Ottawa schlägt „umfassende“ Reformen der Kautions- und Strafgesetze vor
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canada-bail-reform-carney/
Ottawa schlägt „umfassende“ Reformen der Kautions- und Strafgesetze vor
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canada-bail-reform-carney/
4 Kommentare
Very long overdue. I am really skeptical about their decision to not touch the restraint principle. The problem with bail wasn’t just „we’re giving release to people who shouldn’t be released“ but also „when we do release, conditions have been weak and toothless“. It is a real shame they only bothered to address half the problem.
(Speaking about the [government’s announcement](https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/pl/c14/index.html) directly, more so than the Globe’s article in particular):
Well, at least the feds were honest about their given motivations in the Grounds for Detention section. The existing law was fine for protecting the public and getting people to court, but the optics („confidence in the system“) is what the LPC is working on. Ideally this would result in the changes being nothing more than a waste of time and money, but a few of them do seem to harm our rights and freedoms quite a bit.
Specifically, adding/expanding curfew as a bail condition is going to cause tremendous economic hardship to some, and inevitably create bail violations from people who would not have violated bail otherwise. This of course defeats the idea of making *punishment* depend on a trial instead of an accusation, which is the whole point of bail in the first place. We should always be imagining an innocent person facing any bail condition, because anything the government can impose with bail is something the government can impose on any citizen it wants at any time.
The sentencing changes are a different conversation than the bail changes, and consist of typical conservative strategies like making it explicit in the law that the lives of police are more important in courts than the lives of the public.
The one tentatively positive change on the sentencing front is restoring the possibility of driving prohibitions after vehicular manslaughter or bodily harm. There are good reasons to not apply those prohibitions in every case, but there are also good times to apply them, and this probably belongs in a judge’s hands for case-by-case judgement.
What’s the opposite of virtue signalling? Cruelty signalling? I’m not sure what else to call a policy that won’t solve a problem that doesn’t exist anyway, but has the potential to cause not-insignificant misery.
I’m very glad that we’re ending the Trudeau government’s philosophy of being nicer to criminals and hoping they stop hurting people. But these specific reforms are a mistake.
The purpose of the justice system should be to put guilty people in jail, and keep innocent people out of jail. The best way to achieve this is to have speedy trials, easy bail, and long sentences. This minimizes the time innocent people have to spend in jail, and maximizes the time guilty people spend in jail.
The impetus for these changes is rising crime rates and small number of hyper-recidivists. But the solution to this problem is to get those people to trial quicker, and then lock them up and throw away the key. But this bill will do nothing to speed up trials, and barely raises sentences. By just toughening bail, the government is guaranteeing that more innocent people go to jail, without increasing the punishment that guilty people will face.
Again, I’m glad that the political consensus on crime is shifting. We’re no longer pretending that we have an over-incarceration problem or anything like that. But these actual policies aren’t great.