Stratified Justice and the Punishment of Canada

When aboriginal criminality is seen as a reflection of Canada's failures, then aboriginal criminals become victims

Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash

By Michael Melanson

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the indigenization of justice and the attempt by aboriginal activists and academics to establish a separate justice in Canada for aboriginal offenders. The belief is that Canada's justice system is systemically racist and due to its colonial origins, it is particularly prejudiced against Aboriginals. As is typical in the thinking of race hustlers, the best way to fight racial discrimination is with more racial discrimination.

Justice Minister David Lametti recently announced that the Government of Canada will be “earmarking money for the Manitoba Métis Federation (MMF) to tackle the overrepresentation of Red River Métis in the province's justice system.” The notion of 'overrepresentation' is a slight semantic improvement on the usual term of 'over-incarceration' which suggests a deliberate effort by Canada's judiciary to imprison Aboriginals, a paranoid conceit that ignores the obvious precursor: crimes were committed by aboriginal offenders. At least with 'over-representation' there is a theoretical allowance for the possibility that Metis offenders might have done something to get themselves locked up.

The problem for Lametti and the MMF is that no one really knows how many Metis people are ending up in jail because prison officials do not differentiate aboriginal inmates according to the three categories of First Nations, Metis or Inuit. The MMF are past masters of parochialism and anything that can differentiated on the basis of aboriginal ancestry can be further differentiated according to the 3 categories above. The reference to “Red River Metis” is a subtle nod to the ongoing fracturing of Metis special interests into new subsets. The MMF under longtime President David Chartrand has been particularly adroit at cajoling provincial and federal governments into Metis-specific largesse.

According to Correctional Investigator Ivan Zinger, "Overrepresentation of Indigenous people in correctional settings remains one of Canada's most pressing human rights issues and is evidence of public policy failures over successive decades as no government has been able to stop or reverse this trend." 

Why is the normal process of jailing convicted aboriginal offenders considered a human rights issue in the first place? It isn't considered a human rights issue when anyone else is sent to jail upon conviction. The reason is that specious social justice warriors have succeeded in blaming Canadian society for aboriginal crimes and constraining public discourse to blaming society for aboriginal crime. This false attribution of cause has been fermenting for several decades and has manifested in legal mechanisms such as Gladue Reports in which an aboriginal offender's moral culpability is weighed against their upbringing as an aboriginal person, meaning that their personal responsibility is offset by suppositions of intergenerational trauma, family dysfunction, abuse, etc. In short, Gladues suppose all aboriginal offenders are victims of colonization. Most recently the Gladue voodoo figured in the Parole Board's review of Myles Chartrand and got him released from jail.

The insanity of it all can be seen in Zinger's observation that decades of government pity policies haven't stopped or reversed the increasing rates of aboriginal incarceration. Like a deluded gambling addict, government doubles down rather than admit it is wrong. “We accept that it's a serious problem, and hopefully within a few years we'll begin to see a real turnaround," bets Lametti.

The problem is a simple dynamic to grasp. If the state tells someone that they aren't responsible for their crimes, they are likely to commit more crimes. If aboriginal criminality is seen as a reflection of Canada's failures, then aboriginal criminals become victims: their crimes become regarded as a misguided cry for help. This becomes a negative feedback loop for the social justice inflected government: more aboriginal crime means the government is doing more wrong.

In response to Bill C-5 which seeks to repeal mandatory prison sentences for certain crimes, Sen. Kim Pate and former senator Murray Sinclair issued a news release earlier this year calling for an overhaul to the bill, saying it "will not" address systemic racism in the sentencing regime. The focus is on criminalizing sentencing rather than punishing criminals and the characterization of justice as rife with systemic racism is just part of the whole indictment of Canada as being fundamentally unjust.

Into this waltz of false guilt prances Chartrand: "We don't know the ratio (of Metis incarceration) but we definitely know there's a crime concern in our villages right now that's starting to grow." The money the MMF will receive will go “toward MMF initiatives including two community justice programs, a new mediation service, development of new training and education resources, and development of part of an overall Indigenous Justice Strategy.”

That sounds like a lot being done with just the $1.68 million being allocated by Lametti. It is probably prudent to regard that sum as just a primer for more funding to be pumped later. It isn't clear how any of that will make his villages or our cities and towns any safer for law-abiding citizens but that isn't the point of any of this anyway. The point is to keep feeding the government with new convicts to show how bad Canada is so they will disburse more money. It is venal rent-seeking that unconscionably flirts with creating another Myles Sanderson scenario.

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author read - The Orange Tide and the Horrors Beneath Its Surface (substack.com)