Victim support services to remain intact despite court ruling: province

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This article was published 03/01/2019 (2637 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The end of victim surcharges across Canada won’t affect programs that support victims of crime in Manitoba, the provincial government says.

In a statement, a spokeswoman for Manitoba Justice said neither provincial funding nor services will be reduced in the wake of a mid-December Supreme Court decision that struck down the mandatory, court-imposed fees as unconstitutional. The surcharges were imposed on convicted criminals and were meant to go to victim-support funds in each province and territory.

Manitoba collected about $713,000 annually from the federal victim surcharge, according to data from the past three years, the spokeswoman said, and it accounted for about nine per cent of total federal and provincial victim-support funds.

On Dec. 14, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the mandatory surcharge, calling it cruel and unusual punishment for offenders who couldn’t afford to pay.

Convicted criminals who didn’t have the financial means to pay the fees — which could add up to hundreds or thousands of dollars, depending on the number of offences committed — would be subjected to debt-collection processes and threatened with jail if they didn’t pay.

The Supreme Court ruled those circumstances were unconstitutional because they created an indefinite ­extension of sentences even after offenders had served their time or fulfilled other court-imposed penalties.

“No reduction in services or funding is expected as a result of the decision, and Manitoba is committed to supporting victims and their families,” Manitoba Justice’s statement reads in part.

The victim surcharges had been mandatory for the past five years, introduced by former prime minister Stephen Harper’s government, and a bill is before the Senate that looks to restore judges’ discretion to impose the fees in certain cases.

In Manitoba, judges commonly found ways around imposing the surcharges on offenders they knew couldn’t afford to pay. Either they gave offenders lots of time to pay the fees or gave them no time to pay, immediately finding them in default and sentencing them to one day in jail, which was typically fulfilled by their appearance in court that day.

The Criminal Defence Lawyers Association of Manitoba supported the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the surcharges.

“It means that judges can be assured they’re back to just applying the law as it is and not having to feel as though they’re finding a way to skirt it,” spokesman Chris Gamby said in a previous interview.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @thatkatiemay