Authorities on Monday called the weekend's deadly attack
on a Michigan church "an act of targeted violence" but said they were
still trying to determine precisely why an ex-Marine crashed his pickup
truck into the church during a Sunday service, opened fire and set the
building ablaze, killing four people.
Hundreds
of worshippers were inside the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints in Grand Blanc, Michigan, when the suspect rammed his vehicle
into the front doors on Sunday morning, officials said. Two victims were
shot to death, and two other bodies were discovered hours later in the
rubble of the church, which officials said was deliberately set on fire.
At one in the morning, Nicholas Roske allegedly showed up outside
Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home carrying a gun, zip ties and tools for
breaking and entering. Roske was angry about the Supreme Court’s ruling
on abortion because he believed that abortion should be “mandatory for
pregnant women” so that “no new people would be born” and “humanity will
end”.
Roske wanted to
kill three Supreme Court justices so that “there are more liberal than
conservative judges”, so that abortion would be legal and the human race
would end.
While Roske’s first name was listed as Nicholas, he used ‘Sophie; and his lawyers have announced that they will from now on refer to him “as Sophie and use female pronouns.”
Later the same year that a transgender assassin tried to murder a
Supreme Court justice, a transgender cult was beginning its own spree of
violence thousands of miles away in California.
That fall, a group of the ‘Zizian’ transgender cult members impaled
their 80-year-old landlord with a sword after he tried to evict them for
not paying rent and then over the winter, the elderly parents of one of
the cult members were found brutally murdered in their own home.
Three years later, Border Patrol Agent David Maland was killed in a
shootout at the Canadian border with two transgender men who were
members of the cult:, Felix ‘Ophelia’ Bauckholt, a German math genius
who had been working on Wall Street, and Milo ‘Teresa’ Youngblut
By this point, six people were dead in three states by the activities
of a transgender cult animated by veganism, animal rights and the
belief that “the two hemispheres of the brain could hold separate values
and genders” making it possible for there to be two sexes in one body.
The pseudoscientific idea that there can be a “female brain” in a “male
body” is the foundation of transgender identification. Combining the
various suicides, eight people died for this transgender belief system.
And it is possible that some elements of the cult, whose members had a
tendency to fake their own deaths, still remain alive, active and
waiting to strike. ...
Earlier this year, Robert ‘Robin’ Westman murdered two children and
wounded 18 more children in a massacre at the Annunciation Catholic
Church. The mass killing of children in a Christian setting echoed the
massacre of three children and three staff members by Audrey ‘Aiden’
Hale at the Covenant School. Another transgender mass shooter had taken
part in a school shooting in Colorado that killed one student and
wounded 8 others. The murder of 6 children and the wounding of 27 more
children by radicalized transgender school shooters for a total of 33
children who were shot was part of a wave of transgender terror that has
shaken the nation.
As the Liberals deal with the fallout over Anthony Rota’s resignation as House Speaker, tensions are boiling over its attempt to strike Yaroslav Hunka’s recognition from the official record.
Hunka, a 98-year-old Ukrainian-Canadian who fought in a Nazi unit
during the Second World War, was recognized by Rota as a “hero” during
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s visit to Canada Sept. 22. ...
The idea to strike Hunka’s recognition from the official record of the
House of Commons was proposed by Government House Leader Karina Gould on
Monday.
A subsidized “anti-hate” expert blames Blacklock’s Reporter for a review of its federal funding. Evan Balgord, executive director of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, said in a Friday podcast he thought Blacklock’s was “really cool” until it began reporting on his activities: “They’re the ones who recently reported that we target Catholics.”
I don't think CAHN needs taxpayer money for that sort of thing.
He was
reportedly livestreaming a video on TikTok in which he spoke about his
faith. The attack has shocked local Christian communities and drawn
calls for clarity on the motives behind the killing.
(Sidebar: oh, I think we know.)
According to local newspaper Le Progrès,
the victim, identified as Ashur Sarnaya — who was disabled and used a
wheelchair — was returning to his apartment building when a man,
apparently waiting for him, struck him in the neck with a knife.
Emergency services, alerted shortly before 10:30 p.m., found him in
cardiac arrest and were unable to revive him.
Born in
1979, Sarnaya had lived in the building with his sister for more than a
decade after fleeing the advance of the Islamic State in Iraq in 2014.
Neighbors described him as “a vulnerable person who didn’t walk and
never caused any trouble.”
