After weeks of avoiding public safety issues, Liberal Leader Mark Carney unveiled his anti-crime platform today, but it is receiving widespread criticism and ridicule — as it includes laws that are already on the books.
“Today, Mark Carney announced his action plan to bring criminal gangs to justice, stop illegal guns and drugs from flowing over the U.S. border, and build safer communities here at home,” his campaign website announced on Thursday.
However, many of the proposals laid out in his “plan” already exist under Canadian law, demonstrating a profound lack of understanding of how laws and the Criminal Code are enforced.
For example, Carney wrote in an X post early Thursday morning:
“Someone who’s been convicted of violent offences — especially intimate partner violence — should not be allowed to own a gun. My government will automatically revoke their licences.”
The post was quickly recommended for a “community note” by users of the social media platform X as Carney’s proposal belies the fact such a law already exists.
In cases of domestic or “intimate partner violence,” there is already a mandatory prohibition order on the possession or ownership of guns “where a person is convicted of an indictable offence in the commission of which violence was used, threatened or attempted against the person’s intimate partner.”
In addition to proposing laws that are already on the books, the Carney Liberal crime platform doubles down on pre-existing programs that are already in place and, moreover, have already been widely criticized for their impracticality and ineffectiveness.
Take Carney’s proposal to “reinvigorate the implementation of an efficient gun-buyback program for assault-style firearms,” as an example.
This policy would be, presumably, an addition to the pre-existing Liberal ‘gun buyback’ program that has been long derided—even by strict gun-control lobbying groups— and stymied by several years of delay, widespread controversy, and virtually no gun confiscations at all, despite receiving millions of dollars in taxpayer funding.
Most of Carney’s other proposals offer little more than additional funding to government agencies, such as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police or the Public Prosecution Services of Canada.
However, this additional funding does not include any subsequent concrete plans on how to make the agencies more effective in their abilities to combat or prosecute crime.
Perhaps most perplexingly, Carney offered a proposal to make “bail laws stricter,” even though Carney’s Liberal Party is responsible for multiple pieces of legislation that intended to do precisely the opposite under the guise of “ending systemic racism.”
Liberal laws like Bill C-5 and Bill C-75 have been particularly controversial and unpopular amongst prosecutors and policing associations alike. Both pieces of legislation require courts to adopt a “principle of restraint” when sentencing, which often means releasing criminals—sometimes violent re-offenders—expeditiously and “under the least onerous conditions” possible.
The proposal to double-down on existing programs that have proved ineffective whilst not proposing to take a second look at Liberal legislation that has proved problematic for the courts is especially confounding when you consider violent crime, and gun crime in particular, have both increased by double-digits under the Liberal government according to Statistics Canada.
In contrast to Carney’s plan, Carney’s main rival in the upcoming federal election—Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre—has promised to repeal legislation that requires more leniency by the courts.
“This crime wave was no accident,” said Poilievre in a statement made on Wednesday.
“The Liberals introduced radical catch-and-release policies like Bill C-5, which allows some of the worst offenders to serve their sentences at home, and Bill C-75, which lets rampant criminals go free within hours of their arrest.”