The Liberal government’s “soft-on-crime approach” to Canadian law and order has left many Canadians feeling threatened, insecure, and less safe on their city’s streets – and in their residential neighbourhoods. The data and a constant stream of serious, lawless incidents reveals that criminals have become emboldened and fearless of the police and the Canadian justice system. The changes that were made by the Trudeau Liberals have resulted in a catch-and-release justice system that is undermining societal order and public safety by releasing repeat violent offenders back into the community, with many on unconditional bail.
The Trudeau government introduced two pieces of legislation that significantly altered Canada’s justice system. Bill C-5 repealed the country’s mandatory minimum sentences for serious violent crimes and extended judicial discretion for sentencing that could take into account ethnicity and socio-economic background for those persons found guilty. Bill C-75 made it easier for serious repeat offenders to obtain bail quickly, including those charged with gun crimes, sexual assault, and other violent offences. This legislation also made it incumbent upon the prosecutors to prove that denying bail is justified. It established the principle of restraint, that a judge must release the accused “at the earliest of opportunity” on the “least onerous conditions,” regardless of the circumstances of the offender and the offense.
The effect of the Liberals’ sentencing policies can be found in the country’s crime data. A statistical comparison of urban centres in Canada and the United States completed by the Fraser Institute last year showed that both overall violent crime rates and property crime rates are now higher in Canada than in the U.S. cities like New York, L.A. and Detroit. The overall violent crime rate in Canada including murder, robbery and assault with a weapon was 434.1 crimes per 100,000 in 2022, a 43.8 per cent increase from 2014. By comparison, the U.S. violent crime rate in 2022 was 380.7 crimes per 100,000, a total of 14 per cent lower than in Canada. Also, the national figures for property crimes, which include burglary, theft, motor vehicle theft, etc., are 27.5 per cent higher in Canada than in the U.S.
Comparing major cities, the rate of property crimes per person in Toronto is 40 per cent higher than in New York. As a matter of fact, Toronto, Hamilton, and Windsor all ranked higher for property crime than New York and Detroit. Here is more data from that review: from 2019 to 2022, Thunder Bay had Ontario’s highest rate of property crimes (e.g., burglary, theft, motor vehicle theft) and violent crimes, while Winnipeg, Manitoba is Canada’s most-violent city with the highest per person rate of violent crimes (murder, robbery, and assault with a weapon) of all Canadian urban areas.
Statistics Canada reported that in the past 10 years homicides have risen 33 per cent, theft over $5,000 is up 49 per cent, firearm crimes are up 136 per cent, child sexual abuse is up 141 per cent, and extortion is up 429 per cent. Even with this hard data, the government data agency makes this blanket statement on its website: “Canada is generally seen as a safe country and has a low rate of crime compared to many other countries around the globe.” Apparently, Canadians are to take solace with the country’s rising crime and compare our streets with those countries elsewhere.
Still the government-speak belies the fact that Canada’s streets have become more unsafe and its justice system more unjust. To make this serious matter worse, the Liberals refuse to acknowledge a rise in violent crimes or to take responsibility for the deterioration of public safety as a result of their catch-and-release justice system.
On a weekly basis Canadians bear witness to the horrific hellscape this Liberal interpretation of justice provides us. This week a 14-year old repeat offender went live on his Instagram feed to brag about his crimes and his bail, and to taunt the Toronto police after he killed a 71-year old senior. Shahnaz Pestonji was killed while taking her groceries to her car. The murderer wanted her car and stabbed her when she refused to give up her keys.
This gruesome, senseless act of fatally stabbing a senior similarly played itself out a few months ago in an unprovoked attack in a Pickering residential neighbourhood. Recall that tragedy: a 14-year old youth was walking down a sidewalk and saw an elderly woman gardening – and knifed her on the front lawn of her residence.
Last week in Montreal, a violent repeat offender – a murderer just released on full parole – gunned down another man in a downtown public square. The alleged shooter, Jeremiah Valentine, is the same man convicted in the 2005 Boxing Day shooting in Toronto of 15-year old Jane Creba. Tried and sentenced in 2009, Valentine was granted full parole a few months ago in January, in spite of a parole board report that concluded he had a 76 per cent chance of reoffending.
The Liberals have produced a perverse and unjust justice system. Consider these nonsensical law and order incidents from this month of July.
