Pierre Poilievre has stated that he will use Section 33, or the Notwithstanding clause of our Canadian Charter of Rights. For those who is not familiar, this section allows governments to ignore parts of the Charter of Rights for a limited amount of time. If Pierre wins, and if the conservative government actually invokes Section 33, it will be the first time the federal government has used the Notwithstanding clause.
Section 33 is for extraordinary circumstances. Things like navigating a national security crisis, or even acting provisions for dealing with the pandemic, as several provinces used, or the very least attempted to use. So what is the extraordinaire problem Pierre says is a problem that requires the use Section 33? Crime. He wants to be able to lock anybody up for any crime that may or may not have been committed.
Quite literally, the reason Pierre wants to use Section 33, is so he can override other rights such as Section 9 – Arbitrary Detention, the section that describes our right to not be arbitrary detained without due cause or Section 11(e) – Right to not be denied bail without due cause. Pierre wants the ability for the government to lock up anybody accused of a crime under the pretext of cracking down on crime.
So let’s look at some statistics, because Pierre says crime has been on the rise.
Source: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/240725/dq240725b-eng.htm?indid=4751-1&indgeo=0
So we have two charts here, the one on the right shows severity of crime for violent and non-violent reported crime. 2006 serves as the base index at 100. This means for any given year, if the index is less than 100, it had less severe crime overall than crime that occurred in 2006. The left chart shows a per capita crime rate of reported crime.
I think both of these charts paints a pretty good picture. First is crime rate increasing? Yes, it is. In 2015, there was 5232 per 100k population of crime reported. In 2023, that reported crimes grew to 5843 (+611 over 8 years). I think it’s also worth noting that even though overall crime has increased since 2015, it is about half of what it was during it’s peak in 1991. Violent crimes are also largely a flat line.
The chart on the right shows that the severity of the crime while has also been increasing, it’s not nearly as bad as the 90s with non-violent crime being 3/4 as severe compared to 2006, and violent crime being about as severe as it was in 2006. Noting that the frequency of these violent crimes remains virtually unchanged as observed on the left chart.
So what this tells us, is crime is raising, mostly in non-violent crimes, however when a violent crime does occur, it’s been more severe than recent years, but not like as severe as the 90s. Is this something to be concerned about? I think so. Is it something that we need to invoke Section 33 for? To me that seems over the top and using the notwithstanding clause with these statistics just signals abuse of government authority.
Instead I think it will be more productive to figure out why crime is on the raise. What are the needs that isn’t being met that is leading to more crime?
