Western Standard - May 19, 2022


EXCLUSIVE： Charest announces policies to build safer communities.

Topics
guns and crimes
Mentioned
Corey Sherey Fentanyl
EXCLUSIVE： One on one conversation about Aitchison's campaign to lead the CPC. Triggered： Let the UCP leadership race begin

Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

185.05

Word count

2,025

Sentence count

123

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we discuss the recent shooting death of a mother of five in Calgary and the need for tougher sentences for repeat offenders. We also discuss the issue of illegal handguns and gang involvement in violent crime in Canada.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Thank you very much for coming back to the show, Mr. Sherey. I saw the release this morning with
00:00:05.000 you putting out your policy on justice issues, and it was just quite the timing. I don't know
00:00:11.000 if you've been watching Calgary Issues much lately, but we've had a lot of crime issues
00:00:15.520 going on and a recent event where a mother of five was unfortunately killed in an incident
00:00:21.320 with a couple of cars that had been chasing each other and shots were fired. And it turns
00:00:25.280 out that the suspect had been charged with six previous attempted murders, gangland involvement.
00:00:32.980 He'd played it down, got recently released, and now we've found ourselves with a woman 0.55
00:00:39.780 who's lost her life and left five children without a mother. So to see the timing on with
00:00:45.860 where your release is going, I guess, on justice reform and really targeting the violent crimes
00:00:49.560 and the inappropriate firearms use, I just wanted to get you on to expand on that because
00:00:54.020 this race really hasn't gone into the justice system yet, and it's a very important one.
00:00:59.200 And Corey, what you're describing, which is a terrible tragedy in Calgary, is also happening
00:01:05.540 in other cities, including Montreal, where in the last few days we've had shootings in broad
00:01:11.500 daylight and murders, gang crime. And Toronto, of course, is also another city that's under
00:01:19.060 pressure and more of a reason to be very firm on crime. And I would bring back an opportunity
00:01:25.300 for Crown prosecutors to ask for minimum sentences on gun crimes. I would also increase sentences
00:01:32.280 for those who assault police officers or first responders, firemen, or those who are healthcare
00:01:39.580 workers or social workers. Also stronger sentences on hate crimes. And a special RCMP unit to deal
00:01:46.960 with this issue of all these illegal handguns coming into Canada. That's the real issue on guns in Canada.
00:01:53.840 It's these handguns that are coming in from the United States and to stop that as much as possible.
00:02:00.240 Also more policing on transit routes because we've had incidents there. But Canada needs to get up its
00:02:08.400 game on security in all the cities of Canada, including Calgary.
00:02:12.020 Well, and that's a good conservative approach. And that's where some people get a lot of concern,
00:02:16.740 you know, with the long guns. People who hunt or target shoot and things like that often feel like
00:02:20.740 we're being, you know, picked on or targeted in these. You know, statistically, that's not where
00:02:26.660 the issues are coming from. As you said, it's predominantly illegal handguns or people with gang
00:02:31.540 involvement where these issues are happening. And we're not going to address them properly if we don't
00:02:34.900 target them. And, Corey, I am a hunter, you know, and I know hunters well. I know farmers also well
00:02:44.740 enough to tell you that if we have limited resources, which we always do. I mean, it's never been
00:02:50.100 unlimited. But all the energy and money and resources that we have should be put into fighting crime in
00:02:56.980 cities and these gangs and these organized crime in cities who are using handguns. And handguns that are
00:03:03.940 coming in from the United States. That's where the effort needs to be. That's where the threat is. 0.99
00:03:08.500 And it breaks my heart to see that this what happened in Calgary over the last few days.
00:03:15.540 But I'm sorry to report the same kind of things and crimes are happening in Montreal, which used to
00:03:22.340 be, you know, Montreal used to say, oh, we're not Toronto and we don't have a crime problem. Well,
00:03:26.820 you know what? They do now. And so we need to get serious about this and have tougher sentences
00:03:33.700 and be very firm in dealing with the handguns, illegal handguns.
00:03:37.060 Well, that's it. And it's frustrating. As I said, we see that these are people that we've had in
00:03:41.300 custody that have already indicated that they're quite dangerous individuals, yet somehow we seem
00:03:45.780 lapsed. But then just to play devil's advocate, mandatory minimums can be pretty dicey in the
00:03:50.820 justice system and often don't withstand court challenges down the road. Can legislation be crafted
00:03:56.660 that would be able to withstand those sorts of challenges if it came about?
00:03:59.460 I think the way of dealing with that, Corey, is what we're proposing to make it optional for Crown
00:04:04.580 attorneys to either press that charge or not press that charge. Now, that means that they have to
00:04:09.860 think this through. They have to justify it. They have to invoke the special circumstances that would
00:04:16.180 justify them laying a charge that for a minimum sentence, which I think will meet the test of a
00:04:23.380 charter challenge that will inevitably come down the road. The problem in the previous format is that
00:04:28.740 the courts looked at this and said, well, you just can't blanket charges in the same way on everybody
00:04:34.340 in every circumstances. Okay. So we listened to what they have to say. This is an approach that
00:04:39.860 will give the Crown attorneys, though, real tools to work with so that we are dealing with repeat
00:04:45.780 offenders and make sure that we keep them behind bars and keep our communities secure.
00:04:50.180 And I didn't see it necessarily in that release, but it's all justice related. It's one of a larger
00:04:55.940 problems. You mentioned transit and emergency workers and people who put themselves at a lot of
00:05:01.540 risk. Often, it's connected with, you know, we've got a very bad opioid problem and addiction
00:05:06.500 epidemic going on. I mean, that's part of what brings the gangs, of course, too. When they see a means
00:05:11.060 of making money, unfortunately, the unprincipled and organized crime always follows. Are there measures