- A criminal lawyer weighs in on a Toronto teen who was acquitted after self-defence shooting with an illegal gun — the Iraqi man, who was 17 at the time of the shooting, described the Scarborough neighbourhood in which he grew up as unsafe, “like Iraq.”
- There has been three stabbing fatalities in ten days in the greater Vancouver area: a teen was arrested in a stabbing death of 15-year-old near Vancouver’s Robson Square; one person has been arrested following a stabbing on a bus in Kitsilano on Sunday; and Ivy Michelle Bell, 40, of Surrey, was fatally stabbed at 4:30 a.m. in Gastown on Sunday.
- The convicted killer of a father of seven, who stabbed his victim Rukinisha Nkundabatware to death in an Edmonton LRT transit station, was sentenced to seven years jailtime (to be released in 4.5 years). The killer Jamal Wheeler has a prior violent history, and this deadly altercation was determined to be unprovoked, and yet the judge was lenient because of the killer’s tough childhood.
- Shafaq Joya, 39, is seeking an absolute discharge relating to his murder of a roommate in 2016. Joya stabbed his roommate 320 times, dismembered him, and tried to remove his heart. He was deemed not criminally responsible due to a mental disorder and today he lives semi-independently in a Hamilton apartment.
- An Indian foreign national, Akashkumar Narendrakumar Khant, admitted to trying to buy sex from a 15-year-old girl, and was given a conditional discharge by an Ontario judge who did not want to jeopardize the man’s Canadian citizenship application or his marital relationship.
Then there was the news story of the Calgary police issuing notices in Arabic and Hindi to warn possible violators of the consequences of committing sexual assault at the Calgary Stampede. Police were quick to point out the notices were also published in English and French. And, as it was during this year’s Stampede, three people were stabbed on the midway (and this raises the question, does anyone recall the last time there were sexual assault notices published or knife stabbings at the Stampede?).
At the federal-provincial meetings this week, the premiers ended the final day with a call for the Carney government to introduce meaningful bail reform that would make it harder for repeat violent offenders to get bail. The prime minister made vague promises about bail reform during the election and this week he stated his government would bring forward legislation when parliament resumes this fall.
Bail reform legislation is also the focus of a MP’s summertime national tour. Larry Brock, MP for Brantford-Brant South-Six Nations and the Conservative justice critic, is raising awareness of his petition to amend Canada’s Criminal Code to “make bail more restrictive for repeat violent offenders, particularly those charged with firearms offences, intimate partner violence, and serious violent crimes.” The petition also calls for the government to repeal the Trudeau-era laws, bills C-5 and C-75, that has created the “catch-and-release” system.
In an informative Northern Perspective podcast interview, Brock states, “Liberals are actively blaming the provinces for appointments of judges who are not applying the law. But yes, they are applying the law and the principle of restraint enacted in 2018. No amount of reform by this Liberal government is going to move the needle until that principle of restraint has been rescinded.”
In this must-see video podcast “The Next Victim COULD BE YOU,” Cait Alexander, founder of End Violence Everywhere (EVE), is also commenting on the urgency for bail reform. She states that it appears the Liberal government is lax on criminals by choice, and the criminals know this, and they take advantage of the system. Alexander states, “The government is letting Canadians get killed. They alone have the power to do something about it. It is scary that we have to be here. I can’t urge the public enough to get behind us because it is you next. Everyone is one step, one incident away from understanding the perils of our injustice system.”
“One home invasion away, one drunk driver away, one wrong place at the wrong time, as we have seen by the multiple stabbings over the course of the last week. We are all one incident away and the pervasiveness of these issues cannot be understated,” comments EVE’s spokesperson.
Given July’s headlines and the many disturbing incidents that are now regularly occurring on our streets, who can argue with Cait Alexander’s contention that the Liberals’ soft-on-crime approach is killing us – literally?
Chris George is an advocate, government relations advisor, and writer/copy editor. As president of a public relations firm established in 1994, Chris provides discreet counsel, tactical advice and management skills to CEOs/Presidents, Boards of Directors and senior executive teams in executing public and government relations campaigns and managing issues. Prior to this PR/GR career, Chris spent seven years on Parliament Hill on staffs of Cabinet Ministers and MPs. He has served in senior campaign positions for electoral and advocacy campaigns at every level of government. Today, Chris resides in Almonte, Ontario where he and his wife manage www.cgacommunications.com. Contact Chris at chrisg.george@gmail.com.
