Why violent criminals don’t stay in jail in Canada

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Don’t Be Canada is a bold, razor-sharp new book from National Post columnist Tristin Hopper, out now with Sutherland House Books. In this exclusive excerpt, Hopper dismantles the dangerous contradictions at the heart of Canada’s modern justice system.

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Two days after Christmas, 2022, Ontario Provincial Police Const. Grzegorz “Greg” Pierzchala pulled up on a vehicle in the ditch near Brantford, Ontario. Pierzchala knew nothing about the car or its occupants and was presumably pulling over to offer assistance. He was fatally shot in an ambush-style attack within moments of exiting his patrol vehicle.

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Pierzchala was among eight Canadian police officers to be murdered on duty in the span of just seven months, an all-time record in a country that usually only saw one or two peace officers murdered per year.  His death came within a wave of tragedies committed by suspects on bail or early release.

Pierzchala’s death would end up prompting a joint statement from Canada’s four largest police associations demanding bail reform. Ontario Provincial Police Commissioner Thomas Carrique would directly attribute Pierzchala’s death to a lax federal approach to bail.

But probably the most troubling aspect of Pierzchala’s killing is that it almost certainly would not have happened if the suspect had been Caucasian.

Not because the suspect’s race prompted him to shoot a police officer, but because it gave him lighter treatment at the hands of the Canadian justice system. The man who killed Greg Pierzchala had been given early release specifically because he was a member of a group that the Government of Canada had defined as “marginalized.”

Randall McKenzie’s entire adult life had been inflected by charges for violence and illegal firearms. Most recently, he’s been handed assault charges for attacking an ex-girlfriend and weapons charges for having an illegal gun on him when he was arrested. McKenzie had been initially denied bail on the grounds that he was too much of a risk to public safety. But only a few months later, an Ontario judge decided that, actually, McKenzie should be free. He was still a violent and unpredictable man. He was still likely to reoffend. He was still a flight risk (he had repeatedly violated court orders in the past).

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And as Justice Harrison Arrell openly acknowledged in an audio recording of the bail hearing, it was an “iffy” proposal to release him back into society. But taking precedent over all of these considerations was that McKenzie belonged to a First Nation, the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation.

“First Nations people are grossly overrepresented in the prison system, especially in pre-trial custody,” Arrell would tell Crown prosecutors. While the charges were serious, much was “probably to do with (McKenzie’s) native background and education opportunities and employment opportunities and poverty.”

The judge would add that his “obligation” in this case was that McKenzie was “a status Aboriginal.” It was “something I can’t ignore,” said Arrell.

McKenzie was released to his mother’s house with an ankle bracelet, which he promptly cut off before embarking on a months-long crime spree.

At the time McKenzie was accused of killing Pierzchala, he had just crashed a stolen car into a ditch, one of several cars he was accused of stealing since jumping bail.

If Justice Arrell set free a future cop killer entirely on the basis of ethnicity, it was mainly because he was following orders. Starting in 2018, the federal government passed explicit provisions to hand out bail more readily, particularly for Indigenous suspects.

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As a guidance document read, judges were now required to consider the “circumstances of Indigenous accused and of accused from vulnerable populations.”

Almost immediately after the lifting of COVID-19 lockdowns, Canada found itself in the middle of a crime wave unlike anything seen before. The country still hasn’t matched the peaks of violent crime charted in the 1990s, but many of the most serious and disturbing crimes have reached all-time highs.

(Cody Legebokoff) lacks any shred of empathy or remorse. He should never be allowed to walk among us again.

BC Supreme Court Justice Glen Parrett

It isn’t just that unprecedented numbers of police being killed, but the way it is happening. Historically, Canadian police are killed in the line of duty while chasing down a violent suspect or executing a warrant. Most of the recent police murders have been cold-blooded ambushes.

The “stranger attack,” a term that used to barely feature in crime blotters, is now a daily occurrence in Canada’s major cities. On a single weekend in 2023, there were two separate incidents of Canadians being randomly stabbed to death in a public place. One, a 37-year-old man out with his kids at a Vancouver Starbucks, the second a 16-year-old boy waiting for a train in a Toronto subway station.

A Leger poll in early 2023 found that not only did the vast majority of respondents feel less safe, but also one in five actually was less safe; they directly reported being assaulted, screamed at, or threatened in public. Much of this has been the direct result of a criminal justice system that has explicitly decided that prisons make crime worse, and that the very concept of punishment is a relic. It’s also a justice system that has gone all-in on the idea that an offender’s identity, rather than their crime, should define how they are punished.

