GUNTER: Poilievre's plan to impose true life sentences a legitimate use of notwithstanding clause

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The pearl clutchers are at it again.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre promised Monday that, if elected, he and his government would use the Constitution’s notwithstanding clause to allow people who commit multiple murders to be imprisoned for life without possibility of parole.

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At present, the longest sentence a Canadian murderer can receive is 25 years without parole, no matter how many victims he or she has killed.

A long line of activists, academics and analysts have lined up to condemn the idea as controversial, if not dangerous.

What is the problem with Poilievre’s plan? Is it really so atrocious to deny someone who has taken multiple lives the chance ever to be free gain? His or her victims will never again see the light of day.

The use of the notwithstanding clause has become an issue in criminal sentencing because of the 2017 Quebec City mosque shooting.

For killing six worshippers and wounding five more, convicted murderer Alexandre Bissonnette was sentenced to 40 years in jail without possibility of parole. (At the time, judges were allowed to string together two or more “consecutive” sentences.)

Bissonnette appealed and in 2022 the Supreme Court deemed 40 years without parole to be a violation of his Charter right against cruel and unusual punishment.

Poilievre is merely promising to use an existing part of the Charter — Sec. 33 — to override judges in extreme cases such as Bissonnette’s.

Why shouldn’t life have meant life (with no chance for parole) for Robert Pickton, the Pig Farm Killer, who murdered as many as 49 women in B.C.? Or for Clifford Olson, who abducted, assaulted and killed 11 children in B.C. in the 1980s? Or Paul Bernado, who sexually tortured and murdered three young women in Ontario in the late 1980s?

Bernardo was sentenced to 25 years and declared a dangerous offender, which means he will likely never be released, anyway. But his crimes were so heinous that if a judge believes Bernardo should spend the rest of his life behind bars, that should be allowed.

Is our justice system so wed to the idea that even the evilest killers deserve a chance at rehabilitation that its wardens, judges and theorists cannot see that some crimes are so brutal, the only fit punishment is a life of incarceration until the convict’s natural death?

The notwithstanding clause was put into the 1982 Constitution specifically for circumstances such as this — where the people’s elected representatives felt a judicial decision on the Charter went too far.

And remember, we’re not talking here about taking away someone’s freedom of expression or their right to be treated equally regardless of race, gender or orientation.

Poilievre has promised to take the freedom of the worst of the worst, especially those who continue to demonstrate they are a threat to society.

To this point, 43 years after the Charter became law, no federal government has invoked Sec. 33.

And here’s where the pearl clutchers come in. In this and every previous incidence in which a federal government has contemplated using the notwithstanding clause because one of its laws might violate the Charter, the gasps from rights groups, academics and activists have been deafening.

Such a move will undermine the Charter, the argument goes. It will weaken Charter protections for all of our rights.

(Strange, I don’t recall most of those same “experts” complaining about the way the Trudeau government suspended every Canadian’s civil rights just to stop an encampment of truckers in downtown Ottawa in 2022.)

Notwithstanding is a legitimate part of the Constitution. It was put there by its authors deliberately to give an elected provincial or federal government the authority to override judicial expansion of the Charter and reassert the dominance of provincial legislatures and Parliament.