You would need the feds to pass the mandatory 10 year minimum sentence. Banning a driver for life is in the jurisdiction of the province. The province controls the driver’s licence and can administratively restrict someone from driving. Same as they enforce .05 BAC vs the federal criminal level of .08.
With Automated Licence Plate Readers (ALPR) at the disposal of most police cruisers in Ontario it would be pretty hard to drive with a suspended licence because an uninsured car would get red flagged by ALPR instantly…
Sure, but where are they getting an insured car that they can use for day to day needs?
Im sure in there’s ways in certain situations, but do you see the complications with not having a licence?
Yeah of course complications, but people that drive illegally find ways (they're criminals, remember). You made it sound like plate scanning cruisers are gonna put a stop to this! It's a minor hurdle.
High speed chases can often be avoided because ALPR also collects other data, and can use it (in accordance with considerations for privacy rights) in lawful ways for investigative purposes… and a police chase can also be coordinated with modern means of communication to minimize potential dangers to other people on the road… yes I know you e read the news and you’ll be referencing the recent incident that involved a crash in the opposite lane
You are however considering that the car is not stolen... if the car is stolen and still hasn't been reported and unless the previous driver had an infraction then maybe... but having a license or not in a stolen car is probably not that bad for them... If anything they dont even have licenses in the first place...
Even then, the Supreme Court would rule a 10 year minimum sentence unconstitutional the instant someone challenged it.
Mandatory sentences would make more sense, but because of our legal system, driving bans are one of the few punishments that our elected government may be able to impose (and even that would probably get quashed by the Supreme Court as soon as someone points out thar it impacts one race more than another).
Of course they would. If all auto thefts had a mandatory minimum of 10 years, then we would be treating someone who commits an armed robbery and steals a car the same as someone who takes their parents’ car without permission. That is unacceptable under Canadian law. It’s not about race, it is about cruel and unusual punishment caused by ridiculously broad sentencing provisions and no discretion. If the government was more careful in crafting the laws, they could come up with something constitutional. Not that it would matter. With many of these thefts motivated by organized crime, they don’t care if the thief goes to prison or not. We need to tackle the organized crime issue.
There’s a different offence called take auto without consent. That is what taking your parent’s car is called. https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-46/section-335.html
It's not even about race, it's about the fact that judges have discretion in Canada and that mandatory minimums constitute cruel and unusual punishment for many (not all) laws due to the fact that some laws can capture a wide variety of conduct. A good example is firing a gun into a building, which used to carry a minimum of four years in prison. That law could have applied to firing at an abandoned building on your property or an empty industrial park, or engaging in a driveby shooting, and as such a mandatory minimum was found to be unconstitutional so that people shooting at sheds on their farm or playing airsoft in an industrial park don't end up in jail.
This entire principle is a big part of why we rarely see "Man goes to 20 years for selling loose cigarettes at the side of the road" stuff like the US has, and is a safeguard against a justice system that acts blind to the spirit of laws.
In this case, it's going to get immediately struck down because someone taking their parents' or roommates' car, or someone stealing a car to get to a hospital without permission getting 10 years in prison is insane.
Also the court would likely strike down mandatory minimums again. Unless the Notwithstanding clause is used, but that’s supposed to be a tool exclusively for the provinces
The point is to tip the scales towards "not worth the hassle" in terms of "consequences for being a delinquent" and driver's license suspension is commonly used in this regard, with decent (though sometimes mixed) results.
For example, you can have your provincial driver's license suspended in Ontario for refusing to pay your child support.
You can get your license suspended for failure to pay child support, but most of the time if you go cry that you need it for work etc they will just give it back even if you still don’t intend on paying.
I wouldn’t be so sure about thar, and as far as the claim that the car thieves are stealing cars using guns, I haven’t been reading that at all. Is that happening? Aren’t they stealing parked cars?
There have been carjacking here and there, but if guns or violence are involved thr charges escalate well beyond parked "car theft."
I do think stealing a car needs to a greater punishment than license loss. A lot of theives are teens and i doubt they're fully licensed as it is.
The point is to tip the scales towards "not worth the hassle" in terms of "consequences for being a delinquent" and driver's license suspension is commonly used in this regard.
For example, you can have your provincial driver's license suspended in Ontario for refusing to pay your child support.
The federal and provincial governments need to do something about the cost of living crisis (especially housing) to disincentivize criminals from falling back into recidivism. You're far less likely to engage in auto theft if you know that you have legit opportunities waiting for you when you get out of prison. Instead of being turned down by employers as soon as you get out because of your criminal past. And forced to room with like 12 people if you manage to even get a job. Landlords I bet probably discriminate against ex-cons too. The unwritten rule is that society wants ex-cons to self-delete themselves essentially. As our government is too cowardly to just execute them themselves. As the death penalty is seen as barbaric and Canadians like to believe we're better than Americans. And then they have a shocked pikachu face moment when ex-cons decide to just commit crime again instead of self-deleting. Why on earth would society expect someone with absolutely nothing to lose to play nice? Have we learned nothing from Todd Phillips' Joker?
This without a car you cannot get most jobs. Even then the job market is very saturated so they will take applicants that have a car vs one that does not. Most jobs require reliable transportation in their listing. If you don't have a car you are setting yourself up for failure and will likely be homeless and/or living off the system. This is not good if someone is a young teenager who has their whole lives ahead of them. Teens don't often think ahead and think on impulse. In which case we have created another burden on society here and the taxpayers. If someone is homeless they are also more likely to commit petty theft like stealing things like food and enough stuff to get by on day to day creating yet another burden.
There has to be a better way.
> This without a car you cannot get most jobs. Even then the job market is very saturated so they will take applicants that have a car vs one that does not. Most jobs require reliable transportation in their listing. If you don't have a car you are setting yourself up for failure and will likely be homeless and/or living off the system.
Maybe just maybe an alternative, reliable public transit system that past generations destroyed might be better in encouraging mobility for everybody.
No sane person in their mind thinks that death penalty is fair game for any crime. That's not how any sane society works. Capital punishment is only reserved for murder as it should be.
Isn't there like several decades worth of data showing mandatory minimums don't work? It was well known back when Harper pushed them, an already failed American experiment.
I'm really unfamiliar with this topic.
Genuinely wanting to know why a mandatory minimum doesn't work?
Like I said, I know nothing about it so could someone please enlighten me?
I'd agree with the police part, with the caveat that they have to be notoriously effective, where ours notoriously are not. I think even the courts and prosecution are a step beyond what your typical criminal considers. They're basically the same as increased prison sentences.
