Hue and Cry About Canada’s Bail System

You’ve probably seen in the news lately some really high profile crime cases where there are some murders or serious beatings of people who have been released by Justice of the Peace following their bail hearing. This has set up a real hue and cry form of our bail system and these things happen. And I want to just talk a little bit about that they there’s pros and cons of this situation, but anytime this happens, of course, some uninformed members of the public, some informed members of the public and some in between or fall on each side of the equation. Well, let’s strengthen our bail system no one should be released or look, let’s release everyone everyone’s presumed to be innocent or something in between which is reasonable. See under democratic societies and under Section 11(d) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, you have the right to receive bail unless just cause can be shown basically to you know, detain you. People are presumed innocent if we just detained everyone in jail pending their trial, then well, we’d have a million people sitting in jail like we do in the States, many of these people are found innocent. So where’s the happy medium here? Well, I tell you I see the bail system working fairly well right now in Canada. I mean, we could change it and lock more people up and you know, but you’re entitled to bail unless cause can be shown why you should be detained and obviously for serious criminality, you should be detained for people with multiple convictions or breaches and this goes on right now. I’m not a critic of our system. Yes, the odd person. You know, it’s not a perfect system. There’s going to be some high profile cases, but the politicians, they start getting all up in arms about this. They really don’t know anything about the criminal justice frankly, I think if you talk to most crown attorneys in the province, they’ll tell you the bail system is not perfect, but it’s working relatively well. It’s going to cause some mistakes at time. People are human. What is the answer? Let’s just lock everyone out pending the trial for the most minor case. That’s not the answer. But you know, Parliament’s now talking everyone was calling for reform. But as someone in the frontlines of criminal justice system, I can tell you our bail system works pretty well. It’s never going to be perfect. There’s going to be some high profile cases that slip through the cracks. And that’s unfortunately a byproduct of living in a free and democratic society. I mean, if we lived in Russia, we can just lock everyone up right now and no one would get bail and go to jail for 10 years. If that’s the type of country we want to live in, but we should, we should change, change it to that and get rid of our Canadian Charter of Freedoms. But all kidding aside, no one wants that. But I can understand both sides of the argument. There’s extremes there’s components. There’s people in the middle, I tend to people be a person a little bit more of in the middle. I like to error on the side of caution that we should certainly lock up people who are violent, who have multiple convictions or showing breaches when they’re on a bail. But for the average person who’s charged with a criminal offense, I can tell you statistically they don’t commit a breach. they don’t while on bail and they don’t commit further criminal offenses that’s probably 90% of offenders, but yes, unfortunately, there is the odd violent offender who gets out and winds up murdering his wife. It arises once a year it seems and then you know, there’s a cry to reform the bail system. I don’t know what the ultimate answer is I mean I’m open to arguments on both points but we all have our viewpoint, but I can tell you as, as someone on the frontlines of our criminal justice system it’s not perfect but it works pretty well.