EDITORIAL: Two-tier sentencing makes zero sense

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Once upon a time in Canada, non-citizens who broke the law were deported. No muss, no fuss. If you can’t live within our laws and show contempt for this country, you’re gone.

All that’s changed. As Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel Garner points out, now if you’re a non-citizen and you break the law, your citizenship status will be taken into consideration — so you get a lighter sentence than someone who’s a Canadian citizen.

Rempel Garner points to a recent case in which a permanent resident was given a conditional sentence after being convicted of trying to buy sexual services from a 15-year-old. The judge justified the lighter sentence because a tougher penalty would have hindered the offender and his wife from obtaining Canadian citizenship. This is only the most recent example.

“Another non-citizen, in Canada on a visitor’s permit, was convicted twice of groping an 18-year-old woman’s genitals at a bar, yet received a discharge to avoid a permanent criminal record and to allow for an appeal of their deportation,” Rempel Garner told a news conference this week.

The practice is the result of a 2013 Supreme Court ruling in an Alberta case, where a man, Hoang Anh Pham, was given a two-year sentence for trafficking marijuana, which jeopardized his immigration status. Had he been given a sentence of two years less a day, that status would not have been impacted.

The Supreme Court ruled in his favour and said the trial and appeals judges erred in not taking this into consideration. The Supreme Court said the lesser sentence wasn’t unusual for such an offence. It said such considerations, which it called “collateral immigration consequences,” should be examined during sentencing. The court made it clear, though, that those consequences should not automatically influence the sentencing. Since then, it would appear lower court judges have ignored that caveat and have instead erred on the side of leniency to those who are non-citizens.

Citizenship in this country is a privilege. The bedrock of a civil society is respect for the law. Our courts should show a little common sense when handing down sentences. We cannot have two-tier justice — one lenient sentence for non-citizens and tougher jail time for Canadians.