mental health symptoms, such as hypervigilance, that may be trauma-related ... (and possible) disconnection and isolation,” following his move from the diverse and largely black Toronto neighbourhoods to B.C., which has a smaller black population.
Even bending over backwards to subsume the edifying fragrance of compassion, it is very difficult to conclude that these factors reduce the culpable gravity of this man’s conviction for the murder of his girlfriend by stabbing her 15 times in the stairwell of a shopping centre. People of more positive and composed problems can legitimately sympathize with such a person, but stretching that to a reduced sentence for the horrible murder of an apparent loved one is not, on its face, justice.
In 2021, the federal government identified IRCA as a method that would ensure equal justice “for Black and other racialized Canadians,” which was identified as all Canadians who are not white—about a quarter of the population. This is itself a dubious and worrisome introduction of racism into the assessment of judicial guilt and sentencing. It disqualifies from such consideration the 75 percent of white Canadians, many of whom have also suffered very difficult times in their formative years through no fault of their own. The equal applicability of justice is fundamentally disturbed.
This is a practice that both panders illegitimately to minorities at the expense of the equity in our justice system, and reinforces the current tendency of the white leftist minority of our political-media-academic complex to engage in collective self-flagellation over what has come to be known, fatuously and prejudicially, as “white privilege.” (The privilege is life itself, not the pigmentation.)
It is reasonable to consider the background of accused and convicted people prior to sentencing, but not on a “racialized” basis. It was admirable of the outgoing premier of Quebec, François Legault, to reject the idea that there is “systemic racism” in Quebec. There is certainly cultural discrimination against non-francophones, but that is not a matter that is apt to become relevant in a criminal proceeding.
Again, justice must be tempered by mercy, but the best answer to this imbalance is striving for a society less vulnerable to criminal temptation, than automatically sentencing minorities less severely than other Canadians. If we must get into this, it should be available to all ethnicities. One partial exoneration last year in a soft drug-trafficking case was granted because the accused was a descendent of slaves. Slavery has not existed in this country for more than 200 years (before Canada became a nation), or in the United States for 160 years. This is nonsense and mere pandering.
The problem concerning religious matters is the proposed amendment sponsored by the Bloc Québécois (a separatist party) to remove the religious defence to hate speech in the Criminal Code. Naturally, almost all the country’s organized religions have objected on the grounds that this would suppress religious freedom, to which the official response is that Section 2(a) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms provides an overriding freedom of religion. In fact, of course, it will become easier than ever to prosecute anyone for a religious statement with which anti-theistic faddish opinion disagrees. Even if the Charter ultimately can be invoked to acquit the accused, the Bloc’s amendment is a blank cheque for harassment of all religious minorities.
C-9, dubbed the Combatting Hate Act, has had a mixed reception from the Jewish community, which has been shamefully victimized in Canada for the last several years. But some Jewish spokespeople and members of other faiths claim that the useful parts of the bill already exist, and that it is more likely to be employed by prosecutors as restrictive rather than supportive of religious practice.
The Senate should eliminate Bill C-9’s ambiguities, but our upper house is far from a hotbed of original remedial legislative activity. We should all, whatever our religious views, be prepared to fear the worst.
