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Notes -
Canadian judges routinely give lighter sentences to immigrants than citizens for the same crimes. This started in 2013, when an immigrant was convicted and sentenced to 2 years for drug trafficking, and successfully argued that it should be two years less a day to avoid extra immigration consequences. Now, a sex offender gets discharged instead of sentenced after being found guilty.
From another case:
To which I respond: Good. The tests for citizenship, sponsorship, and professional licenses are supposed to exclude sex offenders, and doing so by looking at criminal convictions and sentence length should be a reliable standard. Instead, the judge decided he didn't like what they would do with accurate reports, so he gave a different answer instead.
If I was in charge of the professional licensing body or citizenship and immigration, that would piss me off to no end. I want to know if the accused's conduct was 90-days-of-prison bad, or not that bad. Given that information, I would choose to kick them out (or not). Instead, the judge is taking that out of my hands by reporting whether it's 90-days-of-prison-and-loss-of-licence-and-deportation-and-etc. bad or not. If the judge doesn't share my opinion on the value of a sex-offender-free workplace (and there's no indication that he does), then I can't trust that he summed it up properly.
Also: The Onion hits different 14 years later: Being tried as a black man would be great given how pervasive sentencing adjustments are.
It is clearly, completely and permanently over for Canada. It’s interesting that there was a huge drama in Britain a few months ago over the possibility that certain kinds of sentencing impact reports (which were non-binding but could theoretically play on the emotions of a judge) would be granted automatically for non-whites, LGBT and women but not automatically for straight white men. The (Labour) government threatened to abolish the commission that determines this kind of thing and then forced them into repealing that guidance.
Meanwhile Canada has been officially and openly granting huge sentence reductions on the basis of race for years. The left just won another majority. Even the Canadian right is less anti-immigration than Keir Starmer. Canada’s constitutional system and political deadlock make major reform of human rights law that would allow for mass deportations (which would require packing the Supreme Court, which has rules about who can be elevated that limit it to the almost entirely progressive judiciary) effectively impossible.
Canada and Belgium are the two western countries that are furthest gone with regards to mass immigration, and the two for which I would argue recovery is categorically impossible1, without any likely or reasonably viable routes. Both share the misfortune of having developed as multi-national states with little shared loyalty or national character, making them perhaps uniquely incapable of articulating any kind of anti-immigration position. Maybe the numbers will wane a little, but nobody already there (now getting citizenship and permanent residency by the hundreds of thousands a year) is going home.
1 it is probably also over in The Netherlands, England and Wales, Ireland and Sweden. Weird and unpredictable things will happen in France, although I think hardcore republican assimilationism is more likely than remigration. I think the far right will come to power in Germany, Austria or both. Spain and Portugal will become Latin American countries with large African diasporas. The rest is harder to predict.
Small comfort lies in that it was not in fact a majority -- nobody else is keen to force an election at the moment, and Carney is vulnerable on way too many fronts to easily juggle.
Unless he's a lot more competent than he looks, I give him 18 months.
We're probably still fucked (2019 was our "let's roll" moment, and we... did not roll) but there's still faint hope.
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