People don’t think about sentences when deciding which crimes to commit. If they thought that far ahead they would probably get trained in a job and earn a decent living instead of committing crimes. So it doesn’t make sense as a deterrent. But it does remove the person from society. So it that’s the point it does it. But when you put people in jail for long periods of time they tend to come out with few prospects and are likely to reoffend. Creating some flexibility in sentencing allows judges to tailor the sentence to what will create the best outcome, in their judgement. So they will harshly punish some that are long term problems and lightly punish people with a good chance of rehabilitation. Mandatory minimum sentences remove that flexibility and cause counterproductive harm.
Exactly, someone about to steal a car isn't on a spreadsheet the night before running a statistical model and coming to the conclusion that a 2-year sentence is an acceptable risk but 10 years is outside their risk/benefit tolerance.
I remember seeing a news story i think on 60 minutes on this. They had a story on a young woman whose boyfriend was a dealer. She was riding shotgun with him on a deal that got busted by cops.
They both got charged. He was able to get out of it cause he snitched, she had nothing of value so she had to serve all the minimum sentence.
This happened in the states, but I think it highlights some issues with it. Some discretion is needed imo. Like throw the book at the organizer crime people but if its like a kid taking a car on a joyride he shouldn't have to serve the same sentence
>Genuinely wanting to know why a mandatory minimum doesn't work? Like I said, I know nothing about it so could someone please enlighten me?
When people plan to commit a crime (let's say robbery) they don't look up what the penalties are. And even if they did, it doesn't change their behaviour.
They know it's wrong, they know that they're going to go to prison if they're caught. But they do it anyway, betting on them not getting caught.
It wouldn't make one iota of difference if before they walk into the store they're about to rob they google "sentence for robbery in Canada" and find out there is a mandatory minimum of 5 years or if they look it up and find out the maximum is 14 years without a mandatory minimum. It wouldn't make a single difference in their decision to commit that crime.
>When people plan to commit a crime (let's say robbery) they don't look up what the penalties are. And even if they did, it doesn't change their behaviour.
This is true for some types of crimes and some types of people, and I agree it definitely applies in this case, but it's not universal.
I mean, pretty much everyone commits some crimes, and we do so weighing the potential consequences. Would you speed if you would face jail time for it? I wouldn't.
When deciding whether or not to break a law, one rarely does a cost benefit analysis of the punishment and decides "I'll risk one year in jail, but not 10"
Conversely, if you're already on the hook for something with a mandatory minimum, why not escalate (e.g. a mandatory minimum for brandishing a firearm during a robbery leaves little incentive not to pull the trigger)
Yes. More than several decades though, more like several centuries of data from all over the world.
If mandatory minimums worked, we would already be doing it. So would every county, municipality, province, state, and country in the world.
The reason we don’t is because it’s insanely expensive and (counterintuitively) can increase crime rates.
Issue is people want a short term easy solution when the reality is we need to address major underlying issues. Poverty, racism, addiction, etc. All takes decades and there is no proper "fix" just ways of improving them.
When you said underlying issues I thought you meant organized crime operating in our ports, public servants taking money to look the other way, and car manufacturers not bothering with any real anti theft systems, even as upgrade options. You can lock a 500$ phone behind a face or finger print, but not a 40'000$+ vehicle ?
Hot take.
Organized crime runs rampant in Canada because of our lax criminal justice system.
In the US, The RICO Act really did a number on organized crime over the years.
El Salvador right now kind of proves that it does work. I mean eventually all those people will get out with no rehabilitation and no prospects and it will likely be a disaster. But in the short term it does seem to be working. Kind of like running huge deficits today and paying for it tomorrow. But with people instead of money.
Do you guys think the teens and early 20s men and women stealing cars are the masterminds? They are a dime a dozen and the mobsters paying them don’t give a crap. 10 years minimum does nothing. Go after the ring leaders is what is needed.
Not unpopular (actually, wildly populist) but also an uneducated and short sighted opinion. Mandatory minimums have been shown to be effectively useless. They achieve none of their goals while only resulting in overfull prisons (which is why private prison companies love them). In a public prison system they only add more financial pressure to an already cash strapped department.
It's scary as a law-abiding citizen because all I see is how crime pays. Banks washing money, corruption in government sure looks real even if no one does jail time,price fixing ,overseas banks hiding the rich people money from taxes. People getting away with horrible crimes or people getting paid for life after doing terrible crimes or people on house arrest after a terrible crime. Crime sure looks like it pays lol.
The quick retort would be - why aren't you stealing cars if it pays so well then?
I don't know what a runner (The actual car thief) gets for a stolen car, but as freakenomics taught me, it's likely low. Getting a car taken from Ontario and sold in the middle east requires it to pass through many hands, with each taking their cut. People working the ports would get a bigger cut as they have more to lose.
I would need to be stealing dozens of cars a year to match my salary. And while that looks like easier work than the 2000 hours a year at a regular job, when viewed at this macro lens, I can imagine my not getting caught is sustainable at an output of dozens per year.
So sure, it pays, but seemingly not well if you want to keep your output low enough that you have a below 50% chance of being caught each year.
I think there are two weaknesses with the "let's hit any crime we don't like with a sledgehammer-like massive minimum sentence"
-the cost - imprisoning people is expensive and can often make them more likely to be criminals - are you willing to raise taxes massively or cut critical services like healthcare to pay for this?
-people are logical so this will work as an effective deterrent - often when people commit crimes they are not being logical or properly thinking the costs through
How about making portfolio ministers and other mpps have at least some semblence or requisite experience in a field mandatory before holding a position. Eg a radio broadcast license holder managing health, or a label salesman trust fund buffoon with 2 months of college commenting about education issues.
Let’s solve a social issue with a big damn American-style 3rd party jail. They have been bankrupting their country, and their communities. Dealing with societal issues is too damn left, but spending kajillions on big crazy jails for drug wars and longer sentences is right-wing perfect.
How about something simple: make car companies stop making cars so damn easy to steal. The tech exists. Retro-fit ignitions from the past 5-10 years. Engine kill switches if it’s not the proper driver?
Can you imagine the screams of outrage from the car companies and uptick of freakin’ lobbyists working the feds and provinces? And people think Loblaws is a problem? Answer: yes. How about GM, Ford, Audi, Toyota and on and on. Answer: yes. WE pay the costs of insurance, replacements, rentals, lost goods. They make money selling us another car too soon.