For decades, the Canadian state has consistently located itself at the vanguard of progress and national excellence.
For instance, from 2006-2014, Canada’s GDP steadily increased, crime declined, and the Canadian state was often lauded as a paragon of democracy. Furthermore, throughout the 2000s and early 2010s, Canada remained a stalwart, esteemed member of the international community, and Canadians everywhere constantly enjoyed a remarkable quality of life.
Unfortunately,
since the advent of the Liberal government, Canada has been forced to
endure a precipitous national decline. In fact, Canada’s economy has collapsed, and the very fabric of Canada’s democracy has been rent totally asunder, as a consequence of the past decade of Liberal leadership. ...
For example, since 2015, violent crime in Canada has increased by over 30%. Furthermore, Canada’s homicide rate recently hit a 30-year peak, and in 2022, Canada’s Violent Crime Severity Index (VCSI) easily surpassed its highest point since 2007. In
fact, according to the Global Peace Index (GPI), Canada has eclipsed
every nation in Central and North America in order to record the
“largest deterioration in overall peacefulness over the past year.” ...
For instance, various Canadian Premiers, such as the Premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, and the Premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith,
have, for years, emphatically reiterated that swarms of illegal
migrants, extremists, and criminals, as well as vast quantities of
illicit substances, have surged freely in and out of Canada, as a result
of the Canadian state’s utter inability to secure its borders.
Even Canada’s disgraced
former prime minister himself, Justin Trudeau, has recently been forced
to admit that Canada’s borders have become utterly porous and that “bad
actors…have been exploiting [Canada’s] immigration system for their
own interests.”
In
fact, over the past decade, the Liberal government’s shameful inability
to secure Canada’s borders has permitted a diverse array of criminal
organizations to transform the Canadian state into a global hub for the
export of countless illegal narcotics, such as fentanyl,
and countless terrorist leaders and people with intimate connections to
terrorist organizations have been allowed to migrate freely within the
Canadian state throughout the Liberal era.
**
Illegal immigrants need more free legal help, Amnesty International says
in a submission to the Commons finance committee. The Federal Courts
Administration Service has complained immigration cases are already
clogging dockets with taxpayers’ costs up more than 300 percent:
“Provide Legal Aid funding to ensure certainty and consistency for
refugees and migrants regardless of where they are in the country.”
Twice in four days, Prime Minister Mark Carney scheduled official photo ops in front of environments that weren’t entirely real.
During a Sept. 19 visit to Mexico, Carney led cameras through a railyard stocked with pallets of artfully arranged sacks decorated with a maple leaf and the words “product of Canada.”
The site was the Canadian Pacific Kansas City Ferrovalle train yard, located outside Mexico City. ...
“Canadian
grain farmers haven’t shipped wheat in sacks for over a century!” read a
reaction by Chris Warkentin, Conservative MP for the heavily
wheat-growing riding of Grande Prairie, Alta.
Sylvain
Charlebois, a food scientist at Dalhousie University, wrote in a column
this week that “bagged wheat is a relic of less mechanized economies.”
“We
are among the most efficient bulk grain exporters in the world,
shipping millions of tonnes through rail networks and ocean vessels
designed for efficiency, safety, and traceability,” he wrote.
But
it was a housing announcement just outside Ottawa where Carney would
run into more direct accusations of being deliberately deceptive with
his photo backdrop.
On
Sept. 14, just before the opening of the fall session of Parliament,
Carney stood in front of two under-construction homes in the Ottawa area
and announced the official launch of Build Canada Homes, a new federal
agency tasked with developing subdivisions of manufactured homes on
federal land.
“The two sets of homes behind me were manufactured in two days, assembled on site in one,” Carney said to applause.
“We
wanted to keep the townhouses open; we held back the workers from
finishing it so you could see how things fit together,” he said, adding
that one of the homes was being shipped “to Nunavut.”
Once
the press conference was over, both homes were dismantled, and the site
returned to what it had been before: A patch of fallow government land
located near the Ottawa airport.
The land is a right-of-way for high-voltage power lines, which is why it currently doesn’t contain any development.
Postmedia
reporter Bryan Passifiume was at the original announcement, and visited
the same site four days later only to find a graded patch of gravel.
“The
construction was all just a backdrop — today there’s just an excavator
& bulldozer working the site,” Passifiume wrote in a social media
post.