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Perhaps unsurprisingly, it didn’t take that long for criminals of all stripes to notice that Canada was a place in which they could thrive.

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When Canada’s 13 provincial and territorial premiers sat down for their semi-annual summit in the summer 2024, they represented virtually the entire spectrum of Canadian politics.

The B.C. NDP premier, David Eby, was a former activist lawyer who had written a book entitled How to Sue the Police and Private Security in Small Claims Court. The Alberta premier, Danielle Smith, was a lifelong right-wing populist who was only a few months out from co-hosting a ticketed soiree with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. But all of these first ministers could agree unanimously on one thing: Canada had to stop releasing criminals all the time. “Police services should not have to chase the same criminal three or four times because of an inadequate bail system,” they wrote in a letter to Ottawa. “This not only represents a drain on policing resources but is a hindrance to public safety.”

This wasn’t the first time they had complained about Canada’s so-called “catch and release” justice system. The year before, the 13 premiers had penned a near-identical letter saying that the Canadian justice system “fundamentally needs to keep anyone who poses a threat to public safety off the streets.”

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It’s a golden rule of criminology that most crime is committed by a startingly small cohort of chronic offenders. And Canada has been actively testing to see how few criminals it takes to throw entire regions into chaos.

In Western Canada, police forces have now begun using the term “super-chronic offender,” roughly defined as someone who commits more than one crime every month. A 2022 report by the B.C. Urban Mayors’ Caucus detailed how only 204 of these offenders had been responsible for 11,648 negative police contacts within the past year. In Vancouver alone, the city’s more prolific 40 criminals had racked up 2,152 career convictions between them, an average of 54 apiece.

Whole crime waves are now being committed almost entirely by people who just got out of jail or police custody. In the summer 2022, the Vancouver Police started crunching the numbers on the new wave of random, violent assaults plaguing the city. One trend that immediately stood out was that among those arrested for committing a “stranger assault,” an incredible 78 per cent already had a prior criminal conviction.

In a single three-month period, from March to June 2022, the Vancouver Police arrested forty suspects in connection with stranger attacks. When the “prior police interactions” for all 40 suspects were tallied up, the figure came to 3,892, and that was only for police interactions in the Vancouver region.

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This is part of why Canadian police departments have become increasingly vocal about the fact that a lot of what they’re asked to do doesn’t seem to make any sense. As the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police put it in a 2023 letter, Canada has a “criminal justice system that renders much of our work pointless.”

It’s a rare day in Canada that goes by without some headline-worthy crime being committed by someone on bail or parole. In B.C., the term “catch and release” justice is probably best summed up by the saga of Mohammed Majidpour. In 2022, he attacked a random 19-year-old woman in the centre of downtown Vancouver, striking her with a pole while screaming anti-Asian racial slurs. Later that same day, he set fire to a car.

This was not particularly out of character for Majidpour, who had two dozen prior convictions. But after he was eventually tracked down and arrested within a week of the pole attack, he was released on bail after spending just the Thanksgiving weekend in custody. Before October 2022 was finished, Majidpour would be arrested at least two more times. In one instance, he was free just two hours and 18 minutes before police caught him attempting to steal $330 in leggings from a downtown store. “The officers were familiar with the man, because they’d arrested him the day prior for a different offence,” read a police statement.

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Consider how lax bail helped to make Canada one of the world’s leading centres of auto theft. The problem is so bad that even the justice minister’s official car, a government-provided Toyota Highlander, has been stolen three times in three years.

In the summer 2024, Toronto Police announced the breakup of a massive Ontario car theft ring: 124 arrests, 177 stolen vehicles recovered, and 749 charges laid. Of the suspects caught by the dragnet, 44 per cent were on bail. And the police didn’t even have time to announce the arrests in a press release before 61 per cent were given bail.

A few months later, Toronto would produce one of the most iconic images of the Canadian auto theft deluge: a viral doorbell video of a man being struck by his own Porsche Cayenne. The Porsche owner had just handed the keys to a prospective buyer and was walking around the rear of the vehicle when said buyer suddenly jumped in and backed out of the driveway at full speed. The video shows the owner being catapulted into the street before his Cayenne speeds off.

