Over the last several months, the provincial officials from across Canada have been calling for the federal government to make several changes to the Criminal Code, including eliminating bail for certain offences and implementing a … “three strike rule” for repeat offenders. Provinces seem to feel that people on bail are committing multiple crimes and that catch and release bail reforms are just not working.
I don’t think anyone would disagree with any of these statements but unfortunately the situation is a little more complicated than our public officials may think.
This spring during a parliamentary meeting, the RCMP disclosed that 4,000 organized crime groups are currently operating in Canada — and most of these groups are operating in Ontario, our biggest province. According to Public Safety Canada, each group averages 20 to 50 members, which translates to an average of 140,000 gangsters embedded across the country.
This increase is partially a result of lax immigration policies.
Now that number sounds like a lot, and it is. But the scariest part is that we have a high crime index with a very low incarceration rate.
We simply do not have the capacity to even house our criminals or a robust enough system to prosecute them. We are a small country by population with a large land mass that has a high per capital crime rate but no facilities to house our offenders.
Comparatively, the USA has a very large system of prisons, with a total of 6,284 facilities. Canada only has 301 facilities across Canada and only 32 in Ontario. Furthermore, in Canada we also lump in treatment centres into our correctional centre numbers leaving us with only 50 penitentiaries across our nation. Just recently, Ontario Ombudsman Paul Dubé sounded the alarm about the ‘growing state of crisis’ in Ontario jails. Dubé stressed issues like overcrowding, staff shortages and a deterioration of the overall conditions in Ontario’s correctional facilities.
“We’re finding people housed in broom closets and former pantries and stuff. The system has deteriorated and it’s in crisis,” Dubé said.
Unfortunately this is a complicated issue and it needs immediate attention as more people keep flooding into Canada’s largest province.
We simply are out of room and money to incarcerate our criminals. We can’t keep asking the federal government for more transfer payments, as they too are also out of money with the litany of challenges affecting our country.
Data collected from World Population Review. Overall crime rate is calculated by dividing the total number of reported crimes of any kind by the total population, then multiplying the result by 100,000 (because crime rate is typically reported as X number of crimes per 100,000 people). Crime rates vary greatly from country to country and are influenced by many factors. For example, high poverty levels and unemployment tend to inflate a country’s crime rate. Conversely, strict police enforcement and severe sentences tend to reduce crime rates. There is also a strong correlation between age and crime, with most crimes, especially violent crimes, being committed by those ages 20-30 years old.
