Why Tougher Bail Rules Will Shrink Public Safety

Canadians are scared. They’ve been told violent crime is rising. On social media and the news, they’re seeing stories about random attacks on innocent people riding public transit, gun violence, carjackings, home invasions and assaults on police officers.

And politicians are claiming that denying people bail and keeping them in jail until their trial will make things safer. Prime Minister Mark Carney says his government will introduce bail reform legislation this week.

Sure, violent crime remains historically low, and many people are probably aware that individual stories don’t necessarily represent larger trends. But opinion polls show that Canadians still don’t feel safe. And they’re asking what police and city officials are doing about it.

In B.C., mayors across the province, including from Vancouver, Prince George and the Okanagan have called on the federal government to increase bail restrictions to tackle rising crime rates.

B.C.’s Attorney General has made a similar appeal. "It is clear federal bail laws aren’t doing enough to keep violent offenders off the street," Niki Sharma said.

Across the country, this opinion is largely shared. And some provinces are proposing extreme reforms. Ontario’s Solicitor General and Attorney General recently sent a letter to the federal ministers of justice and public safety arguing for stringent bail restrictions to manage violent crime in the province.

Among other things, the letter claims that time in pre-trial detention shouldn’t serve as “credit” toward the final sentence of a “repeat and violent offender” if that person is convicted. Offenders now receive 1.5 days credit for each day in pre-trial custody, which is subtracted from their sentence.

Under the Ontario request, any time served before a conviction would be lost — or “dead time.” That would mean the sentence could be longer than the punishment deemed proportionate to the offence.

Anthony Doob, professor emeritus of criminology at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies, told me that this proposal, like many of the bail restrictions outlined in the letter, was not only severe but also “bizarre” and out of touch with the law.

From small towns to the federal government, there’s a surprising consensus: fighting crime means restricting bail.

Before the 2025 election, the federal Liberal party promised to “move aggressively to protect victims by making bail laws stricter for violent and organized crime, home invasion, car theft, and human trafficking.”

Now they intend to introduce legislation this week that will increase bail restrictions, presumably as a response to pressure from the provinces and out of a need to protect their right flank from Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre whose populist crime-fighter rhetoric hasn’t abated.

For their part, Poilievre’s Conservatives are touting a “Three-Strikes-And-You’re-Out” legislative proposal, which borrows a once-catchy baseball metaphor used in the 1990s for severe sentencing laws in the United States that ballooned state prisons, overloaded courts and led to long-lasting problems with the criminal justice system.

The Conservatives’ “Three-Strikes-And-You’re-Out” proposal means people convicted of three “serious offences” wouldn’t be eligible for “bail, probation, parole or house arrest.”

Also, a Conservative MP has introduced a private member’s bill, Bill C-242 (the “Jail Not Bail Act”), that makes further, and often quite ruthless, restrictions on who can access bail in this country.

The Liberal and Conservative approaches to bail are different, of course, but they share the presumption that rising crime, especially violent crime, can be addressed through bail reform, reflecting what has almost become a point of national agreement.

Yet this agreement is concerning since it’s out of step with the evidence, which tells a very different story.

In a September special issue of Criminological Highlights, Doob and Tyler King, from the University of Toronto’s Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies, reviewed some of the most “high-quality criminological research” about pre-trial detention and came to the following unequivocal conclusion: “pretrial detention does not reduce overall crime in the community.”

There is, they write, no “credible evidence” that releasing someone on bail increases crime. Indeed, Canada's former justice minister and Attorney General David Lametti essentially said as much two years ago when discussing Bill C-48, the most recent legislation to introduce bail restrictions. He admitted there were “data gaps,” but added that a lack of evidence “can't stop us from acting in the meantime.”

But the available evidence should “stop us from acting” because it shows that bail restrictions could make crime worse. Nicole Myers, associate professor and graduate chair in the department of sociology at Queen's University, told me that incarceration is “criminogenic” — it makes criminal behaviour more likely.

For one thing, if someone is held in pre-trial detention, even briefly, they could lose their job, their home or their children. The connective tissue between them and their community is removed, and this disruption puts them at risk. And so, write Doob and King, “it is almost certain that crime is increased, not decreased, by laws and procedures that increase the likelihood of pretrial detention. Simply put: unnecessary pre-trial detention increases crime.”