Sarah Badshaw, 18, was arrested and handed a slew of charges, including one for “causing bodily harm with a motor vehicle.” Nevertheless, she was immediately out on bail. The next day, she was given bail again following charges for a different auto theft.

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A lenient justice system is nothing new to Canada. Ever since the 1970s, Canada has been a place in which prisons are viewed almost entirely as rehabilitation centres, and in which even the most heinous crimes can yield shockingly lenient sentences.

In 1984, disgruntled Canada Armed Forces corporal Denis Lortie stormed into the Quebec National Assembly with two stolen machine guns, a pistol, and the goal of murdering Quebec Premier Rene Levesque, his cabinet, and any other members of the government he could find. It was only by sheer chance that Lortie entered an empty legislative chamber instead of one packed with hundreds of easy targets. Still, his indiscriminate rampage through the building would kill three and wound 13 others.

It remains the deadliest act of violence ever committed against a Canadian democratic institution. Lortie was out of jail within 11 years. Convicted on a reduced charge of second-degree murder, he was released on day parole by 1995, and had full parole in time for his 36th birthday. “I don’t think the punishment here fits the crime,” Steve Boyer, the son of one of Lortie’s victims, told a reporter in 1995.

Punishment is out of vogue in the Canadian prison system. Rather, it is oriented toward the idea that every offender will eventually reenter society, and that its job is to make sure that happens as quickly as possible. That’s even the case when it comes to serial killers.

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Cody Legebokoff was only 24 when he was convicted for the murder of three women and a 15-year-old girl, Loren Leslie. He had been arrested by an alert RCMP officer shortly after dumping Leslie’s body in a remote area. “He lacks any shred of empathy or remorse. He should never be allowed to walk among us again,” wrote BC Supreme Court Justice Glen Parrett at Legebokoff’s 2014 sentencing.

Only five years later, Legebokoff was moved from a maximum-security prison to a cushier medium-security facility. When the families of his victims reacted with outrage, Corrections Service Canada issued a statement implying that they’d better get used to this, since Legebokoff was eventually getting out. “Rehabilitative efforts, leading to a gradual and controlled release, have proven to be a better way of protecting the public than keeping offenders in maximum security to the end of their sentence, and then releasing them into society without supervision,” wrote the agency.

There is no mechanism in Canada under which a convicted felon can be held permanently in jail. Although Canadian media headlines will often speak of a convicted criminal being handed a “life sentence,” there’s no such thing. The “sentence” doesn’t refer to incarceration, only to a parole term that never technically expires.

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Ever since Canada formally abolished capital punishment in 1976, the absolute harshest sentence under Canadian law is a guaranteed 22 years in prison. Even if a criminal managed to set off an atomic bomb in the centre of Montreal, there’s no sentence they could be given under which they wouldn’t be eligible for full parole after 25 years, and early release three years before that.

Public Safety Canada, the agency that oversees the prison system, is always quick to remind critics that “eligibility does not mean automatic release.” But in practice, that’s how it works. As far back as 2002, an analysis by the Correctional Service of Canada showed that the average first-degree murderer was serving just 22.4 years in prison.

Canadian parole boards are so committed to the doctrine of “reintegrating” offenders that they’ll even release convicted child murderers who continue to exhibit a sexual attraction to children. Five-year-old Kimberley Thompson was abducted from the streets of Calgary in 1980 as she walked to kindergarten. She was taken by Harold Smeltzer, a 24-year-old neighbour who, by his own account, had attacked more than 40 women and girls. He had grabbed Kimmie from behind as she stopped to make snowballs and taken her inside his parent’s house where he quickly decided to drown her in a bathtub. Smeltzer served just 27 years in prison before he started receiving day parole. He continued to be reupped for parole even after multiple breaches of his release terms and open admissions of feeling attracted to random children he encountered while on release.

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It’s also been two decades now that Canada has been experimenting with a justice system that punishes offenders differently based on their race or background. This started in 1995, the year that the government of Prime Minister Jean Chretien amended the Criminal Code to require judges to consider “the circumstances of Aboriginal offenders” before handing down a sentence.

The idea of the reform was to address Indigenous “overrepresentation” in prison. In one stark example, by the late 1980s the inmates in Saskatchewan prisons were 60 per cent Indigenous, despite representing only seven per cent of the provincial population.