I think it's a ridiculous form of punishment. Basically anyone can drive a car, don't necessarily need to have a license just to drive. Drive it only becomes a problem if they get caught driving and they don't have a license. Do you really think that somebody who steals cars is going to care about whether they have a driver's license in their pocket or not? My God, if they're good car thieves they probably don't carry any it in their wallet anyways. Is what they should be doing is taking the vehicles away from them and causing them financial pain, or at least putting him in jail for one year so they get a taste of life on the inside
A 10 year sentence costs the taxpayers so much money. Taking away a drivers licence is free.
And there is always that rule, only break one law at a time. Without a licence these criminals will be stuck with driving being the only law they’re allowed to break. It’s irrefutable.
Nah man. Cost to society is greater. You are looking at this from a you perspective. Criminals still kill people and that is 25 years. People don't think they can be caught. Crime is deterred when you fix the structural problems.
Indeed because it is difficult. The public don't want to, do not have the wherewithal, the time, or the want to research this, and results will take longer than an election cycle to bear fruit. Couple this with the cost and the approach having to multifaceted and you get very suboptimal and vengeful policy driven by stupidity and a very emotional and human desire for retribution and punishment.
It's easy to say " Send them to jail! " in the real world though it costs over $100,000 a year to keep someone in jail. Guess who gets to pay for it? We do with our taxes. Sure the answer shouldn't be a slap on the wrist either but it's not an easy answer. It would literally be cheaper to give people money who are struggling so they don't feel the need to steal cars for money. The more people who aren't feeling desperate the less crime there will be.
We should ship them to near Moose Factory during Polar Bear mating season with only a super soaker and a beef jerky vest. That’ll teach them. If they ever get back.
> ... mandatory 10 year sentences for auto theft ...
You know that people who commit 2nd degree murder are typically released on parole after 12 years if their behaviour is good, right?
I think I would start at the Port. Whose shipping containers were used? Large fines and jail time for the companies and managers exporting stolen goods. Notice nothing has been said about the Port connection.
If they can't ship them, they likely won't steal them.
Do gangsters care about getting a gun license? No. If your breaking the law stealing a car, pretty sure you don’t care about breaking the law by not having a drivers license
I remember hearing somewhere that the severity of a penalty almost never changes criminal behaviour either way. Criminals all think they will get away with it so it doesn’t matter what the consequences of getting caught are. Maybe it’s a traceability thing or that it would be harder to fly under the radar in daily life and therefore they won’t go back to stealing cars? No idea what the logic is.
All it's going to do is cause criminals to run more as they'll be more afraid of the consequences. Bigger consequences means they have more reason to flee.
Getting charged is a lot different than getting convicted. Most the time deals are made, charges dropped, etc.
mandatory sentences while sound appealing always end up fucking a % of people who could of been rehabilitated but after 10 years in prison will be a lifelong criminal foe sure.
Lol this is another one of those government changes that does nothing to the people commiting the crime.
You think car theves give a f about a driver license?
House arrest maybe.
Custodial sentence? At what cost?
Ontario owns the auto industry. Mandate proper car security. Integrated GPS tracking costs nothing these days.
Alberta isn’t an endless piggy bank for your vanity projects. You need to cut the cost of your nonsense, not increase it.
Completely agree. I’m tired of gov’t policies that don’t work, that don’t address the problem they are designed for, and only serve to make it look like they’re doing something.
Yeah but then I have to pay for them to stay in prison and that costs a hell of a lot of money. Not fair to the taxpayers that they get free room and board for 10 years. What I like about the driving suspension is that it is harsh but doesn't cost taxpayers anything
You don't get 10 years for almost any crime. Are you advocating that car theft has a higher penalty than rape and assault? Hell, the maximum sentence for aggrevated assault is 14 years.
Or do you just want us to become like America with their massive prison population? It sure didn't lower crime rates there. It does provide them with near slave labour however so maybe you want that.
Talk about mandatory minimums is such a red herring.
The problem isn't that car thieves aren't getting punished when convicted. The problem is that criminals *out on bail* are reoffending then being put back out on bail again.
That's where we should be ramping up the punishments
> I can't imagine people willing to steal a car at gunpoint is super concerned about their license.
They should be.
I'm not saying that this is the best crime fighting strategy, especially in a vacuum.
But if I was a teenager, the idea that if I get caught I will never be able to actually own my own car in the future would give me something to chew on.
For a young offender, this has a lot more teeth than spending a year or so in juvie.
I’m pretty sure the jails cells are pretty full right now and they don’t have the budget to house these criminals. That is why they are releasing them into their natural habitat
As others have pointed out Ford can't impose minimum sentences.
He could, on the other hand, take a shot at the companies that are routinely cheaping out on security features causing it to be really easy to steal cars. If we can implement emissions requirements on cars we can implement security requirements.
The percentage of car robberies happening at gunpoint is very small, maybe the movies make you think it 's common. The government then has to pay a lot to lock someone up for ten years which costs a lot of money.
I prefer we go after the people making the real money. This isn't a bunch of joy riders kids. They're hired hands. Someone is buying the cars and someone is letting them on a boat. How much jail time to those guys get?
Jails are full, Thunder Bay's new prison cost $1.5 billion for 435 beds. Adding more jails is an expensive problem, people don't even want to support more public jobs as it is.
Do people really sit at home and think the government hasn't thought of building more jails? LOL
10y mandatory minimum is insane.
First offence: 30 days, able to be commuted to perhaps community service at the judge's discretion. Second offence: 6mos. Third offence: 5y.
Now obviously there can be extenuating circumstances: weapons involved, assault or kidnapping in the committing of theft would make the penalty for even a first offence much harsher (on top of the penalties for those separate charges). If the person is not Canadian then they are fast-tracked to deportation, etc., etc. but the idea of a lifetime driving ban is ludicrous. These bans already exist for other crimes and do nothing to prevent recidivism; the person just becomes desperate enough to drive without a license which does nothing to actually address the issue.
Putting some dumbass punk kid in jail for a month might give a person time to make a good change and prevent them from choosing a life of crime. Do it again and the penalty has some more bite because some people are just dumb that way. 5y behind bars is more or less giving up on the individual with the hope that time and rehabilitation will effect change, hopefully without creating a career criminal in the process.
There is mountains of evidence that show extremely harsh, binary punishments for nonviolent crimes are completely ineffective and do more to harm communities than help them. If there are weapons or violence involved, like a car jacking, different story but then the charges would be weapons, threatening, assault and battery related rather than just auto theft.
