Jas Goraya On September 27, 2015, a minivan carrying six family members- three of them children under the age of 10- was struck by a drunk driver at the intersection of Kipling Avenue and Kirby road in Vaughan. The crash led to the tragic death of the three children and their grandfather. Police reported that…
Tag: Criminal Justice
Criminal and Police Records: Are We Criminalizing Character instead of Crime?
Shelby Challis A judge once told me about his own personal run-ins with law enforcement agencies when he was in his 20’s. It was the late 1960’s and he was attending a number of anti-war demonstrations (though he later confessed it was more about finding the perfect opportunity to pick-up women than about following his…
The Overrepresentation of Minority Youth in Canada’s Criminal Justice System
Jasjit Goraya Canadian criminologists and policymakers alike have long debated the issue of “disproportionate minority confinement,” or the overrepresentation of minority youth in the criminal justice system. This debate has been ongoing since the early 1980s, with seemingly no end in sight. Key among the reasons for its never-ending nature include: the fact that policies often…
Breaking the Cycle: Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women in Canada
Alexis Mulvenna The death of Tina Fontaine, a 15-year-old girl from Sagkeeng First Nation whose body was found dumped in Winnipeg’s Red River in August of 2014, reignited the debate surrounding Canada’s missing and murdered Aboriginal women. Fontaine’s name was added to a long list of others — including Maisy Odjick and Shannon Alexander from Maniwacki,…
Fighting “Barbaric Cultural Practices” as Public Policy
Saad Omar Khan Sometime in his tenure as Britain’s Commander-in-Chief in India during a period of British rule in the nineteenth century, General Sir Charles Napier was approached by several Hindu priests regarding his aggressive crackdown on the practice of sati—the ritual burning of widows upon the death of their husbands. The priests’ objection to the colonial…
Political Expediency and the Youth Criminal Justice Act
Lindsay Handren Major errors discovered in two separate government crime bills in the past month – the first when the House of Commons sent an unamended version of Bill C-479 to the Senate, and the second when the Senate knowingly approved a bill with a glaring error – have led to renewed scrutiny of Prime…
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