no but we do have homeless camps, people dying in the streets from cold, entire neighbourhoods where small businesses are going bust due to petty theft, vandalism, and break ins such as parts of Victoria, Edmonton, Toronto of course, Winnipeg. Are you sure that society has really evolved for the better? We should maybe examine are improvements in the light of recent history and change back the bad choices we made and that requires a method of making the courts answerable to the law and not crafting it to suit themselves
Part of that boils down to expecting the justice system to solve social ills. As was raised upthread, solving infrastructure and capacity problems in the court system would go a long way to making it more responsive. About 70% of the Ontario correctional system population is on remand - not sentenced according to the Auditor-General (year u/k). The response to the
Jordan ruling has been lackluster but imagine where we would be without it.
As well, improving the economy would help diminish property crime and homelessness. The background and motivation for so-called petty crime like theft is much different than serious crime like murder. Tossing somebody in jail for long sentences simply because they were caught stealing for the third went out the window in most democratic countries about a century ago. Sure, it stops that person from stealing but you haven't created a society where there aren't 10 more to take their place. They cut their hands off in some countries but poor people still steal.
I am convinced a lot of the homelessness (and attendant crime) is a result of drug addiction. It will be interesting to see how Alberta's new 'involuntary treatment' law fares. No doubt some civil liberties advocate is already writing their brief.
I can't answer on society's behalf. In some aspects, we are better off in terms of life expectancy, health, etc. but poverty isn't a new thing. Old photos of Toronto and no doubt other cities from a century + ago show shanty towns, uneducated orphans, etc.
The activism of the Court ebbs and flows with the bench composition. There have been times when it unashamedly 'interpreted' laws - 'this is what we think they meant to say'. I'm not sure how true that is currently. The accepted principle in Canada is that the Charter is a 'living document'. In almost 250 years, that is not a settled concept in the US. Certainly, Charter matters such as 'cruel and unusual' and 'reasonable expectation' are principles or concepts that get applied to substantive laws. I suppose they could craft a law that defines what 'cruel and unusual' means, but them it would have to be stripped from the Charter (therefore no longer a protected freedom) and subject to revision by subsequent governments.
I guess if the solution was easy, someone smarter than I would have already thought of it.