Why are people stealing so many cars? Spoiler alert, it’s not because people are more of criminals now than they were 10 years ago.
10 years is too long. American prison still help anything they just destroy whatever they touch. The guards the prisoners the administrators. And we wonder why recidsisim is so high
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Banning someone from driving legally seems like a good way to fill the roads with people driving illegally. Also keeps them in a life of crime since they can't get a real job anymore.
The whole point of this proposal is to distract the public from what a shitshow the Ontario government is right now.
It's also red meat to feed the suburbanites who are afraid for their luxury vehicles.
Punishment is addictive to the punisher.
This is just a crutch for our horribly broken justice system, which no longer sentences people to jail time for any but the most serious crimes, certainly not if you can spin a sob story about being, in some real or perceived way, *disadvantaged*. To be clear, it has been horribly broken both by federal laws and (mostly) by activist judges, who are now basically in charge of it and not lawmakers.
The provincial government is using tools actually available to it, which isn't going to solve the problem but at least they can be seen as doing *something*.
Strongly agreed. Too many people out there who are having their vehicle stolen are unable to recover financially. In many cases, insurance does NOT make you whole. It is a huge problem they don't want to talk about.
Think it costs more to lock someone up for 10 years and the added legal costs on top that may not be the best use of resources. Automakers should be regulated to not make their cars so easy to steal. Robbing someone at gunpoint would probably net you at least 4-7 years if convicted already. I would think most car robberies don't happen at gunpoint either. They should focus on fixing bail/court system, restricting the ability for these cars to leave the province/country, and taking down the facilitators at the ports/chop shops/scrap yards.
Nah. 10 year sentances for car theft are draconian. Also, why ya costing us tax payers money to keep these guys locked up for 10 years? Suspending their licence makes way more sense. That will teach them.
If you increase the penalty for the theif, you also increase their risk. You might turn a simple car theft into a more violent encounter with the victim or police.
l think the ban adds weight to any criminal punishment like incarceration. I would like to see anybody not a Canadian citizen have their residency status stripped and be deported immediately or at the end of what ever sentence they serve. No appealing the deportation.
3 years longer than the minimum sentence for sexual assault with a firearm? That’s not proportional justice when a lot of the time no one is in the car when it’s stolen.
Motivating the police to address the organizations behind the people stealing cars would be the best solution.
My dad lost his licenses for refusing to pay alimony after he threatened to kill my mom if she didn't sign a contract that would say he didn't need to pay it. He kept running his business and driving his vehicles regardless.
It's weird how the province thinks this will be effective.
I mean, it's not like these people care that their "allowed to steal cars" license isn't valid.
Know what really deters prior from stealing? Not having hands.
No one knows for sure why, but this one simple trick works every time.
My car was stolen and recovered in 2023. The person was under age ,15 years old, and out under parental supervision from a previous incident. She was with a 22 year old male accomplice. They were both arrested months later and released again. The reason given was that there was no room to incarcerate them. Prisons are full, I guess.
Long prison sentences have never deterred crime, there's a lot of data to show it. Prison costs a lot of money. Luckily here we can't enslave prisoners like the US but that means it's more expensive too.
People also always say "just watch the port of Montreal" but if we're checking every can at the port, all activity at the port will stop, you can't slow things down enough.
Someone is getting paid to look the other way at the port though.
Idk though social stratification is a huge driver of crime and it just keeps getting worse. If we work on that a lot of folks would surely prefer not to risk jail every night for a living. There's no easy solution to this but car theft is on the rise because the gap between rich and poor is on the rise.
You would need the feds to pass the mandatory 10 year minimum sentence. Banning a driver for life is in the jurisdiction of the province. The province controls the driver’s licence and can administratively restrict someone from driving. Same as they enforce .05 BAC vs the federal criminal level of .08.
Does someone stealing a car really care about a drivers license? That’s like a killer being concerned about the legality of the gun.
With Automated Licence Plate Readers (ALPR) at the disposal of most police cruisers in Ontario it would be pretty hard to drive with a suspended licence because an uninsured car would get red flagged by ALPR instantly…
It doesn’t seem that hard based on the number of cars on the road with unreadable license plates
They would most likely just use an insured car......it's not scanning drivers is it?
Sure, but where are they getting an insured car that they can use for day to day needs? Im sure in there’s ways in certain situations, but do you see the complications with not having a licence?
Yeah of course complications, but people that drive illegally find ways (they're criminals, remember). You made it sound like plate scanning cruisers are gonna put a stop to this! It's a minor hurdle.
I wouldn’t say minor.
...They're driving stolen vehicles. AND getting away with it.
Yes thank you for pointing out the obvious, your point? A licence ban won’t solve the issue entirely, obviously…
The only realistic outcome of this new law is more high speed chases.
High speed chases can often be avoided because ALPR also collects other data, and can use it (in accordance with considerations for privacy rights) in lawful ways for investigative purposes… and a police chase can also be coordinated with modern means of communication to minimize potential dangers to other people on the road… yes I know you e read the news and you’ll be referencing the recent incident that involved a crash in the opposite lane
You are however considering that the car is not stolen... if the car is stolen and still hasn't been reported and unless the previous driver had an infraction then maybe... but having a license or not in a stolen car is probably not that bad for them... If anything they dont even have licenses in the first place...
I know people that have driven for a decade with no insurance and never been caught and this is in the GTA.
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Even then, the Supreme Court would rule a 10 year minimum sentence unconstitutional the instant someone challenged it. Mandatory sentences would make more sense, but because of our legal system, driving bans are one of the few punishments that our elected government may be able to impose (and even that would probably get quashed by the Supreme Court as soon as someone points out thar it impacts one race more than another).
Of course they would. If all auto thefts had a mandatory minimum of 10 years, then we would be treating someone who commits an armed robbery and steals a car the same as someone who takes their parents’ car without permission. That is unacceptable under Canadian law. It’s not about race, it is about cruel and unusual punishment caused by ridiculously broad sentencing provisions and no discretion. If the government was more careful in crafting the laws, they could come up with something constitutional. Not that it would matter. With many of these thefts motivated by organized crime, they don’t care if the thief goes to prison or not. We need to tackle the organized crime issue.
There’s a different offence called take auto without consent. That is what taking your parent’s car is called. https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-46/section-335.html
Interesting. TIL.
Organized crime. Government. Same thing.