There were warning signs in 2015 and no one wanted to see them:
Justin Trudeau may be gone, but the economic consequences of
his fiscal approach, chronic deficits, rising debt costs and stagnating
growth, are still weighing heavily on Canada.
Before
becoming prime minister, Justin Trudeau famously said, “The budget will
balance itself.” He argued that if expenditures stayed the same,
economic growth would drive higher tax revenues and eventually outpace
spending. Voila–balance!
But
while the theory may have been sound, ...
(Sidebar: wait - what?)
... Trudeau had no real intention of
pursuing a balanced budget. In 2015, he campaigned on intentionally
overspending and borrowing to build infrastructure, arguing that low
interest rates made it the right time to run deficits.
This
argument, weak in its concept, proved even more flawed in practice.
Post-pandemic deficits have been horrendous, far exceeding the modest
overspending initially promised. The budgetary deficit was $327.7
billion in 2020–21, $90.3 billion the year following, and between $35.3
billion and $61.9 billion in the years since.
Those formerly
historically low interest rates are also gone now, partly because the
federal government has spent so much. The original excuse for deficits
has vanished, but the red ink and Canada’s infrastructure deficit
remain.
For two decades, interest payments on federal debt steadily declined,
falling from 24.6 per cent of government revenues in 1999–2000 to just
5.9 per cent in 2021–22, thanks largely to falling interest rates and
prior fiscal restraint. But that trend has reversed. By 2023–24,
payments surged past 10 per cent for the first time in over a decade, as
rising interest rates collided with record federal debt built up under
Trudeau.
Rising debt costs are only part of the story. Federal
revenues aren’t what they could have been because Canada’s economy has
stagnated. Population growth pads our overall GDP growth stats, but
masks our productivity problem. From 2014 to 2022, Canada had
near-lowest GDP growth among 30 countries in the Organization for
Economic Co-operation and Development. Canada’s average growth rate
during that period (0.6 per cent) was only ahead of Luxembourg (0.5 per
cent) and Mexico (0.4 per cent).Why should a country like Canada, so
blessed with natural resources and know-how, do so poorly? Capital
investment has fled because our government has made onerous regulations,
especially hindering our energy industry.
In May, Prime Minister Mark Carney proudly announced a new
bill to “deliver tax relief for Canadians by reducing the lowest
marginal personal income tax rate from 15% to 14%, effective July 1,
2025.
The
government news release went on: “Nearly 22 million Canadians are
expected to benefit from this measure. The middle-class tax cut would
reduce the tax rate that is applied to the first $57,375 (in 2025) of an
individual’s taxable income, regardless of their income level.”
The
government claims that an individual could save as much as $420 and a
couple up to $840 in 2026. This is naturally welcome news for
beleaguered taxpayers. However, the reality is likely to differ from the
announced measures.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO), Yves
Giroux, states that the maximum saving a couple will receive will be
$750, not the $840 the government says. That $750 is the maximum amount a
couple can expect to benefit from this bill. That works out to $14.42
per week for that couple. Again, this is the maximum amount.
The news for lower-income Canadians is even less inspiring.
The PBO says that the lowest-income bracket Canadians will save $90 a
year. That’s $1.73 a week, not even the price of a medium double double.
To
compound the illusion that this tax break will have a significant
benefit for taxpayers, as income levels rise due to the tax reduction,
some non-refundable tax credits will be reduced. Once again, these
figures come from the PBO. Giroux’s office says the actual cost in
revenue to the government will be $9.5 billion but that loss will be
offset by the clawing back of $4.2 billion in non-refundable tax
credits. Those clawbacks come from the same taxpayers who are supposed
to benefit from the tax relief promised by Carney in May.
Canada’s
tax structure renders us uncompetitive with our southern neighbours.
Despite the challenging political climate these days, we have lost
enormous amounts of brain power to lower-taxed jurisdictions in the
United States over the years. Carney’s tax break will do little to make
us a more attractive place for higher-income earners or budding
entrepreneurs.
Making matters worse for the federal government is
what House Leader Steven MacKinnon admits is a “deficit issue that needs
to be dealt with.” With a budget due in November, the Carney government
is going to be faced with how to reduce Canada’s reliance on borrowing
in order to fund its various programs.