The policy of race-differentiated sentencing was ultimately codified in the 1999 Supreme Court decision R v. Gladue. Jamie Tanis Gladue, 19, had stabbed her common-law husband to death in a drunken rage, accusing him of having an affair with her older sister. She was convicted of manslaughter, and her sentence of three years imprisonment was appealed all the way to Canada’s highest court to see if it truly jibed with the new rules regarding Gladue’s “circumstances” as a Cree woman.

The Supreme Court not only said it did but also enshrined the adoption of so-called “Gladue reports.” Ever since, whenever an Indigenous offender is facing sentencing, the judge has to first read through a commissioned report listing the “systemic or background factors” that may have influenced the crime. “The jail term for an aboriginal offender may in some circumstances be less than the term imposed on a non-aboriginal offender for the same offence,” reads the Gladue decision.

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Gladue reports have now been the law of the land for nearly 25 years, but it’s particularly in the last 10 years that identity-based justice and an institutional distaste for punishment have combined into an unholy regime in which seemingly nobody goes to jail.

Anti-racism doctrine has been embraced by the Canadian justice system harder than almost anywhere else. In 2021, the Department of Justice openly declared that it was shot through with systemic racism that had resulted in the “over-incarceration of Indigenous peoples, Black Canadians, and members of marginalized communities.” “Rooting out systemic racism is key to a fair and effective justice system,” it said.

One result of this declaration was a proposal to loosen the punishments for gun criminals, even as Ottawa was simultaneously leading a drive to crack down on gun crime by banning whole categories of firearms. In December 2021, the Department of Justice proposed stripping the minimum prison sentences from 11 gun crimes, including “robbery with a firearm,” “extortion with a firearm,” and “discharging firearm with intent.” The reasoning was that non-white Canadians were disproportionately convicted of these crimes, which made them racist.

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“Sentencing laws that have focused on punishment through imprisonment have disproportionately affected Indigenous peoples, as well as Black Canadians and members of marginalized communities,” read a backgrounder.

And this was despite the fact that Canada didn’t really have an over-incarceration problem, at least not in the way that the term was used in American anti-racism literature. The term was often employed in the United States, and it made much more sense in a country home to the world’s largest population of incarcerated prisoners (about 1.8 million as of the last count).

But the Canadian prison population is almost the exact opposite: The non-profit World Prison Brief is the usual authority on prison populations, and it has long pegged Canada as having the lowest incarceration rate in the Western Hemisphere. According to its 2015 count, the United States was locking up prisoners at a rate seven times that of Canada.

Canada’s prison population was more in league with Spain, Belgium, Portugal, and Luxembourg, all of which have dramatically lower rates of violent crime.

Additionally, the Parole Board of Canada declared itself an agent of “systemic discrimination.” In a 45-page “diversity, equity and inclusion” report published in 2022, the board said that high number of Black people in Canadian prisons was due entirely to “systemic oppression, marginalization, and disenfranchisement that is so deeply entrenched in Canadian society that it is functionally normalized.”

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It followed that when board members were weighing whether to release a criminal from prison, they were to consider the offender was in jail simply because the “discrimination and marginalization of Black people” had driven them to a life of crime. “Underlying social and economic factors contribute to criminalization and it is important to address systemic inequality in all areas of society in order to make meaningful change toward substantive equity.”

Now, whenever an offender is being sentenced or considered for parole, it’s not uncommon that the hearing will spend far more time parsing over the details of the offender’s childhood and family history rather than the crime committed.

In 2024, a B.C. man, Anthony Woods, was being sentenced for a fatal stabbing he had committed at a Vancouver transitional housing facility. Four years prior, Woods had been causing a scene at the facility, yelling and pounding on doors. When a 72-year-old visitor, Alex Gortmaker, apparently confronted Woods about the ruckus, he received a stab wound in reply. Woods produced a knife, stabbed Gortmaker in the chest, and pushed him to the ground where he bled to death.

The sentencing decision went into granular detail about Woods’ life. His mother’s drug problem. His time in foster care. His ADHD diagnosis. The Indian Residential schools were attended by Woods’ grandparents and extended family. The generalized impact of Canada’s “colonial history and post-colonial assimilationist policies.” The decision even detailed how he spent his summers growing up. “Mr. Woods recalls playing with cousins, picking berries and learning how to cut and jar fish,” it read.

