Kinew should act on his outrage, enhance laws

Premier Wab Kinew’s reaction to a Supreme Court of Canada decision on mandatory minimum sentences for child abuse images was one of the most forceful statements a Canadian premier has offered in years.

He said the offender should be “buried under the prison” and placed in the general population rather than protected. Many Manitobans likely agreed.

But Kinew’s remarks immediately raise a deeper question: if he truly believes the system is failing this badly, why is he speaking as though he has no power to change it? He is not an outsider shouting at the courts. He is the premier. There are laws that can change these outcomes, and they are his to rewrite.

Right now, Manitoba’s tools are surprisingly limited. When someone is labelled a “high-risk sexual offender,” police may issue a public bulletin with the person’s name and photograph.

These warnings matter, but they apply only to a tiny fraction of offenders. Most people convicted of possessing or distributing child sexual abuse images never appear in a public notice at all.

They return to the community with full privacy protections, even though they participated in crimes involving children who will never fully recover.

Part of the reason Canada’s system is so restricted is that the Supreme Court has struck down stricter approaches. In R. v. Ndhlovu (2022), the court ruled that automatic registration violated the Charter. In R. v. Redman (2023), it struck down mandatory lifetime listings.

Together, these decisions weakened the Sex Offender Information Registration Act and left Canada with one of the mildest sex-offender-registration regimes in the developed world.

Yet this is precisely where the premier’s rhetoric meets the limits of his action. He knows the Supreme Court has narrowed what legislatures can do. He also knows there is a constitutional tool that allows governments to override those limits for a period of time: the notwithstanding clause.

If Kinew truly believes that offenders in these cases should be, in his own words, “buried under the prison,” then nothing prevents him from ensuring they are at least buried in the consequences of their crimes for the rest of their lives.

He could introduce a Manitoba-specific sex-offender registration system, restore automatic listings for the most serious offences, expand public-safety notifications, or even create a more transparent registry. None of these measures are impossible. They simply require political will and a willingness to use the constitutional tools available to him, including the notwithstanding clause.

This is where the comparison to other jurisdictions becomes unavoidable. During the early days of the pandemic I found myself occupying my time with reruns of Dateline NBC’s To Catch a Predator. What struck me wasn’t just the stings themselves but what happened afterward.

In the United States, nearly every man caught in those operations is still, to this day, on a state-level sex-offender registry. These are public, searchable registries operated by individual states, not the federal government.

In many states, registrants remain listed for life. Their names, photographs, addresses and sometimes employers are available to any member of the public.

America’s approach is far from perfect, and Canada cannot copy it wholesale. But its existence shows what it looks like when the justice system treats crimes against children as crimes with lifelong consequences.

Here, the victims carry the trauma for life. The offenders often do not.

Kinew’s anger is understandable. But outrage by itself does not strengthen sentencing. It does not expand supervision. It does not create new public-safety tools. And unless the premier is prepared to legislate, even boldly, his words risk becoming another moment of emotional politics without real change.

Manitobans deserve a justice system that reflects the severity of these crimes. If Premier Kinew believes that people who exploit children should be “buried under the prison,” then he should be willing to introduce laws that reflect that conviction, even if it means using the notwithstanding clause.

The question now is simple: will the premier turn outrage into action, or will this moment pass with nothing more than strong words?

Kenneth Ingram is a musician, educator and historian whose favourite place to be is right at home in West Kildonan.