In the latest economic and fiscal
outlook, Jacques estimates the Liberals will post an annual deficit of
$68.5 billion this year, up from $51.7 billion dollars last year. The
interim PBO also projects that the federal debt-to-GDP ratio — one of
the government’s fiscal anchors — will increase over the medium-term,
and remain above its pre-pandemic level.
In an
interview with CTV Question Period airing Sunday, Jacques told host
Vassy Kapelos that his analysis “raises significant concerns” about the
“sustainability of federal finances.”
Asked
what that means in layperson’s terms, Jacques said while Canada hasn’t
“gone over the precipice,” it’s “looking out over the cliff.”
“We’re
at a point where, based upon our numbers, things cannot continue as
they are, and I think everybody knows that,” Jacques said, adding his
report contextualizes the anxiety some Canadians are feeling about the
economy right now.
The National Research Council is budgeting millions to renovate a vacant
library into an “engaging workplace” with an atrium, staff gymnasium,
“wellness rooms” and an executive suite for Mitch Davies, its $377,500-a
year president. Notices to contractors were issued Friday, only days
after the Prime Minister instructed federal agencies to earmark unused
property for public housing: “Our people make big things possible.”
Documents tabled in Parliament show the Department of Justice has racked up $21,031,000 on civil litigation and the Emergencies Act commission. That tally includes both real disbursements and “notional” costs for government lawyers billing their time against convoy files.
And the bill doesn’t stop there.
The Public Prosecution Service of Canada admitted it has its own convoy-related costs for federal prosecutors — but refused to say how much, claiming its system doesn’t properly track the spending.
Canadians know the civil tab alone is past $21 million, but the government won’t come clean on how high the true total really runs.
Rebel News reported earlier this week how the Liberals have also spent an additional $3.6 million in fighting challenges to Justin Trudeau's invocation of the Emergencies Act.
The act, which was used in February 2022 against the peaceful civil liberties demonstration, was deemed unconstitutional and unnecessary.
Taxpayers will take a double hit on federal financing for Chinese shipyard jobs, union executives yesterday told the Commons transport committee. Costs of the subsidized loan are on top of waivers of tariffs intended to protect Canadian jobs, they said: “If we are using taxpayers’ money to fund projects, surely to God we can put people to work.”
In a statement, RCMP Quebec division spokesperson Cpl. Erique Gasse confirmed that the police force had closed the two-year-long investigation “recently.” The information was first reported by theJournal de Montréal.
“We confirm that we have closed the foreign interference investigation into alleged illicit activities reported in connection with Chinese diaspora service centres in the Montréal area. Due to ongoing legal proceedings, we are unable to comment in greater detail,” Gasse said.
An American man dying of heart failure received the heart of a Canadian man with ALS who chose a medically assisted death in what is being described as a landmark case of a heart transplant following euthanasia.
He didn't choose.
He did the government a favour by letting them kill him.
“We will not commit national suicide because you don’t have the guts to face down a hostile media and anti-Semitic mobs demanding Israel’s blood,” the prime minister said in New York on Friday, referring to the recognition of Palestine by France, the U.K., Canada and others. The message to Hamas, Netanyahu said, was that “murdering Jews pays off.”
Many delegates walked out as Netanyahu prepared to speak, leaving the hall largely empty.
(Sidebar: RUDE!)
Israel’s longest serving leader cited the country’s military successes over Iran-backed militias and Tehran itself over the past year. He said that while Israel wanted to end the war in Gaza “as fast as possible,” it wouldn’t stop until Hamas was defeated or surrendered.
He spoke of the violence perpetrated by Hamas — designated a terrorist organization by the U.S., European Union and others — on Oct. 7, 2023. That day, it attacked Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking another 250 as hostages.
More than a quarter of Canadians believe “Jews are often to blame for any acts of prejudice they face,” according to a new national poll that the researcher says is indicative of post-October 7 victim-blaming on social media.
Leger found that 28 per cent of Canadians agree (nine per cent strongly and 19 per cent somewhat) with the statement that Jews are often to blame. The poll, which was conducted for the Association for Canadian Studies, found that just under three-quarters (72 per cent) of Canadians disagreed (37 per cent strongly and 35 per cent somewhat).
