OTTAWA — Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is calling on the federal government to spell out in law that Canadians have the right to use force, including deadly force, against someone who enters their home illegally and poses a threat to their safety.
It is the latest tough-on-crime proposal from Poilievre and it comes at a time when public debate has been stirred over a high-profile arrest in the country. An Ontario man was arrested earlier this month and charged with aggravated assault regarding his alleged actions in response to a suspected
who has also been charged with carrying a weapon and break-and-enter.
Standing in the backyard of a family home in Brampton, Ont., on Friday, Poilievre proclaimed that “your home is your castle” and called for Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government to amend the section of the Criminal Code on self-defence.
Specifically, he called for a change to that section to say that “the use of force, including lethal force, is presumed reasonable against an individual who unlawfully enters a house and poses a threat to the safety of anyone inside.”
“It means you have the right to use force to defend your home and your family against someone who threatens you and who has entered illegally.”
Poilievre vowed that Conservatives would advance their own private member’s bill should Carney’s government fail to take up his proposal. On Friday, Justice Minister Sean Fraser appeared to throw cold water on the idea.
“This isn’t the Wild West. It’s Canada. Canadians deserve real solutions that make us safer, not slogans that inspire fear and chaos for Pierre’s political survival,”
.
Poilievre’s use of the term “castle” refers to provisions based on the “Castle Doctrine” that exist in U.S. states that allow residents to use force, including deadly force, without being put to the same tests that exist within Canada about whether their actions were reasonable or not.
Canadian criminal law on self-defence states that a person is not guilty when they believe “on reasonable grounds” that force or the threat of it was being used against them and that their actions could be considered to have happened in defence of themselves and to be “reasonable in the circumstances.”
The law outlines nine different factors that Crown prosecutors and police use to determine whether a person’s action constitutes being “reasonable,” including the nature of the threat, whether weapons were used, pre-existing personal relationships between those involved, as well as the physical size and gender of those involved.
Poilievre called those conditions “very complicated” and “vague” during his press conference on Friday, saying no one has time to think about them when they find their home threatened.
He says his proposal would make it clear that when someone enters a home illegally and a person inside has a reason to believe they are in danger, the force they used would be deemed reasonable.
Boris Bytensky, the president of the Criminal Lawyers’ Association, said Poilievre’s proposal would not make “anything any worse for anybody,” but at the same time says, “it’s not going to make it any better for anybody.”
He suggests that a “bit of a misunderstanding” may be at play, given there is a major difference between someone who is charged with a crime versus someone who has been convicted, and that it falls to the Crown to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that someone did not “act reasonably” or in self-defence.
“When you unpack the current proposal, it amounts to nothing more than basically confirming that the presumption of innocence applies when somebody uses force inside their own house against the intruder.”
When it comes to the case of the Ontario man charged in relation to an alleged intruder trying to enter his apartment, Bytensky said the facts of the case are not yet known.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford pointed to the situation this week to say “something is broken.” Ford has also been a vocal critic of criminal bail laws as well as judges.
Bytensky suggested the proposal from Poilievre would not prevent police from taking action should they suspect someone’s actions in the case of a break-in to have been unreasonable.
“If the police suspected that somebody wandered into your home and was not a threat to you, and you used unreasonable force — that you bludgeoned somebody with a baseball bat when they had turned their back and in the process of leaving and were no longer a threat to you — neither this new provision, nor the current law, would protect that person,” he said.
Criminal defence lawyer Alex
De Boyrie said he believes Poilievre’s proposal “would definitely have avoided a charge” in the recent case against the Ontario man, as well as the second-degree murder charge that was ultimately withdrawn in the previous case of a Milton, Ont., man who was accused in the death of a home intruder.
De Boyrie said when it comes to clients he has been involved with, charges have been “withdrawn quite often” in cases of self-defence. One issue, he says, is that assessing self-defence is difficult, adding that there is a lower threshold to lay a charge against someone than to proceed with prosecuting a case.
Bytensky said his experience has been that police tend to be “sympathetic” towards situations involving an intruder in someone’s home and do not pursue charges without “strong reason” to believe a crime has been committed, which is why he cautions against speculation.
Still, De Boyrie said many are confused by Canada’s self-defence laws and believes more clarification and even education would be useful.
“Clients are almost always confused as to why they were charged… and why the police didn’t listen to them when they advised them that they were acting in self-defence,” he said.
“There’s unfortunate circumstances where somebody swings on you and you happen to swing back and you’re stronger than them, or you land a better punch than them, and you unfortunately break their bone or break a nose … then you’re looking at a charge, and is that necessarily fair? I would say no.”
National Post
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