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His victim got a single cursory section, 200 words out of the 8,000-word decision. Gortmaker’s niece Sandra was brought in to read a victim impact statement saying, “she is haunted with nightmares; that going outside fills her with anxiety; that her foundation of trust and empathy has been lost; and that words do not properly capture the depth of her sorrow.”

Ultimately, a judge ruled that the “fair, fit and principled sentence” for Woods was to release him immediately. He ultimately served just eight months of pre-trial detention for the crime.

The Canadian justice system’s obsession with identity has also made Canada likely the only country on earth, which holds that citizens should be treated harsher by the courts than noncitizens. According to a 2014 Supreme Court decision, foreigners convicted of crimes should have “collateral consequences” factored into their sentencing. In other words, if the conviction is likely to get the offender deported, that should count as part of their punishment.

In 2024, an Alberta judge cited this exact precedent in refusing to convict a 25-year-old foreign student found guilty of sexual assault for groping an 18-year-old at a nightclub. If he was Canadian, he probably would have gotten at least a criminal record. Instead, the conviction was discharged in “consideration of the devastating collateral immigration consequences to recording a conviction.”25

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If crime in Canada has truly taken a turn into the ridiculous in recent years, much of the blame can be placed on a single piece of legislation that took all of Canada’s various experiments in identity-based justice and supercharged them. Bill C-75, which entered into law in the summer of 2019, was the Trudeau government’s signature crime reform bill. Designed to “modernize the criminal justice system,” the bill notably included a series of provisions making it much easier for accused criminals to obtain bail.

The bill’s creators were quite open about the fact that easier bail was the goal. In introducing C-75 to the House of Commons, then Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould criticized Canada’s prior bail system for perpetuating a “cycle of incarceration” and for disproportionately impacting “Indigenous people and marginalized Canadians.”

Henceforth, judges would be ordered to grant bail “at the earliest possible opportunity” and to spend much more time considering the ethnicity of the bail seeker before them. As per the bill’s text, bail would need to be granted more readily to anyone who belonged to “a vulnerable population that is over-represented in the criminal justice system.”

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The bill didn’t even like the idea of bail conditions. That is, releasing a suspect on bail but requiring them to avoid certain neighbourhoods, stick to a curfew, or avoid alcohol. C-75 mandated that all this bail should be handed out under the “least onerous conditions.”

Pretty much immediately, the effect of Bill C-75 was to ensure that basically everyone got bail and continued to receive bail even if they violated their conditions or were charged with additional crimes. At one point in 2023, the B.C. Prosecution Service took the unusual step of publishing data to show just how rare it was for violent suspects to get their bail revoked.

Over a five-week period, the B.C. Prosecution Service counted 425 bail hearings involving a suspect who had been charged with a violent crime while already on bail for a prior offence. In 327 of those hearings (76 per cent), the suspect was simply given bail again.

In 2022, British Columbia’s Justice Minister was veteran environmental lawyer Murray Rankin. He was part of a provincial government not particularly known for being “tough on crime.” Among other things, the government had championed the decriminalization of illicit drugs and the distribution of government-supplied “safer supply” opioids. Rankin had also been a federal MP when C-75 was passed, where his main critique of the reform was that it didn’t go far enough.

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But as his province became seized by a crisis of stranger attacks committed by the same few hundred chronic offenders, Rankin was put into the strange position of publicly advocating for the federal government to start keeping people in jail for longer.

As Rankin told reporters at the time, Bill C-75 had yielded “unintended consequences.”

We are faced with the grim reality that murderers, even those who have taken the life of a child, can be given as little as five years in prison.

David Monias, chief, Pimicikamak Cree Nation

One of the consequences of a justice system based on immutable characteristics is that it pretty quickly yielded a whole cottage industry of criminals pretending to be part of a marginalized group in order to evade punishment.

When B.C. man Nathan Legault was convicted for a raft of child sexual assault crimes committed while he was working as a pastor, he was about to face sentencing when he suddenly mentioned that one of his great-great-grandparents was a member Haudenosaunee Confederacy and that he was, therefore, entitled to a Gladue review.

A sentencing judge drafted a decision going into granular detail about Legault’s tenuous Indigenous links before concluding that it had no bearing on his eventual “child pornography addiction.” That same decision would warn other judges to gird themselves for a flood of similar attempts at “Indigenous identity fraud.”

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“A Tsunami is coming; driven by the desire of non-Indigenous people to get what they perceive to be the benefits of identifying as Indigenous,” it read.