Let me state clearly - there is no such thing as a Palestinian state. There are no borders, no laws, no constitution, no tax collection services, no infrastructure built with said taxes, nothing. There is only a land-mass squatted on by people who rape and murder women and children, a figment of the liberal West's feverish imagination:
(Sidebar: as much as the bribed press would prefer to frame this as a battle of wills between Carney and Trump, it really is a statement of what both leaders represent. Carney represents himself as Canadians are largely indifferent to things that happen outside of Canada and will only embrace Jew-haters if told, and Trump sees the UN as the enabler of the worst sorts of tyrannies.)
Earlier
in the day, Trump accused allied nations — which include Canada — of
encouraging “continued conflict” in the Middle East by seemingly
rewarding terrorist group Hamas.
(Sidebar: not "seemingly". It does.)
**
Hamasperformed a public execution
on a Gaza City street on Sunday night. Three men in blindfolds, who had
been accused of collaborating with Israel, were lowered to their knees
in front of hundreds of onlookers. While members of the crowd cheered,
jeered and took videos on their phones, the men were shot at point-blank
range.
Just hours earlier, a dispatch had come from Ottawa: Canada was officially recognizing a Palestinian state.
The Palestine that Canada now recognizes bears no resemblance to the Palestinian territory that actually exists on the ground.
A statement released by Prime Minister Mark Carney
said that Canada is “recognizing the State of Palestine, led by the
Palestinian Authority,” though the reality is that the PA currently has
no authority beyond the West Bank.
**
Canada has promised to exceed $400 million in funds to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, including a new investment of $47 million, Canadian
Prime Minister Mark Carney announced on Tuesday. The total amount also
includes a new $47 million investment in the judicial systems,
government structures, economic resilience, and democratization efforts
of the territories.
(Sidebar: the joke's on you. We don't have that kind of money.)
Such
handbooks are supposed to include calendars and other useful
information for students. But according to Zorchinsky, this year’s
agenda doesn’t look like anything that should be handed out at a
Canadian university.
In a social media video, Zorchinsky describes the handbook as “Pro-Hamas and anti-western,”
explaining that it doesn’t contain Canadian flags, only Palestinian
ones, and that the calendar does not feature “any Canadian or religious
holidays whatsoever,” not even Christmas. It does, however, mention the
Palestinians’ “Nakba Day.”
The Commons yesterday by a 192 to 140 vote endorsed cabinet’s oil and
gas emissions cap. The regulations not yet in force would cost at least
$3.4 billion and some 3,400 energy jobs, according to the Department of
Environment: “Here is where we disagree.”
The Department of Industry billed taxpayers nearly a third of a million
to host a two-day conference of green technology companies seeking
federal subsidies, records show. “Now is the time for ambitious climate
action,” then-Minister François-Philippe Champagne said at the time.
Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree yesterday launched cabinet’s
long-delayed buy-back of “assault style” firearms under a national
program he privately dismissed as a political ploy to save 44 Liberal
seats in Québec. Opposition MPs demanded his resignation: “Why did you
say it was about Québec?”
Cabinet aides in internal emails schemed to “limit the damage” from
public disclosures that Canadian taxpayers financed Chinese shipyard
jobs, records show. “Distance ourselves from this as much as possible,”
wrote one aide as then-Transport Minister Chrystia Freeland denied
personal knowledge of the $1 billion BC Ferries deal: “It is our attempt
to make the best of the worst.”
When Perry MacDonald heard that Canadian author Robert
Munsch had requested Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) after his diagnoses
with dementia and Parkinson’s disease, it touched a nerve.
Munsch recently explained to the New York Times that, under
Canadian law, recipients of MAID must be able to actively consent on the day of
their death. “I have to pick the moment when I can still ask for it,” he said.
If he waited too long, he added, talking to his wife, “you’re stuck with me
being a lump.”
Government regulations are clear: “The person must be given
an opportunity to withdraw consent and must expressly confirm their consent
immediately before receiving MAID.”
MacDonald is familiar with watching dementia take a loved
one. Three months ago, his brother died after living with the disease for
almost two decades.
Ontarians without a primary care practitioner may soon be
relieved to connect with one in their community.
This week, the provincial government launched a call for
proposals to create and expand approximately 75 primary care teams with the aim
of connecting 500,000 more residents with primary care.
It’s an “over $250 million investment,” the Ontario
government announced on Monday.
It’s also part of the government’s $2.1 billion primary care
action plan to connect everyone in province to convenient primary care by 2029.
The entire campaign stems from the Primary Care Act passed in May.
But let's not address the real reason why there are no medical professionals remaining in Canada or the failed healthcare scheme.
