New federal legislation offers little hope on its own of neutralizing violent repeat offenders — it’s up to the provinces to keep tabs.
Bill C-48 might also conceivably have made a difference to Carolann Robillard and her 11-year-old daughter Sara, whom 33-year-old Muorater Arkangelo Mashar stabbed to death outside Crawford Plains School in Edmonton earlier this month — a purely random act of savagery, according to police. No surprise to anyone: Mashar had been out on bail, for just 18 days.
Mashar’s record includes beating up a 12-year-old boy on the Edmonton LRT, which netted him a nine-month sentence; bear-spraying a random LRT passenger, which was only worth 80 days; and stabbing a man waiting for a bus in the back, puncturing his aorta and nearly killing him, which landed Mashar a not-so-whopping four years. Mashar had violently attacked at least two retail employees.
To the layman’s eye, there is nothing in the existing statutory bail conditions that would have prevented a judge from ordering Mashar detained pending trial. And there isn’t anything in the proposed new conditions to suggest every live grenade out there will henceforth be defused — and that’s assuming Blll C-48 is actually constitutional.Article content
But in many high-profile cases, it’s clear the alleged offender had simply been in the wind. The most gruesome in recent memory might be the case of Jordan O’Brien-Tobin, who is accused of fatally stabbing 16-year-old Gabriel Magalhaes on a Toronto subway station platform earlier this year.
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