One of the alternative sentencing options that arose in the wake of the Gladue decision was a new network of Indigenous “healing lodges” — low-security rehabilitation centres that could serve as an alternative to hard time in a federal prison. In 2018, it emerged that Terri-Lynne McClintic, one of Canada’s most notorious child murderers, had secured transfer to a Saskatchewan healing lodge despite no Indigenous background whatsoever.

The transfer was particularly surprising to the Nekaneet First Nation, the Saskatchewan band on whose land the healing lodge was located. The lodge had opened in 1995 as a way to get Indigenous female offenders back on the straight and narrow.

But with the federal government having nixed any Nekaneet role in inmate selection, it wasn’t until the McClintic transfer made headlines that members realized that a woman who had abducted and murdered a nine-year-old with a hammer was now housed just a short walk from the Nekaneet School. “I believe if our elders were still a part of the process maybe Ms. McClintic wouldn’t be at the healing lodge,” Nekaneet Chief Alvin Francis said at the time.

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Along the way, legal scholars were noticing that none of this seemed to be working as intended. “Over representation,” the siren call of Canada’s move to stratify the justice system along racial lines, remains as high as ever. In 2008, 20 per cent of federal inmate were Indigenous. Ten years later, it was 28 per cent.

An internal Department of Justice report noted this trend in 2017, but generally concluded that the solution was to focus even harder on the identity of offenders: Gladue reports should start including gender analysis and more granular details such as whether an accused’s “grandparents were residential school survivors.” It continued: “Gladue should not be regarded as a panacea for overrepresentation, but rather as a contribution to the efforts required.”

As Canada has leaned ever harder into its catch-and-release odyssey, it’s often found itself directly at odds with First Nations governments openly campaigning for more policing and harsher sentencing for repeat offenders, regardless of ethnicity. And the reason is simple: while Canada’s criminals are disproportionately Indigenous, so are their victims.

Winnipeg Police Chief Danny Smyth would say as much during an August 2023 summit on bail policy. “What I think people sometimes overlook is that the victims of crime are the very communities that (we’re) talking about,” said Smyth, who was then the serving president of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police.

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In 2022, the James Smith Cree Nation in Saskatchewan was subjected to a horrifying mass stabbing in which an attacker went door-to-door, slashing whole families and ultimately killing 11. The attacker was a familiar figure by Canadian justice standards. Myles Sanderson had 59 criminal convictions and a history of explosive, random violence. But none of that had prevented Sanderson from obtaining early release from prison the year before, where he’d been serving a sentence for assault. Sanderson then violated his release conditions and dropped off the radar before emerging a few months later as Canada’s newest spree killer.

When the Assembly of First Nations convened a national justice forum in 2022, “overrepresentation” was indeed a top agenda item, but the solution was deemed to be greater local control of policing and justice, rather than the “sentencing circles and Gladue reports” mandated by Ottawa.

“One of the complaints I’ve heard, particularly from Indigenous women, is how, unfortunately, it’s been men in positions of power when there’s been sexual assault or some wrongdoing, in the sense that they will use restorative justice to have an easier sentence. And I don’t know what the solution is, but this is something that needs to be researched,” said one participant.

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What the Canadian legal system has done over the past generation is to become laser-focused on the notion that past traumas and current inequities can be solved simply by tweaking the numbers, and that jail or policing isn’t a reaction to society’s problems, but the cause of them. But in so doing, Canada has proved remarkably disdainful to those same marginalized communities whenever they ask the courts to at least stop handing them new traumas.

When convicted murderer Kenneth MacKay was granted day parole just 23 years after brutally murdering 21-year-old Indigenous woman Crystal Paskemin, it was the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations who said that a proper country would have sentenced him to die in jail. “Kenneth MacKay has violated the basic principles of human dignity and justice, and he has forfeited his right to belong to a civilized community,” it wrote in a 2023 statement.

The year before, when Winnipeg man Jeremy Skibicki was arrested for the serial murders of four Indigenous women, one of the first reactions of Manitoba First Nations leaders was to note the “cruel joke” that he would probably make parole one day.

“We are faced with the grim reality that murderers, even those who have taken the life of a child, can be given as little as five years in prison,” David Monias, chief of the Pimicikamak Cree Nation, told the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network. “These individuals are then released back into our communities, free to walk amongst us as if they haven’t destroyed lives.”

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