A little late, but it's been a long week:
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Poilievre is once again rage baiting and using emotions and the ignorance of everyday people to win political points. PP has been demanding that Paul Bernardo remain in a maximum security prison, and demanding the gov directly interfere in the judicial process, and he put forward a motion to do so. The motion was obviously voted down. Why? Because it’s unconstitutional. The HoC does not individually determine punishments for criminals. That’s not how our justice system works, at all, and this is PP demanding to use the justice system to punish those he thinks deserves to be punished. That is a very scary prospect. He wants to use the HoC to manipulate the judicial system, and when it was voted down, do you know what the conservatives did? They started chanting “you guys love Paul Bernardo.” This is how low they’ve sunk. The HoC has become incredibly vile, and it’s largely being driven by the CPC, playing this sort of disgusting game. Politicians interfering with the criminal justice system
directly, especially with individual cases, is unconstitutional. PP is demanding that federal government do something unconstitutional, and then getting mad at them for not doing.
What's really sad is that the CPC is the only real alternative to the LPC, but it's like the CPC doesn't
want to be left alone; as the LPC sinks lower and lower, the CPC is diving right in after them.
I said earlier I’d come back with my thoughts on this. I’ll preface this with fuck Paul Bernardo and it’s a shame he’s not dead, just so nobody thinks any of what I say comes from any sympathy for him.
Our federal criminal laws (Criminal Code, and some other statutes) establish criminal offences, and prescribe the possible sentences for them. The Crim Code will say, for instance, how much time someone might serve in prison. That’s established by Parliament. Parliament has also legislated what are the factors for judges to consider in sentencing. The criminal law explicitly leaves it to judges to actually issue a sentence.
Federal corrections has varying levels of security and programming in order to keep prisoners secure and in custody, and to fulfil its its rehabilitative mandate under the Corrections and Conditional Releases Act. The security level, more than anything, is about safeguarding the prisoner from escape and, to some extent, from them causing harm to other inmates. The level of security is
not part of the punitive sentence; it’s essentially an administrative decision. Yes, being incarcerated in maximum security sucks more than medium security, which sucks more than minimum security. But that’s not intended in any part of the system to explicitly be part of the punitive sentence.
It’s very
emotional for people to consider someone like Bernardo being dropped a security level, but he’ll still be securely behind bars. It’s an operational and administrative decision under Correctional Service Canada’s purview as it is for any other prisoner.
Unfortunately, the emotional and sensational nature of this makes it fodder for some frankly pathetic and opportunistic political showboating. What that really tangibly means is that we have the opposition wanting a cabinet minister to specifically interfere to turn the dial up on the punishment of a convicted offender, in a way not provided for in our laws, and not intended or legislated by parliament. That’s a pretty significant separation of powers issue, and a lot of people are ok with it because it’s that piece of shit Bernardo. But, no matter who it is, this is not a decision that would be appropriate for a political figure to meddle in. We explicitly have a whole separate part of our system to deal with crime and punishment. That’s hived off from the executive branch on purpose, because we specifically
don’t want the government of the day prescribing punishments. If they want that, they need to lead legislative efforts on it.
So that’s my take. It wasn’t ok when the government of the day interfered in the internal decisions of the justice system in the past, and it wouldn’t be ok for them to do so now or in future. The imperfections in the system - and there are many - should be remedied by thoughtful policy making and legislation, not as hoc meddling when something is sensational enough to make the news and score points on electoral intention polls.
338canada.com
