It was just a few hours after a man woke in the middle of an August night to find an alleged home invader with a crossbow in his apartment that police charged the resident with using a knife to defend himself.
The home invasion happened at 3:20 on the morning of Aug. 18, in Lindsay, Ont. At around 1 p.m, the Kawartha Lakes Police Service posted a news release announcing that the apartment resident had been charged with aggravated assault and assault with a weapon. (The alleged invader, too, was charged with various offences.)
Trust us, says the Kawartha police chief, there’s more to it, and the right to self-defence is not unlimited. True enough, but why rush to a decision to charge? How thorough can an investigation be in such a short time? How much time to assess, to reflect, to consider?
This is not just about one incident and one police service. A similar pattern has been found over and over again. And that’s despite a law developed by the Conservative government of Stephen Harper in 2012 that was supposed to make clear that reasonable acts of self-defence are permissible.
In at least four hair-raising cases, when the invaded turned the tables on the invader, they faced serious charges for doing so, only to have to prosecutors withdraw the charges.
The belief in the right to self-defence – and the legal limits of a reasonable response
In a 2023 case in Milton, Ont., several home invaders ran into a man with a legally registered firearm, who shot one of them dead. When police arrived, they immediately charged him with second-degree murder, according to his lawyer Jag Virk. A prosecutor withdrew the charge five months later. In another case it was two years before second-degree murder charges were withdrawn.
A presumption seems to have taken hold among some police services that people who use serious or lethal force in defending themselves and their family should be charged, and that prosecutors and courts can then deal with it.
Police seem to prefer the path of least resistance – and to recommend residents take that path, too. A Toronto police officer suggested residents could avoid a confrontation by leaving their car keys just inside their front door. This week, after a man in York Region, on Toronto’s northern border, was shot dead in front of his children during a home invasion, the region’s police chief said the best defence in most such cases is to comply.
Trust the home invader with a crossbow or a gun? The police seem woefully out of touch with communities increasingly feeling abandoned by the authorities.
There is something seriously wrong here. The people who have faced armed intruders are being forced to confront yet another terrifying foe, the state, and to bear the stress of a possible jail sentence, and the expense of hiring a lawyer. It borders on the abusive when charges are laid and withdrawn again and again.
Coyne: Poilievre’s anything goes approach to self-defence is even more extreme than U.S. law
A scenario in which the accused resident in Lindsay went too far is possible, of course. We don’t want people to shoot those who push their way in the front door asking for a boost for their friend’s car – the scenario, more or less, from a self-defence case from the 1980s in Ontario that ended, justifiably, in a manslaughter conviction. We don’t want homes to become morality- or law-free zones, as law professor Michael Plaxton put it. We want, in short, for Canada to remain Canada.
Yet the starting point surely is that the law that applies in home invasions is the law of human necessity, that urgent need human beings have to protect themselves and their loved ones from severe danger, when flight is not possible.
In that light, Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre wants a new law centred on a presumption that people defending their homes and families against a threat acted reasonably. The idea hasn’t been fleshed out in a draft bill, so it’s hard to assess. Mr. Poilievre was a member of the government that carefully drafted the 2012 law. Reasonableness in all the circumstances is the standard it sets.
Reasonableness includes that the force was no more than necessary, and proportionate to the threat. The courts have made clear a person under threat cannot “weigh to a nicety” how much force is necessary or proportional. The law may or may not need a tweak, but it would be good if the police remembered that guidance. Instead they are charging precipitously, leaving considerations of justice and the self-defence law for others to work out, someday.
That, in a word, is unreasonable.