00:05:17.860 perhaps to try and see how we could address that aspect of things? I mean, if it's not profitable for
00:05:23.140 organized crime, that could reduce some of the impacts. It's a big, complicated issue, I know.
00:05:28.180 Well, the opioid crisis in the country right now is a terrible tragedy also. It's more concentrated,
00:05:34.500 actually, in British Columbia than what we've seen in Eastern Canada. And I guess that means the
00:05:38.820 droops, the drug roots, are probably more organized in certain parts of the country than they are in
00:05:45.620 other places. Fentanyl. And these are drugs that are often coming in from Asia and other places. That means
00:05:51.460 much tighter border controls and policing to make sure that these drugs don't come in,
00:05:58.420 and then treating those who are victims of opioid abuse and who are victims to that. We also need to
00:06:05.620 find ways to help them out so that they can kick their addiction and return to some normalcy in their
00:06:12.260 own lives. So hate-motivated crimes you had in there as well, which again, you know,
00:06:19.140 as with any, it's an odious thing. So you're not talking about bringing new laws on the books,
00:06:24.420 though? Your policy is just talking about increasing the potential sentences for that sort of crime?
00:06:28.820 Well, actually, Corey, it would demand that we legislate. If we want to bring in legislation,
00:06:34.500 if we want to have the ability to give Crown attorneys an option to lay down minimum sentencing,
00:06:40.100 then we have to bring in legislation. The same would be true for tougher sentences for those
00:06:45.940 who attack or who aggress either police officers or firemen or first responders or nurses or health
00:06:55.380 caregivers or even social workers. So yes, we would have to bring in legislation. I'm hoping that the
00:07:01.140 other opposition parties would, because we'll be in government at that point, would cooperate to make
00:07:06.820 this happen as rapidly as possible. So if we were to increase incarceration times for people
00:07:14.180 upon conviction, quite often we have a lot of our correctional facilities are already full or
00:07:18.980 overloaded. I imagine that would have to be coupled with some sort of means of either
00:07:22.660 bringing up space or increasing space in our facilities to take in more people for longer.
00:07:27.220 Well, we have to look at that on a regular basis on how we're organized. Do we have to expand space?
00:07:34.260 If we hopefully we, you know, we're not in a world in which we're actually just jailing more people
00:07:40.660 because there's more crime. But if we have to do that, we'll do that. But we'll do it on a needs basis.
00:07:46.740 And we'll do it in a context where we're not trying to jail more people. I mean, let's be clear.
00:07:52.500 That's not the idea. The idea is to deal with criminals and hardened criminals who are a threat to our
00:07:58.580 community and make sure that we always observe the cardinal rule, Corey. And the cardinal rule is
00:08:05.540 security of our communities first and foremost. Everything else comes second. And that's the way
00:08:14.900 that my government would approach this. Yeah. Well, and it's likewise, I think most
00:08:19.300 people with common sense realize we don't want to pack our prisons full of car thieves over extended
00:08:23.380 long sentences, though, I mean, it's still a crime. It's of concern we want to get the people who've
00:08:28.180 been committing violent crimes and seeing a pattern of that. I think the California three strikes law
00:08:32.340 when they tried that some years ago failed dramatically because of that, because people
00:08:35.060 with very minor offenses found themselves with very long sentences, and then they didn't have space
00:08:39.380 for the very serious offenders when the time came. But it's just, you know, asking because,
00:08:43.140 of course, when you do justice reform, it has a ripple effect all the way around throughout
00:08:46.260 the entire system. And being smart about it means that you have to trust the judgment of the
00:08:50.980 Crown attorneys who are laying these charges, who have the information about individuals,
00:08:54.900 about their prior convictions, about their behavior, about their releases,
00:08:59.460 and who are in the best position to say, well, this is a person who deserves a minimum sentence
00:09:04.580 because they obviously they're not getting the message and we need to protect our communities.
00:09:08.980 So if we trust that we can trust the right people to make those calls, we just need to give them the
00:09:13.220 tools so that they can actually do the right thing. Sure. And likewise, as you said, you know,
00:09:19.060 setting up a police task force to target the smuggled firearms and handguns in particular,
00:09:24.100 would there perhaps be examining giving more resources to Canada Border Services Agency as
00:09:28.420 well? I mean, they're on the front line trying to prevent that. Definitely. Canada Border Services
00:09:32.820 is a key role to play and to allow them to do the work they need to do to be able to find these
00:09:40.820 firearms where they come in or patrol in areas that are vulnerable. We have a very long undefended border
00:09:46.340 with the United States. And that means there's a lot of ways for criminals to be able to make
00:09:52.660 their way through. And so the Border Services have a key role to play in this respect.
00:09:59.540 Great. Well, I guess, you know, it's a big issue. I'm just happy to see it come up. Crime and justice
00:10:04.980 have always been big ones with me and we often don't hear about them. They don't hit the top of the
00:10:08.980 polls with the public often at election time. It seems to be more like incident by incident when we get
00:10:13.300 upset with it. But we've always got to look at these things. So hopefully the other candidates
00:10:18.820 will respond now that you've broached the issue. It's important to hear from everybody on it. And
00:10:23.380 I appreciate where you're coming from with it. Is there more you'd like to add before I let you go?
00:10:27.380 Well, conservatives are about law and order. This is a core value of the conservative party and one
00:10:34.260 that I believe in. So this policy is about our value of respecting law and order and the role of law.
00:10:41.300 Thank you, Corey. Great. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Sherey. And well, we look forward to
00:10:46.180 watching and hopefully speaking again as the campaign continues to unfold.
00:10:49.380 Thank you. Talk to you soon. Bye bye.