The Crown prosecutor handling the case of a 25-year-old
half-Cree man who pleaded guilty to repeatedly raping a 12-year-old girl in
Calgary — among many other vile things — believed 12 to 15 years would make a
fair sentence; 10, if you count his mitigating factors. But the judge arrived
at merely eight. Why? Because the offender was Indigenous.
Known only as RJM, the offender met the girl online and
quickly escalated it into a real-world relationship that would span from May to
September 2023. It was abusive. He pulled a knife on her and threatened to kill
her; he punched her in the face; he dragged her by the hair; he hit her with a
metal pole; he drove her out to the country and left her by the side of the
road to walk back (he eventually returned to pick her up); he threatened to
kill her mom and her cat; he threatened to burn her mother’s house down (backed
by a video of himself holding a blowtorch outside the home); he was likely the
one to bomb her mom’s car.
And then there was the sexual abuse. Their age difference
made any sexual activity illegal, but RJM went as far as holding her down and
forcing himself upon her. And while RJM initially believed the girl to be 16,
he did not end the relationship when he learned her age (by that time, she was
13).
Indeed, her true age seemed to arouse him: he was angry that
he could be labelled a pedophile, but he doubled down anyway, saying that he
“might as well earn these potential life changing charges.” He told her he
wanted to “stretch” her, “breed” her, ejaculate inside her every day until she
turned 16, and film himself raping her.
He was arrested by police in September 2023 after a
half-hour chase that reached speeds of 140 km/h and caused at least $10,000 in
property damage. When he was caught, officers found bomb-making and
grave-digging instructions in his backpack, and various weapons in his car.
From jail, he attempted to contact the girl numerous times and, when he
succeeded, pressured and threatened her to not co-operate with the
investigation.
So, aside from the rape, RJM committed a slew of crimes
that, to most regular people, would demonstrate his incompatibility with
society. But on his side was his ethnicity, and Canada’s nearly 30-year-old
practice of giving racial discounts for Indigenous heritage
It all started in 1996 when the Liberal Parliament — under
Prime Minister Jean Chrétien — added a new line to the Criminal Code’s
sentencing provisions: Section 718.2(e). This required that judges consider
“all available sanctions, other than imprisonment, that are reasonable in the
circumstances and consistent with the harm done to victims or to the community
should be considered for all offenders, with particular attention to the
circumstances of Aboriginal offenders.”
That alone was not necessarily a racial discount. You can
read that provision in a way that isn’t offensive to the notion of individual
equality; one interpretation might be that it simply allows judges to use, for
very minor cases like first-time vandalism by a 19-year-old, Indigenous-related
diversion programs in lieu of a criminal sentence. Diversion programs as an
alternative to criminal sentencing aren’t abnormal at all — indeed, we use them
all the time for low-level, first-time crime, so explicitly allowing Indigenous
variations wouldn’t be radical.
But in 1999, the provision’s racial discount nature was
sealed with a Supreme Court interpretation. The court, in the case of R. v.
Gladue, required that all judges in Canada take into account every Indigenous
person’s “systemic and background factors” in sentencing. It declared that
Chrétien’s Criminal Code amendment was inherently aimed at giving racial
balance to Canada’s prison population, and that there was a “judicial duty” to
give this “real force.”
“The drastic overrepresentation of aboriginal peoples within
both the Canadian prison population and the criminal justice system reveals a
sad and pressing social problem,” wrote the court. “It is reasonable to assume
that Parliament, in singling out aboriginal offenders for distinct sentencing
treatment in s. 718.2(e), intended to attempt to redress this social problem to
some degree.
“The provision may properly be seen as Parliament’s
direction to members of the judiciary to inquire into the causes of the problem
and to endeavour to remedy it, to the extent that a remedy is possible through
the sentencing process.”
While Chrétien’s justice minister had once expressed to a
parliamentary committee that he was saddened by the proportionately large size
of the Indigenous prison population and hoped the bill would encourage courts
to look for alternatives to jail, the written law introduced no actual
demographic duty in the sentencing process. That, the Supreme Court simply made
up.
From there on out, the public became generally aware that
Indigenous people were treated more leniently in sentencing than everyone else.
So, in the 2012 case of R. v. Ipeelee, the Supreme Court expanded the regime
and attempted to convince everyone that it’s not a racial discount — it’s just
a discount that applies to all people of a certain race. I remain unconvinced.