If we really want to reduce crime, we should get more people out of pre-trial detention rather than find ways to lock them up.

That might seem like a bold claim since most Canadians believe the bail system is dysfunctional because it’s too lenient.

But, once again, the evidence says otherwise. Shakir Rahim, the director of the criminal justice program for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association says, “bail has become more, not less, difficult to obtain in Canada over the past 50 years.”

“According to Statistics Canada, 22 per cent of people in provincial and territorial prisons in 1978 were denied bail,” Rahim says. “When Bill C-75 was passed in 2019, that number had tripled to 67 per cent. Last year, it stood at 76 per cent.”

In other words, the argument that Canada’s justice system is a “revolving door” or undermined by weak “catch-and-release” policies isn’t just wrong: it’s completely backwards.

Behind those numbers, keep in mind, are accused people. An accused person is technically innocent since they haven’t yet had a trial. The presumption of innocence, which is guaranteed by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, is a bedrock principle of the Canadian criminal justice system. Citing R. v. Oakes, the Supreme Court of Canada called the presumption of innocence “a hallowed principle lying at the very heart of criminal law. . . [that] confirms our faith in humankind.”

Inevitably, some of those accused people will be the “repeat violent offenders” continually invoked in bail reform debates. But they’re very much in the minority.

Many people in pre-trial detention aren’t found guilty of anything. In fact, according to the most recent data, only 46 per cent of criminal charges resulted in convictions. So, while we should be concerned about violent crime, we should also worry about innocent people who are refused bail and forced to live in pre-trial detention with its overcrowding, poor living conditions, scarce medical care, understaffing and frequent lockdowns.

And while no evidence shows current bail laws increase crime, there is evidence showing that people who will ultimately be released without charge are forced into an experience that may have profoundly traumatic effects on them and their loved ones.

Ultimately many recommended reforms to the bail system satisfy a need for swift, retributive action but could worsen conditions known to cause crime, bloat already packed pre-trial detention facilities, clog the courts and jeopardize the constitutional rights of many Canadians.

So what can we do to reform bail in this country? 

Crime is often an effect of other social and economic determinants, so investments in mental health, housing and social services will create safer communities much better than making the criminal justice system more restrictive and retributive. Investing in social programs is a harder political sell, but it will reduce crime.

In terms of bail reform, increased support for community programs that ensure people comply with bail conditions would be cheaper and more effective than locking people up.

Reducing the number of minor matters entering the system would give the courts more time and resources to focus on more serious and risky cases. Improving case processing and access to justice, including increasing funding for Legal Aid, will help reduce the number of people in pre-trial detention and reduce the time people are detained or subject to conditions of release in the community. With more timely case processing, people who are guilty will be held accountable for their actions sooner.

Finally, and importantly, Canada needs an independent study of the bail system to ensure evidence-based criminal justice policy.

Although there’s no evidence linking bail with violent crime, mayors, prosecutors and police who are arguing that there is a problem with the bail system shouldn’t be ignored. Perhaps they’re seeing something on the ground that isn’t captured by existing studies and statistics.

According to Shakir Rahim, however, “no jurisdiction provides standardized data on the number of people who allegedly reoffend while on bail, their charges, and their release conditions.” Without the data, it’s difficult to determine whether local concerns with, say, prolific offenders are actually part of a larger trend that should be managed through new legislation.

Rahim adds that collecting standardized data “would also tell us about the many bail releases where people do not re-offend... [but] abide by their conditions. Those cases too must be taken into consideration when it comes to bail reform.”

And that’s an especially important point. There’s a kind of optical illusion to all of this. We see when someone breaks the conditions of their release. Particularly if someone on bail commits a violent crime, their story circulates on social media and the news, and politicians use it as a talking point.

But we don’t see the vast majority of people who adhere to their bail conditions.

Rather than make legislative decisions that apply to the whole country based on shocking stories of violent crime, we need laws based on evidence. So far, the evidence tells us that bail reform can only make matters worse.