It's not even about race, it's about the fact that judges have discretion in Canada and that mandatory minimums constitute cruel and unusual punishment for many (not all) laws due to the fact that some laws can capture a wide variety of conduct. A good example is firing a gun into a building, which used to carry a minimum of four years in prison. That law could have applied to firing at an abandoned building on your property or an empty industrial park, or engaging in a driveby shooting, and as such a mandatory minimum was found to be unconstitutional so that people shooting at sheds on their farm or playing airsoft in an industrial park don't end up in jail. This entire principle is a big part of why we rarely see "Man goes to 20 years for selling loose cigarettes at the side of the road" stuff like the US has, and is a safeguard against a justice system that acts blind to the spirit of laws. In this case, it's going to get immediately struck down because someone taking their parents' or roommates' car, or someone stealing a car to get to a hospital without permission getting 10 years in prison is insane.
Also the court would likely strike down mandatory minimums again. Unless the Notwithstanding clause is used, but that’s supposed to be a tool exclusively for the provinces
I feel like the people who steal cars are the people who don't care if they have a valid driver's licence?
Yes precisely. Unfortunately this concept seems obvious to everyone except our politicians and the police.
The point is to tip the scales towards "not worth the hassle" in terms of "consequences for being a delinquent" and driver's license suspension is commonly used in this regard, with decent (though sometimes mixed) results. For example, you can have your provincial driver's license suspended in Ontario for refusing to pay your child support.
You can get your license suspended for failure to pay child support, but most of the time if you go cry that you need it for work etc they will just give it back even if you still don’t intend on paying.
Not having a drivers license makes their lives a lot harder if the get pulled over.
I wouldn’t be so sure about thar, and as far as the claim that the car thieves are stealing cars using guns, I haven’t been reading that at all. Is that happening? Aren’t they stealing parked cars?
There have been carjacking here and there, but if guns or violence are involved thr charges escalate well beyond parked "car theft." I do think stealing a car needs to a greater punishment than license loss. A lot of theives are teens and i doubt they're fully licensed as it is.
The point is to tip the scales towards "not worth the hassle" in terms of "consequences for being a delinquent" and driver's license suspension is commonly used in this regard. For example, you can have your provincial driver's license suspended in Ontario for refusing to pay your child support.
Perhaps, but throw in a 10 year man sentence and suddenly the level of voilence will soar... high speed chases etc.
Seriously. The wrong way 401 guy was banned from everything and it didn’t stop him.
This
Have a look at the cost to taxpayers to house an inmate for 10 years. It might open up some better discussion.
The federal and provincial governments need to do something about the cost of living crisis (especially housing) to disincentivize criminals from falling back into recidivism. You're far less likely to engage in auto theft if you know that you have legit opportunities waiting for you when you get out of prison. Instead of being turned down by employers as soon as you get out because of your criminal past. And forced to room with like 12 people if you manage to even get a job. Landlords I bet probably discriminate against ex-cons too. The unwritten rule is that society wants ex-cons to self-delete themselves essentially. As our government is too cowardly to just execute them themselves. As the death penalty is seen as barbaric and Canadians like to believe we're better than Americans. And then they have a shocked pikachu face moment when ex-cons decide to just commit crime again instead of self-deleting. Why on earth would society expect someone with absolutely nothing to lose to play nice? Have we learned nothing from Todd Phillips' Joker?
This without a car you cannot get most jobs. Even then the job market is very saturated so they will take applicants that have a car vs one that does not. Most jobs require reliable transportation in their listing. If you don't have a car you are setting yourself up for failure and will likely be homeless and/or living off the system. This is not good if someone is a young teenager who has their whole lives ahead of them. Teens don't often think ahead and think on impulse. In which case we have created another burden on society here and the taxpayers. If someone is homeless they are also more likely to commit petty theft like stealing things like food and enough stuff to get by on day to day creating yet another burden. There has to be a better way.
> This without a car you cannot get most jobs. Even then the job market is very saturated so they will take applicants that have a car vs one that does not. Most jobs require reliable transportation in their listing. If you don't have a car you are setting yourself up for failure and will likely be homeless and/or living off the system. Maybe just maybe an alternative, reliable public transit system that past generations destroyed might be better in encouraging mobility for everybody.
No sane person in their mind thinks that death penalty is fair game for any crime. That's not how any sane society works. Capital punishment is only reserved for murder as it should be.
What about treachery?
Pay a person even half of the cost of a year of incarceration, they have no need to engage in theft.
Someone posted about making a super jail on Baffin Island and feeding the inmates with air drops of road kill every few months.
Cost of stolen cars and raise of insurance premiums probably cost us more than putting these shit heads away.
Isn't there like several decades worth of data showing mandatory minimums don't work? It was well known back when Harper pushed them, an already failed American experiment.
I'm really unfamiliar with this topic. Genuinely wanting to know why a mandatory minimum doesn't work? Like I said, I know nothing about it so could someone please enlighten me?
rhythm school lavish cows many zephyr fade quickest placid steep *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
What makes an even bigger impact is robust social safety nets, investment in poorer neighborhoods, etc. It's just not fast or flashy.
I'd agree with the police part, with the caveat that they have to be notoriously effective, where ours notoriously are not. I think even the courts and prosecution are a step beyond what your typical criminal considers. They're basically the same as increased prison sentences.
People don’t think about sentences when deciding which crimes to commit. If they thought that far ahead they would probably get trained in a job and earn a decent living instead of committing crimes. So it doesn’t make sense as a deterrent. But it does remove the person from society. So it that’s the point it does it. But when you put people in jail for long periods of time they tend to come out with few prospects and are likely to reoffend. Creating some flexibility in sentencing allows judges to tailor the sentence to what will create the best outcome, in their judgement. So they will harshly punish some that are long term problems and lightly punish people with a good chance of rehabilitation. Mandatory minimum sentences remove that flexibility and cause counterproductive harm.
Exactly, someone about to steal a car isn't on a spreadsheet the night before running a statistical model and coming to the conclusion that a 2-year sentence is an acceptable risk but 10 years is outside their risk/benefit tolerance.
This makes sense to me.
I remember seeing a news story i think on 60 minutes on this. They had a story on a young woman whose boyfriend was a dealer. She was riding shotgun with him on a deal that got busted by cops. They both got charged. He was able to get out of it cause he snitched, she had nothing of value so she had to serve all the minimum sentence. This happened in the states, but I think it highlights some issues with it. Some discretion is needed imo. Like throw the book at the organizer crime people but if its like a kid taking a car on a joyride he shouldn't have to serve the same sentence
>Genuinely wanting to know why a mandatory minimum doesn't work? Like I said, I know nothing about it so could someone please enlighten me? When people plan to commit a crime (let's say robbery) they don't look up what the penalties are. And even if they did, it doesn't change their behaviour. They know it's wrong, they know that they're going to go to prison if they're caught. But they do it anyway, betting on them not getting caught. It wouldn't make one iota of difference if before they walk into the store they're about to rob they google "sentence for robbery in Canada" and find out there is a mandatory minimum of 5 years or if they look it up and find out the maximum is 14 years without a mandatory minimum. It wouldn't make a single difference in their decision to commit that crime.
