COLUMN: Think Again – Common sense on the Charter of Rights

On Jan. 29, 2017, 27-year-old Alexandre Bissonnette walked into a Quebec City mosque and shot six people dead while they were praying. Two years later, he was convicted of six counts of first-degree murder.

Here’s the $64,000 question: When should Bissonnette be eligible for parole?

If you said “never,” then you agree with Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. If, however, you think Bissonnette should be eligible in 25 years (only 19 years from now), then you agree with Liberal leader Mark Carney and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh.

Both Carney and Singh have loudly claimed that Poilievre plans to trample on the Charter rights of Canadians. They say that Poilievre’s promise to invoke the Charter’s notwithstanding clause so that mass-murderers stay in prison for life is a slippery slope to taking away all our rights and freedoms.

This debate stems from a 2022 Supreme Court decision in which the justices ruled that it was unconstitutional for the Criminal Code to permit consecutive parole ineligibility periods of 25 years for mass murderers. The justices claimed that this provision violated Section 12 of the Charter of Rights which states that no one shall be subject to cruel and unusual punishment.

In other words, the Supreme Court believes that it is cruel and unusual punishment for a mass murderer to spend the rest of his life in prison. That is patently absurd.

Thanks to this Supreme Court ruling, Alexandre Bissonnette had his original parole ineligibility period reduced from 40 years to only 25 years. Now he can have his first parole hearing when he turns 54.

During the English leaders’ debate last week, Jagmeet Singh pointed out that being eligible for parole doesn’t mean that parole will be granted. He went on to argue that Poilievre was raising a pointless hypothetical scenario since there was no way that any parole board would release a mass murderer like Bissonnette into the public.

However, Singh conveniently ignored three key facts.

First, if it’s true that mass murderers such as Bissonnette have no reasonable prospect of getting out of prison, why shouldn’t their original sentence reflect this reality? After all, if a parole hearing is a sham, then one could argue that it’s “cruel and unusual” to give these prisoners false hope of a potential release in the future.

Second, parole hearings for mass murderers put unnecessary strain on the family members of their victims. Paul Bernardo, who was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder in 1995, has had three parole hearings so far. Each time, the family members of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French must make the case for keeping this monster in prison. Since Bernardo (who is only 60 years old) now gets to apply for parole every two years, these families can look forward to many more of these hearings in the future.

Finally, the prospect of a mass murderer receiving parole is not hypothetical. On May 7, 1992, Freeman MacNeill, together with two of his friends, brutally murdered three employees while robbing a McDonald’s restaurant in Nova Scotia. Last year, MacNeill was granted full parole at the age of 55. That’s only one year older than Alexandre Bissonnette will be when he gets his first parole hearing.

Thus, the Conservative pledge to invoke the notwithstanding clause so that mass murderers spend the rest of their lives in prison is both fair and reasonable. While the Liberals and NDP are focused on protecting the Charter rights of mass murderers, the Conservatives are more interested in standing up for the victims of crime.

I know which party I intend to support on Election Day.

Michael Zwaagstra is a high school teacher and deputy mayor of Steinbach. He can be reached at mzwaagstra@shaw.ca.