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LEGER: Commons sense on crime and punishment

Anyone with a sense of justice would agree that you shouldn’t get a life sentence for shoplifting or marijuana possession. Yet under Canadian law, that’s pretty much what it is. You don’t rot in jail, but conviction records for even minor offences can stick around for a lifetime.

Records in the digital age are persistent, guarded in massive government databanks and can be passed around within the police, security and criminal justice systems. They might show up in searches by prospective employers, bankers and landlords or at international borders.

Records can’t legally be expunged or pardons granted without a multi-year delay, payment of a hefty fee and navigation through bureaucratic thickets. All the while, criminal records carry a stigma that is dauntingly hard to shake.

It’s not clear how many Canadians are in this boat, but it could be as many as three million. More than 500,000 have records for marijuana possession, which isn’t even a crime anymore. Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale has promised to fix that injustice, but that’s a complicated task that could take years to complete.

Statistics Canada reports that in 2014-15, a total of 328,028 criminal cases were completed in Canadian courts, with 63 per cent resulting in guilty verdicts. And a note to future criminals: don’t expect sympathy in the courts. Despite urban legends to the contrary, only four per cent of those accused got acquitted, although many charges were stayed or withdrawn.

Custodial sentences (legalese for prison) were handed out in 37 per cent of the cases that resulted in conviction. Generally speaking, jail sentences go to dangerous criminals who commit violent acts, to repeat offenders or those who really need to be taught a lesson. But everyone convicted gets the record.

Those records also expose people to the fickle winds of politics. The former Conservative government boasted of being “tough on crime” and passed reforms that included mandatory minimum sentences for some offences. That removed discretion from judges and courts and tended to put more people behind bars.

Certainly there are lots of Canadians who believe imprisonment is the only proper remedy for crime. But jail terms tend to fall most heavily on those who are already marginalized: Indigenous people, visible minorities, the mentally ill and the poor. That’s not fair.

The Stephen Harper government also made it harder to get a pardon, even for those who subsequently hewed to the straight and narrow. Waiting times were doubled to five years after completion of a sentence for a minor offence and the processing fee quadrupled to $631 from $150.

And while $631 might not sound like much to people with jobs and income, it is more than many poor people can afford. So it left former offenders with no choice but to carry the record forward with all its baggage.

Now, at last, change might be coming. The multiparty Commons committee on public safety is pondering reforms that would cut the administrative fee for pardons and simplify the bureaucratic process. At recent hearings, the committee heard proposals to make pardons automatic for some offences.

Although the committee doesn’t specify which crimes should be included in the list for automatic pardons, it’s likely they’d be non-violent, fairly minor offences. There’d likely be a stipulation that offenders stay out of trouble for a prescribed length of time.

No firm proposal is on the table yet. But the tenor of discussions seems to be that change is needed to make the punishment better fit the crime. The parties won’t be unanimous in every proposed reform, but the differences sound more on process than on principle: the amount of the processing fee, for example.

But there does seem to be honest non-partisan discussion going on among MPs about an issue that affects a lot of Canadians. That’s Parliament’s job and it’s what Canadians want: smart reforms aimed at bringing justice to the system and not just endless punishment.

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