Let’s legalize self-defence

Ten Ideas for 2025 - post #3

Night after night, urban Canadians experience different forms of home invasion.

In York Region, for example, they’re up 116% since 2021. Is that the aftermath of Covid? Cost of living pressures pushing otherwise law-abiding parents to steal? A hot stolen car market in Nigeria? Brazen criminals who discovered how easy it is to come here from, say, Chile on a longer-than-needed six month Visitor’s Visa?

While you can subscribe to a home alarm monitoring service, install cameras, and buy protective film for your front door window, what you cannot do is legally PLAN to defend yourself in a way that looks pre-meditated. Not with a baseball bat, kitchen knife, nor with a licenced and safely-stored legal hunting rifle. An inconvenient rule of the Nanny State given the trend (as depicted by the team at Macrotrends - Canadian crime rate/capita):

There’s something very quaint about the government relying on the kindness of the criminal gang that’s just broken into your home. Now that many are using smuggled handguns to keep us all in line during the process, it may well be too late to amend the Criminal Code to correct this imbalance — even unwise.

According to a recent Fraser Institute study, “Canada’s violent crime rate was 14.0% higher than the U.S. in 2022, and rising; property crime rate 27.5% higher.” Lax sentencing guidelines might account for some of that increase following 2014. What I’ll call the loophole for >16s in the Young Offenders Act can be closed (more on that tomorrow), and CBSA can do much better at fending the travelling criminals off at the Canadian border.

But many families have come to believe that it’s become necessary to think about self-defence strategies within their home.

Bill C-26 (S.C. 2012 c. 9) introduced amendments to Canada’s self-defence laws some years ago, but this sticky concept was retained:

Ability to retreat or to respond by means other than the commission of an offence has been held by Canadian courts to be a relevant factor to a self-defence claim, but not a determinative requirement.

Today, the Crown Attorney has the option (Editors note: duty?) to lay assault or manslaughter charges if, rather than planning to “retreat” to your bedroom clothes closet, you put a baseball bat by the front door to intentionally wield in self-defence during a future home invasion. A jury might quickly dismiss the charges after an expensive and time-consuming trial, but why should you have to go through that hassle?

Consider this advice from the Criminal Defence law firm Alberta Legal:

Just because you were defending yourself does not give you free rein to break the law, use a firearm or lethal force, legally kill, or use a defence knife. Even in self-defence, you can be charged with assault or manslaughter.

Therefore, one must be calculated in a situation where they have to use self-defence. Ideally, there is no self-defence knife involved, no pepper spray, no possession of a firearm, and nothing of that sort. Consider alternate routes to handle a matter.

This may mean calling the police and waiting for them to provide protection or avoiding a fight altogether and simply allowing what is happening to occur. This applies if you have criminals in your home wanting money and/or situations where no one’s life or health is at risk.

If there is a physical altercation, be sure to restrain your force when you realize you have subdued the threat.

Ironically, a drywaller can walk to lunch at Yonge and Sheppard with a five inch knife attached to their belt, provided it’s not concealed, and — in the moment — legally defend themself from a mugging with that knife.

But there’s to be no baseball bat or shielded kitchen knife under your bed in the event your home is invaded.

Who are we protecting?

MRM

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

(photo credit: Hunter, New York, 1951 by Irving Penn)