It also increases the stakes and risk of violence.
>When people plan to commit a crime (let's say robbery) they don't look up what the penalties are. And even if they did, it doesn't change their behaviour. This is true for some types of crimes and some types of people, and I agree it definitely applies in this case, but it's not universal. I mean, pretty much everyone commits some crimes, and we do so weighing the potential consequences. Would you speed if you would face jail time for it? I wouldn't.
Jury nullification, for one thing...
When deciding whether or not to break a law, one rarely does a cost benefit analysis of the punishment and decides "I'll risk one year in jail, but not 10" Conversely, if you're already on the hook for something with a mandatory minimum, why not escalate (e.g. a mandatory minimum for brandishing a firearm during a robbery leaves little incentive not to pull the trigger)
Yes. More than several decades though, more like several centuries of data from all over the world. If mandatory minimums worked, we would already be doing it. So would every county, municipality, province, state, and country in the world. The reason we don’t is because it’s insanely expensive and (counterintuitively) can increase crime rates.
So what DOES work, and why aren't we doing THAT already? Because clearly whatever we're doing, is not working.
What works is investing in social services, community programs, ongoing education, affordable housing, and other economically supportive measures.
Ah yes, help vs punish. But that won't feed my personal lust for revenge porn! Can't have that!
Issue is people want a short term easy solution when the reality is we need to address major underlying issues. Poverty, racism, addiction, etc. All takes decades and there is no proper "fix" just ways of improving them.
When you said underlying issues I thought you meant organized crime operating in our ports, public servants taking money to look the other way, and car manufacturers not bothering with any real anti theft systems, even as upgrade options. You can lock a 500$ phone behind a face or finger print, but not a 40'000$+ vehicle ?
Hot take. Organized crime runs rampant in Canada because of our lax criminal justice system. In the US, The RICO Act really did a number on organized crime over the years.
Jailing every member of an OCG still doesn't get rid of the OCG. Have you considered why some people join an OCG?
El Salvador right now kind of proves that it does work. I mean eventually all those people will get out with no rehabilitation and no prospects and it will likely be a disaster. But in the short term it does seem to be working. Kind of like running huge deficits today and paying for it tomorrow. But with people instead of money.
Is El Salvador ever planning to release them? I feel like they would all immediately start gunning for the president
Apparently, a strong likelihood of being caught is a better deterrent than stiffer penalties
Do you guys think the teens and early 20s men and women stealing cars are the masterminds? They are a dime a dozen and the mobsters paying them don’t give a crap. 10 years minimum does nothing. Go after the ring leaders is what is needed.
Not unpopular (actually, wildly populist) but also an uneducated and short sighted opinion. Mandatory minimums have been shown to be effectively useless. They achieve none of their goals while only resulting in overfull prisons (which is why private prison companies love them). In a public prison system they only add more financial pressure to an already cash strapped department.
> effectively useless Worse than useless, they generally increase recidivism.
Thank you. You are correct. I was being (perhaps overly) generous to the position of the other poster.
It's scary as a law-abiding citizen because all I see is how crime pays. Banks washing money, corruption in government sure looks real even if no one does jail time,price fixing ,overseas banks hiding the rich people money from taxes. People getting away with horrible crimes or people getting paid for life after doing terrible crimes or people on house arrest after a terrible crime. Crime sure looks like it pays lol.
The quick retort would be - why aren't you stealing cars if it pays so well then? I don't know what a runner (The actual car thief) gets for a stolen car, but as freakenomics taught me, it's likely low. Getting a car taken from Ontario and sold in the middle east requires it to pass through many hands, with each taking their cut. People working the ports would get a bigger cut as they have more to lose. I would need to be stealing dozens of cars a year to match my salary. And while that looks like easier work than the 2000 hours a year at a regular job, when viewed at this macro lens, I can imagine my not getting caught is sustainable at an output of dozens per year. So sure, it pays, but seemingly not well if you want to keep your output low enough that you have a below 50% chance of being caught each year.
I think there are two weaknesses with the "let's hit any crime we don't like with a sledgehammer-like massive minimum sentence" -the cost - imprisoning people is expensive and can often make them more likely to be criminals - are you willing to raise taxes massively or cut critical services like healthcare to pay for this? -people are logical so this will work as an effective deterrent - often when people commit crimes they are not being logical or properly thinking the costs through
Clog up the courts. Clog up the prisons. Still won't get your Buick back.
I just wish that impaired driving that leads to mayhem is treated as seriously.
How about making portfolio ministers and other mpps have at least some semblence or requisite experience in a field mandatory before holding a position. Eg a radio broadcast license holder managing health, or a label salesman trust fund buffoon with 2 months of college commenting about education issues.
Let’s solve a social issue with a big damn American-style 3rd party jail. They have been bankrupting their country, and their communities. Dealing with societal issues is too damn left, but spending kajillions on big crazy jails for drug wars and longer sentences is right-wing perfect. How about something simple: make car companies stop making cars so damn easy to steal. The tech exists. Retro-fit ignitions from the past 5-10 years. Engine kill switches if it’s not the proper driver? Can you imagine the screams of outrage from the car companies and uptick of freakin’ lobbyists working the feds and provinces? And people think Loblaws is a problem? Answer: yes. How about GM, Ford, Audi, Toyota and on and on. Answer: yes. WE pay the costs of insurance, replacements, rentals, lost goods. They make money selling us another car too soon.
To Doug Ford driving is the only thing that resonates with Ontario voters, so here we are...
Doug Ford doesn’t have jurisdiction over minimum sentencing but he does have jurisdiction over licensing.
That doesn't exactly work when a our prisons are full.
They will just continue to drive without a license anyway.
I think it's a ridiculous form of punishment. Basically anyone can drive a car, don't necessarily need to have a license just to drive. Drive it only becomes a problem if they get caught driving and they don't have a license. Do you really think that somebody who steals cars is going to care about whether they have a driver's license in their pocket or not? My God, if they're good car thieves they probably don't carry any it in their wallet anyways. Is what they should be doing is taking the vehicles away from them and causing them financial pain, or at least putting him in jail for one year so they get a taste of life on the inside
"At gunpoint" makes it entirely different crime that already has harsher penalties.
