The provision was added because of a concern that courts were not taking into account the circumstances of aboriginal peoples. The stats indicate that aboriginal peoples tend to be disproportionately imprisoned, measured against others with similar records. That raises a concern about systemic discrimination in the justice system.
Sentencing is meant to find a punishment that fits the crime, and the offender. Some aboriginal people have had life experiences that are outside the norm of most judges, who tend to be from upper middle-class backgrounds, without much systemic traumas, such as the residential schools experience.
The provision is telling judges, “Don’t assume that everyone has had your life experiences, and particularly make sure you understand the very different backgrounds and experiences of some aboriginal offenders.”
So, discrimination for good instead of evil, eh? If I understand that correctly, two people who commit the same crime could get two different sentences, if one was a white guy and one was an Aboriginal guy. That doesn’t seem like equality to me.
I did like the point made in the article - it doesn’t matter to the victims what race the person was that curb-stomped their face or raped them - they’re still just as damaged.
I don’t think so. I think it’s justifiable to take into consideration the circumstances of aboriginal offenders. As we saw in the Attawapiskat story, their living conditions can be quite horrendous.
As far as I’m aware though, the justice system does take history into consideration for all sentencing. If you’re a first-time offender who is employed full time, I think you’d be sentenced differently than an unemployed repeat offender, for example.
I don’t have a problem with the “special considerations” but as that National Post opinion pointed out, public safety should be paramount.
I wouldn’t agree with that characterisation. The provision is to direct judges to take everything into account about the individual. It’s not saying to treat aboriginal offenders more leniently.
Depends I suppose. The Aboriginal Justice Initiative emerged in the early 1990’s along with a Royal Commission to investigate Aboriginal concerns. This is the time period of Oka, Residential School fall out etc. And for the Justice department the issue at hand really was that aboriginals were in prison far in excess of what their population would indicate. In fact in 2008 the Justice department said :
So in the mid 1990s the Justice department opted to kick off a series of pilot projects and experiments geared to keeping offenders in their communities while being rehabilitated. The other option of prison would simply continue to tear at the social fabric of first nation’s commnuities which in turn would drive crime.
So given the context of what the Canadian government had done to aboriginals this was seen as a way to begin mitigating the destruction inflicted through earlier practices through legislation.
Plus, it’s also a basic principle of sentencing, as set out in s. 718.2(b), as quoted by Grey upthread, that “a sentence should be similar to sentences imposed on similar offenders for similar offences committed in similar circumstances”. That’s not negated by the direction to be aware of the particular circumstances of aboriginal offenders.
Protection of the public is already set out in the Criminal Code, in s. 718, which sets out the basic principles for sentencing. It’s not as if the law has ignored that key purpose of a criminal system.
More importantly the National Post seems to be casting Rothstein as the only one who cares about community protection. However Rothstein appears to agree with the majority but disagrees about their interpretation of Parliamentary intent of the Long Term Supervision Order (LTSO).
Actually the more I read this judgement the less difference I see between Rothstein and the majority opinion. From the decision:
so I’m confused as to what was different w.r.t LTSO and the second appeal of Ladue.
I guess I’m just not getting why judges who are assumed to be competent and fair need to be told to give special attention to the circumstances of native offenders. Why don’t they just judge and sentence everyone according to the circumstances they come to court with?
It does seem a little weird, doesn’t it? It makes a certain historical sense, and is a reasonable effort, but I wonder if - regardless of the intent of the law - that extra, explicit statement results in a discrepency in sentencing, such as more lenient sentences for aboriginals (as compared to non-aboriginals, rather than compared to previous sentencing trends). I think it would be a rather large undertaking to try and see if that statement has had an impact on the types of sentences handed out.
Now, you might argue that some forms of racism are justifiable, but that doesn’t make them not racist. Law provides for many forms of justifiable or legal discrimination.
Except that wasn’t happening, for numerous reasons. There were ample studies, culminating in the evidence before the Royal Commission mentioned by Grey, that aboriginal people were over-incarcerated, even when other factors were taken into account. When you have an identifiable group of people who are being imprisoned more harshly than others for the same types of crimes, that raises a serious issue about the fundamental fairness of the criminal justice system. Section 718.2(e) was one measure that was added to try to rectify that injustice.
So if you have a group of people being over-incarcerated, tied to their racial origins, it’s racist to try to rectify the problem so that they are treated the same as other people of different races?
True enough, but until that happens, we want a justice system that operates fairly in light of the great disparities in wealth and life experiences among Canadians.
Besides Canada has systematically undermined the social fabric within aboriginal communities. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes not, but couple massive family fabric disruption with poverty and you create a poverty trap of astounding proportions.
Who could be this stupid, really? There’s no way I can possibly believe that this was a Conservative or Liberal attack. What the fuck is going on here?
The strangest thing about that attack is that the people who are cyber-savvy enough to try to pull that off ought to be cyber-savvy enough to know that they’ll leave traces of their IP addresses behind…
And here’s an interesting survey result - a NANOS poll commissioned by the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, a pro-CBC group shows that
The executive summary, and a link to the full report in PDF format, can be found at this link.
I find it quite heartening after all the Conservative-based petitions and CBC bashing by Sun Media that there are some hard numbers out there that show public support for CBC.
I’m no computer geek - though I am married to one - and it seems to me that something with that many attacking IP addresses would be done through somesort of distributed malware or virus or whatever. Get thousands of computers infected with something that logs on to a central place without the computer owner knowing, then a ‘single’ person (or small group) could command those computers to “attack.”
Everything in quotes up there because I don’t really know how it works, but it sounds like you could use the type of tools used for Folding@homeor SETI@home (distributed computing) for all kinds of malicious stuff too.