“Justice”

Last summer, Canada’s Supreme Court sent an inadvertent message to all young offenders in Canada: you will almost certainly never be sentenced as an adult.

Even before the Court released its judgement in R v. I.M., which changed the standard for which youth can be sentenced as adults, it was already true that young offenders would be treated more leniently in sentencing than adults. For a second-degree murder conviction, for example, which comes with a life sentence without parole for 10 to 25 years for an adult, a youth offender would be eligible for parole after five to seven years, depending on his or her age at the time of the offence, even if the youth was sentenced as an adult. That discrepancy is reasonably justified if we, as a society, accept that young people are of “diminished moral blameworthiness” for their actions compared to fully developed adults.

Increasingly, politicians across the country are taking aim at judges. This is a dangerous trend that has crept across the border from Trump’s America. It should concern all Canadians because it threatens to erode respect for the rule of law in this country.

I’ve been following such events for three decades and I cannot remember a time when attacks on judges were so frequent and faced such little blowback.

Canada’s courts have come to resemble an insane asylum run by the inmates.