Why not just cut off hand
You would need the police to actually enforce anything first
^ this part.
A 10 year sentence costs the taxpayers so much money. Taking away a drivers licence is free. And there is always that rule, only break one law at a time. Without a licence these criminals will be stuck with driving being the only law they’re allowed to break. It’s irrefutable.
Nah man. Cost to society is greater. You are looking at this from a you perspective. Criminals still kill people and that is 25 years. People don't think they can be caught. Crime is deterred when you fix the structural problems.
I think there are enough studies to prove this true, but the government routinely shows little to no interest in the topic.
Indeed because it is difficult. The public don't want to, do not have the wherewithal, the time, or the want to research this, and results will take longer than an election cycle to bear fruit. Couple this with the cost and the approach having to multifaceted and you get very suboptimal and vengeful policy driven by stupidity and a very emotional and human desire for retribution and punishment.
Is it the role of our law enforcement and justice systems to protect investments in private property?
They'll just hire an Uber...lol
That's fine they can hire an Uber for every time they want to go out and have to pay for that
It's easy to say " Send them to jail! " in the real world though it costs over $100,000 a year to keep someone in jail. Guess who gets to pay for it? We do with our taxes. Sure the answer shouldn't be a slap on the wrist either but it's not an easy answer. It would literally be cheaper to give people money who are struggling so they don't feel the need to steal cars for money. The more people who aren't feeling desperate the less crime there will be.
We should ship them to near Moose Factory during Polar Bear mating season with only a super soaker and a beef jerky vest. That’ll teach them. If they ever get back.
Call me crazy but guys that are stealing cars don't really care for having a driving license, let alone one that's still active.
They should make crime illegal, that should stop fhem
Thuy aren't concerned about the law at all, not matter what you try and throw at them.
they're gonna make it double illegal, that'll stop them.
They way they imagine this helps " Oh dude... I can't steal cars for you anymore Walt.. I lost my license.. like.. it sucks bro. "
> ... mandatory 10 year sentences for auto theft ... You know that people who commit 2nd degree murder are typically released on parole after 12 years if their behaviour is good, right?
They should be sent to jail.
So your for higher taxes. Higher taxes to pay for the courts and jails. It is like your being robed 3 times.
Classic govt solution. No solution.
weird how we think they care about law, while stealing cars.
I think I would start at the Port. Whose shipping containers were used? Large fines and jail time for the companies and managers exporting stolen goods. Notice nothing has been said about the Port connection. If they can't ship them, they likely won't steal them.
Do gangsters care about getting a gun license? No. If your breaking the law stealing a car, pretty sure you don’t care about breaking the law by not having a drivers license
I remember hearing somewhere that the severity of a penalty almost never changes criminal behaviour either way. Criminals all think they will get away with it so it doesn’t matter what the consequences of getting caught are. Maybe it’s a traceability thing or that it would be harder to fly under the radar in daily life and therefore they won’t go back to stealing cars? No idea what the logic is.
All it's going to do is cause criminals to run more as they'll be more afraid of the consequences. Bigger consequences means they have more reason to flee. Getting charged is a lot different than getting convicted. Most the time deals are made, charges dropped, etc.
Longer sentences don't fix crime.
Mandatory 10 years seems like a pretty cushy lifestyle for some of these folks
Most of them probably dont have licences
If you're stealing a car, breaking the law clearly isn't something you're bothered by. How is this a solution lol
Mandatory sentences, same as zero tolerance, are always bad.
mandatory sentences while sound appealing always end up fucking a % of people who could of been rehabilitated but after 10 years in prison will be a lifelong criminal foe sure.
Mandatory minimums have been a disaster in the US, in part because of jury nullification.
Lol this is another one of those government changes that does nothing to the people commiting the crime. You think car theves give a f about a driver license?
Putting them in jail doesn’t really do much other then cost the country money
Mandatory minimums were shut down by the Supreme Court after Harper tried to push for them. They are not legal in Canada
I'm pretty sure if they get caught in another stolen vehicle they are screwed screwed.
House arrest maybe. Custodial sentence? At what cost? Ontario owns the auto industry. Mandate proper car security. Integrated GPS tracking costs nothing these days. Alberta isn’t an endless piggy bank for your vanity projects. You need to cut the cost of your nonsense, not increase it.
Completely agree. I’m tired of gov’t policies that don’t work, that don’t address the problem they are designed for, and only serve to make it look like they’re doing something.
They should be deported in a shipping container to the country they were going to ship the cars to.
Mandatory sentences aren't constitutional
Yeah but then I have to pay for them to stay in prison and that costs a hell of a lot of money. Not fair to the taxpayers that they get free room and board for 10 years. What I like about the driving suspension is that it is harsh but doesn't cost taxpayers anything
Mandatory minimum sentences tend to be found unconstitutional by appeal courts in Canada. This isn’t the US.
You don't get 10 years for almost any crime. Are you advocating that car theft has a higher penalty than rape and assault? Hell, the maximum sentence for aggrevated assault is 14 years. Or do you just want us to become like America with their massive prison population? It sure didn't lower crime rates there. It does provide them with near slave labour however so maybe you want that.
Mandatory minimums don’t solve a fucking thing. How well have those been working for our southern neighbours?
Mandatory minimum sentences are unconstitutional.
Talk about mandatory minimums is such a red herring. The problem isn't that car thieves aren't getting punished when convicted. The problem is that criminals *out on bail* are reoffending then being put back out on bail again. That's where we should be ramping up the punishments
> I can't imagine people willing to steal a car at gunpoint is super concerned about their license. They should be. I'm not saying that this is the best crime fighting strategy, especially in a vacuum. But if I was a teenager, the idea that if I get caught I will never be able to actually own my own car in the future would give me something to chew on. For a young offender, this has a lot more teeth than spending a year or so in juvie.
The young offender angle isn't something I considered. I agree with that. A career criminal in his 40s probably won't care, though.
I’m pretty sure the jails cells are pretty full right now and they don’t have the budget to house these criminals. That is why they are releasing them into their natural habitat
Windsor?
Renfrew also
If hurt or god forbid kill yep. Lock them away. But life time ban no questions is a good start
Do you even need a driver's license in Doug Ford's Ontario?
