Fix the Youth Criminal Justice Act

Ten Ideas for 2025 - post #4

In more romantic times, teenage urban crime inspired a screenplay for West Side Story, with its “forbidden love and the rivalry between the Jets and the Sharks.” My Dad would remind me that Riff, Bernardo and Tony all met violent ends, but something feels different, today.

Youth crime has risen 40% in Windsor, Ont., for example. Up the road in London, local police charged 438 youth aged 12 to 17 in 2023, more than double 2021. Toronto Police say the average age “of those involved in gun violence in the city has dropped from 25 in recent years to just 20,” which is a function of far more younger people pulling triggers.

Many would have been shocked when two 14-year old Toronto-area boys were charged with first degree murder in separate, unrelated crimes over a two week period in July 2024.

Are Criminal gangs outsourcing some of their work to kids under the age of 18, knowing full well that they’ll benefit from a very different judicial system? Or, as “Social workers, educators, psychologists and community support workers” told the CBC last year, do these alarming trends reflect society’s shortcomings, evidencing insufficient program funding on the part of taxpayers?:

“…a constellation of factors contribute to youth violence in the Greater Toronto Area, ranging from pandemic fallout to the proliferation of social media. They did, however, agree that the solution is far more straightforward: they say long-term funding commitments for support programs, coupled with the space and time to focus on root causes and violence prevention, are critical to achieving change and saving lives.”

I’d love to understand how giving “space and time” to the five young men, all described as being between 15 to 18 years old, would have helped prevent their sexual assault of a young woman in Vaughan last October. According to York Regional Police, this particular group were unknown to the victim prior to the attack.

One need not directly connect any of these anecdotes to yesterday’s pitch (see post #3 of my Ten Ideas for 2025 series - “Let’s legalize self-defence” Jan 14-25), but there’s no denying we appear to have a made-in-Canada problem: “Canada’s violent crime rate was 14.0% higher than the U.S. in 2022,” according to a Fraser Institute study

There are plenty of differences between the American and Canadian judicial systems, but even in liberal California, kids as young as 14 may be tried in Adult Court if they’ve been accused of the very crimes we are seeing too frequently on our side of the border:

• Murder

• Certain sex crimes

• Kidnapping

• Assault with a firearm or destructive device

• Torture

• Voluntary manslaughter

Once you reach age 16, the default for serious crimes in that State is Adult court.

Not so in Canada, and perhaps that makes sense if 18 is the age threshold if you want to vote, join the military full-time (unless your parents consent at 17), or get married.

But think of all of the life-altering situations where Ontario gives a 16 year-old licence to make adult decisions: i) the Education Act requires that a 16 year-old must attend school (or an approved home school program), but if they drop out, there’s no real penalty (Parents are liable to a fine of $200 if the child); ii) healthcare, where “everyone is presumed to have capacity to make health care decisions for themselves no matter what their age”; or iii) driving a two ton vehicle at 80 km/h along Highway 10.

If the provincial government believes a minor is sufficiently mentally competent to be solely responsible for their healthcare decisions by age 16 (to the surprise of a parent who calls to retrieve their child’s blood test results), why does the State treat a 17-year old accused murderer as being unable to form adult thoughts?

Despite the high profile news stories, Statistics Canada reports that “Youth Violent CSI and the Youth Non-violent CSI both declined between 1998 and 2022.” That increases were recorded for the Youth Violent CSI (+27%) and the Youth Non-violent CSI (+9%) between 2021 and 2022 may well be a combination of the effects of both Covid lockdowns and social media, as per the CBC piece above.

When Pierre Trudeau’s government passed the original Young Offenders Act legislation in 1984, it may have hoped that the number of youth court cases receiving a custodial sentence as the most serious sentence in the case would drop by an incredible 98%, as they did between 1997/1998 and 2021/2022. Changes to legislation, and a different approach by Courts, has been incredibly impactful at diverting young criminals away from incarceration.

As a former Board member of ProAction - Cops & Kids, I’ve seen first hand the positive influence that community leaders and volunteer uniformed Toronto Police Officers can have by mentoring at-risk youth across the GTA. We can never get enough of the personal touch, and the charitable bang for that organization’s buck is tremendous, but we can’t ignore that gangs appear to be gaming the judicial system.

Rather than have the murder trial of a 16 year-old default to the juvenile stream (the Youth Criminal Justice Act does permit the “worst cases” to be transferred to adult court), let’s amend the Act to have that same trial held in Adult Court — a Defence lawyer could always ask a Judge to refer a particular case to Youth Court, if the facts warranted.

The Jets and Sharks of today might be NHL hockey teams, but the murders that played out in West Side Story are more real than ever.

MRM

(this post, like all blogs, is an Opinion Piece)