Every time
there’s a mass shooting in the United States
, Canadians (and American liberals) tend to lament that
the U.S. isn’t like the rest of the anglosphere when it comes to gun control.
In Canada (
the École Polytechnique massacre in 1989
), in the United Kingdom (
the Dunblane primary school massacre in Scotland in 1996
), in Australia (
the Port Arthur massacre in 1996
in Tasmania), and most recently in New Zealand (
the Christchurch mosque massacre in 2019
), the United States’ closest peer nations have translated horror and grief into concrete policy cracking down on gun ownership.
There is no reason to think that will ever happen in the U.S., and the most frustrating thing about it, I find, is that basic unsexy gun safety in American homes
could save far more children’s lives than eliminating school shootings — which is impossible
.
It s no less frustrating watching Canada refuse to help itself on crime, though, especially since our problems, in general, ought to be easier to solve. Over and over and over again we see people, arrested on suspicion of having committed a violent crime, who were on some combination of bail, parole, probation or otherwise nominally protective measures for society at large.
Many are horrifyingly young. They include at least one of the feral girls convicted in the “swarming” murder of 59-year-old Kenneth Lee in downtown Toronto in December 2022; she was 14, out on bail for Lee’s killing in 2024,
when she allegedly stabbed another man at a subway station
.
At the time she had been in an “open custody home,”
a lower-security supervision facility in the community.
They include
a 14-year-old boy currently sought by York Region police
for a double-shooting over the Labour Day weekend; charges against him now include failing to abide by what police call “release orders for unrelated violent offences.”
They include a 12-year-old accused of a double-shooting in Markham near Toronto last month — who, no word of a lie —
was released on bail again just the other day
.
That’s objectively insane. I doubt you could even find a tenured Canadian law professor to defend it under their own name.
And when it comes to
grownups
who make the news for wreaking havoc, the problem is all the worse. (Well, they’ve had so much more time to work on their records!)
It is one of the great mysteries of Canadian politics that this never becomes a real issue —
even as senior police officers advise you to roll over and let home invaders do what they want
— when it should be a full-blown, stay-up-all-night crisis for the entire political class at every level of government.
The discussion over the limits of personal and property self-defence, prompted by Conservative Leader Pierre
Poilievre’s call for fewer restrictions for people to protect themselves against criminals
, is similarly annoying to watch. After some high-profile recent cases of people being horrifically attacked in their home, with one homeowner being charged for
fighting back with a knife against an intruder armed with a crossbow
, Poilievre last month called for a law explicitly permitting the right to use force against a home invader.
A
huge
amount of the discussion about the proposal has to do with the United States, as Canadian headlines will attest: “Poilievre’s anything goes approach to self-defence is even more extreme than U.S. law”; “Don’t import deadly U.S. self-defence laws to Canada.” In other words: “America. Ick.”
But what does Canada’s supposedly more enlightened regime look like in practice?
The most famous recent “castle doctrine”-style defence in Canada was probably that of Gerald Stanley, the Saskatchewan farmer
who shot would-be thief Colten Boushie to death in 2022
. Stanley was acquitted both of second-degree murder and of manslaughter.
There was
the David Chen case back in 2012
: The Toronto grocer faced kidnapping charges for apprehending an inveterate shoplifter in a manner not technically allowed under the Criminal Code. He was acquitted as well.
, who helped a friend remove an unwanted houseguest from a party in Iqaluit in 2017, but fatally cut off his oxygen using a headlock. Hodgson was acquitted of second-degree murder and manslaughter; the Supreme Court of Canada declined the Crown’s appeal.
I’m not saying any of those verdicts was unjust. But meanwhile, stateside, “castle-doctrine” and “stand-your-ground” defences fairly routinely fail — and when they fail, the United States’ famously harsh sentencing rules often kick in.
A Texas jury in 2019 had no time
for Dallas police officer Amber Guyger’s “castle doctrine” defence after she claimed to have found accountant Botham Jean skulking around in her apartment — it was actually
his
apartment — and shot him to death. She got 10 years in prison, with no possibility of parole for five.
When was the last time you heard of a Canadian police officer getting 10 years in prison for anything?
In 2023, the Pennsylvania Superior Court
rejected a “castle doctrine” defence
in the case of a homeowner who shot a man behind his closed and secured front door; the shooter is currently serving 25 to 50 years.
In 2015,
47-year-old Houstonian Raul Rodriguez got a life sentence
for killing a neighbour over some loud music, despite claiming to have felt threatened.
The American self-defence doctrine produces plenty of highly dubious decisions. But you can’t just shout “castle doctrine!” to absolve yourself of manslaughter or murder, as caricatures might suggest. And when American courtrooms decide they want people off the street, they bloody well take them off the street.
Maybe we could wipe the smirk off our collective mug and ask what the hell
our
problem is in that respect.
National Post
cselley@postmedia.com