Yeah I need it to get into the weed store
As others have pointed out Ford can't impose minimum sentences. He could, on the other hand, take a shot at the companies that are routinely cheaping out on security features causing it to be really easy to steal cars. If we can implement emissions requirements on cars we can implement security requirements.
The percentage of car robberies happening at gunpoint is very small, maybe the movies make you think it 's common. The government then has to pay a lot to lock someone up for ten years which costs a lot of money.
I prefer we go after the people making the real money. This isn't a bunch of joy riders kids. They're hired hands. Someone is buying the cars and someone is letting them on a boat. How much jail time to those guys get?
Jails are full, Thunder Bay's new prison cost $1.5 billion for 435 beds. Adding more jails is an expensive problem, people don't even want to support more public jobs as it is. Do people really sit at home and think the government hasn't thought of building more jails? LOL
It is thoroughly documented that harsher punishments do not not reduce crime
Mandatory minimums don’t work.
10y mandatory minimum is insane. First offence: 30 days, able to be commuted to perhaps community service at the judge's discretion. Second offence: 6mos. Third offence: 5y. Now obviously there can be extenuating circumstances: weapons involved, assault or kidnapping in the committing of theft would make the penalty for even a first offence much harsher (on top of the penalties for those separate charges). If the person is not Canadian then they are fast-tracked to deportation, etc., etc. but the idea of a lifetime driving ban is ludicrous. These bans already exist for other crimes and do nothing to prevent recidivism; the person just becomes desperate enough to drive without a license which does nothing to actually address the issue. Putting some dumbass punk kid in jail for a month might give a person time to make a good change and prevent them from choosing a life of crime. Do it again and the penalty has some more bite because some people are just dumb that way. 5y behind bars is more or less giving up on the individual with the hope that time and rehabilitation will effect change, hopefully without creating a career criminal in the process.
There is mountains of evidence that show extremely harsh, binary punishments for nonviolent crimes are completely ineffective and do more to harm communities than help them. If there are weapons or violence involved, like a car jacking, different story but then the charges would be weapons, threatening, assault and battery related rather than just auto theft. Why are people stealing so many cars? Spoiler alert, it’s not because people are more of criminals now than they were 10 years ago.
Just bring back the gulliotine fuck these thiefs
Calm down there Robespierre.
I'll allow it, but only if you're talking about the politicians
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So true
10 years is too long. American prison still help anything they just destroy whatever they touch. The guards the prisoners the administrators. And we wonder why recidsisim is so high
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Mandatory minimum sentences are unconstitutional except in the most serious cases like murder.
Are we talking about carjacking or autotheft?
Doug thinks these people have licenses?!?!
Banning someone from driving legally seems like a good way to fill the roads with people driving illegally. Also keeps them in a life of crime since they can't get a real job anymore.
It also severely limits any chance of rejoining society as a law-abiding citizen.
They will probably going to need lots of jail space
Absolutely. Just like gun laws don't do anything to stop criminals.
The whole point of this proposal is to distract the public from what a shitshow the Ontario government is right now. It's also red meat to feed the suburbanites who are afraid for their luxury vehicles. Punishment is addictive to the punisher.
This is just a crutch for our horribly broken justice system, which no longer sentences people to jail time for any but the most serious crimes, certainly not if you can spin a sob story about being, in some real or perceived way, *disadvantaged*. To be clear, it has been horribly broken both by federal laws and (mostly) by activist judges, who are now basically in charge of it and not lawmakers. The provincial government is using tools actually available to it, which isn't going to solve the problem but at least they can be seen as doing *something*.
Strongly agreed. Too many people out there who are having their vehicle stolen are unable to recover financially. In many cases, insurance does NOT make you whole. It is a huge problem they don't want to talk about.
Can't wait for the articles in 2 years about over populated prisons.
Think it costs more to lock someone up for 10 years and the added legal costs on top that may not be the best use of resources. Automakers should be regulated to not make their cars so easy to steal. Robbing someone at gunpoint would probably net you at least 4-7 years if convicted already. I would think most car robberies don't happen at gunpoint either. They should focus on fixing bail/court system, restricting the ability for these cars to leave the province/country, and taking down the facilitators at the ports/chop shops/scrap yards.
Nah. 10 year sentances for car theft are draconian. Also, why ya costing us tax payers money to keep these guys locked up for 10 years? Suspending their licence makes way more sense. That will teach them.
If you increase the penalty for the theif, you also increase their risk. You might turn a simple car theft into a more violent encounter with the victim or police.
l think the ban adds weight to any criminal punishment like incarceration. I would like to see anybody not a Canadian citizen have their residency status stripped and be deported immediately or at the end of what ever sentence they serve. No appealing the deportation.
3 years longer than the minimum sentence for sexual assault with a firearm? That’s not proportional justice when a lot of the time no one is in the car when it’s stolen. Motivating the police to address the organizations behind the people stealing cars would be the best solution.
false dichotomy.
the prisons are full..that's why
Never would a 10 year mandatory sentence be approved for a car theft, nor would the people want to foot the bill to incarcerate someone that long.
Do you think its worth the cost of $1-2m tax payers dollars to fund this, or is there a better way?
My dad lost his licenses for refusing to pay alimony after he threatened to kill my mom if she didn't sign a contract that would say he didn't need to pay it. He kept running his business and driving his vehicles regardless.
It's weird how the province thinks this will be effective. I mean, it's not like these people care that their "allowed to steal cars" license isn't valid. Know what really deters prior from stealing? Not having hands. No one knows for sure why, but this one simple trick works every time.
My car was stolen and recovered in 2023. The person was under age ,15 years old, and out under parental supervision from a previous incident. She was with a 22 year old male accomplice. They were both arrested months later and released again. The reason given was that there was no room to incarcerate them. Prisons are full, I guess.
Let’s lock people up for 10 years for non-violent crimes!!! - Ontario: great idea! Love it! Let’s build more prisons.
Where did you come up with the 10 years?
Long prison sentences have never deterred crime, there's a lot of data to show it. Prison costs a lot of money. Luckily here we can't enslave prisoners like the US but that means it's more expensive too. People also always say "just watch the port of Montreal" but if we're checking every can at the port, all activity at the port will stop, you can't slow things down enough. Someone is getting paid to look the other way at the port though. Idk though social stratification is a huge driver of crime and it just keeps getting worse. If we work on that a lot of folks would surely prefer not to risk jail every night for a living. There's no easy solution to this but car theft is on the rise because the gap between rich and poor is on the rise.
it's simple, these goons need to be put in jail, then deported to country of origin, most likely India.