A statue of Lady Justice, inspired by the Roman goddess Justitia, a symbol of law and fairness, stands at the Attorney General’s Office in Jakarta on March 6, 2025. (Photo by Yasuyoshi CHIBA / AFP)
News Analysis
Lady Justice has been depicted as blindfolded for centuries—an implicit promise not to judge a person by immutable factors such as skin colour. In Canada, that may be changing, as courts increasingly consider a defendant’s race when determining punishment.
Rulings of recent years highlight the trend: A B.C. judge earlier this year ruled that a black man who stabbed his girlfriend to death will become eligible for parole in 12 years in part because of “systemic anti-Black racism.” A man of Filipino heritage convicted of a hit-and-run in Ontario received a conditional sentence in 2024 in part because of reports of racism, including classmates making “slanted-eye” gestures at him as a child. And a hashish trafficker in Quebec had his sentence cut by a third last year, at least partly because he descended from slaves.
This shift reflects changes brought in by the Trudeau government, and the rapid spread in Canada of Impact of Race and Culture Assessments (IRCAs)—reports that detail how factors such as race and social marginalization may have shaped an offender’s life. Backed by millions of dollars in federal funding since 2021, their growing use is prompting debate over whether they promote fairness in sentencing or undermine the principle of equal treatment under the law.
An IRCA was at play, for example, in a court decision last month that lightened the sentence of Everton Javaun Downey, convicted of killing his girlfriend by stabbing her 15 times in a stairwell at a shopping centre in Burnaby, B.C. Downey was sentenced to life in prison, but B.C. Supreme Court Associate Chief Justice Heather Holmes rejected the Crown’s suggestion of no possibility of parole for at least 15 years, cutting it to 12 years.
The decision cited Downey’s IRCA as recording “early exposure to violence, chronic instability, poverty, systemic anti-Black racism, and untreated mental health symptoms, such as hypervigilance, that may be trauma related.” The document said he experienced “disconnection and isolation” after moving from “predominantly Black and racially diverse neighbourhoods” in Toronto to B.C., a province with “a much smaller Black population.”
Another high-profile case involved Nigeria-born Omogbolahan Jegede, found guilty of violently assaulting two women in residences at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, in 2022 and 2023.
His two-year prison sentence “would have been much higher,” wrote Nova Scotia Supreme Court judge Frank Hoskins, had it not been for the IRCA, which said Jegede “was feeling intense pressure around the time of the assaults and did not have culturally appropriate support to turn to.”
IRCAs have existed for specific purposes since around 2014 in Nova Scotia, but they started spreading in 2021 after the case of Rakeem Anderson, a black man from the province. Anderson was stopped by police at a random vehicle checkpoint and found to have a loaded .22 calibre revolver tucked into his waistband. Nova Scotia Court of Appeal Justice Anne S. Derrick found that it “may amount to an error of law” for a judge to not look into the “systemic and background factors detailed in an IRCA or otherwise raised in the sentencing of an African Nova Scotian offender.”
The federal government of then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau responded by pushing for an expansion of IRCAs nationwide—a strategy that applied racial sentencing reports to all non-white ethnic minorities.
The government announced in August 2021 that it would spend $6.64 million over five years, followed by $1.6 million a year on an ongoing basis, to make IRCAs “a part of the criminal justice system across the country.” The funding would develop training curricula for IRCA writers, teach criminal defence lawyers, Crown prosecutors, and judges about IRCAs, and draft IRCA reports for “eligible racialized accused Canadians.”
At the time, Ottawa described IRCAs as a tool that can ensure “fair and equal access to justice for Black and racialized Canadians.” The word “racialized” is equated with “people who are not white” in the government’s 2023 anti-racism lexicon.
David Lametti, who was minister of justice when IRCA funding was announced, said that “helping courts consider the impact of race and cultural heritage on a racialized offender’s life trajectory during sentencing” would “help eliminate systemic barriers in our criminal justice system for Black and racialized Canadians.”
The government’s main goal was to counteract the “overrepresentation of Black and other racialized Canadians in the justice system.”
Besides IRCAs, the Trudeau government introduced Bill C-5, which repealed mandatory minimum sentences for gun offences “associated with the overincarceration of Indigenous peoples as well as Black and marginalized Canadians.”
According to a 2022 report from the justice department, black Canadians are heavily overrepresented in the criminal justice system. Black people, the report found, represented only 4 percent of the nation’s population but 9 percent of all offenders under federal jurisdiction.
In the Trudeau government’s 2024 budget, the federal government further expanded funding for IRCAs, allocating an additional $8 million over five years “to allow for the expansion in IRCA implementation across Canada and to maintain current training projects for IRCA assessors and justice system professionals.”
IRCAs represent a significant expansion in race-based sentencing, which in Canada had been limited to indigenous people in the form of Gladue reports.
Section 718.2(e) of Canada’s Criminal Code, added by Parliament in 1995, stipulates that courts must consider “all available sanctions, other than imprisonment” for all offenders, and must pay “particular attention to the circumstances of Aboriginal offenders.”
R. v. Gladue in 1999 was the first Supreme Court of Canada decision to consider this provision of the Criminal Code. Since then, sentencing judges have directed that pre-sentencing reports be prepared for indigenous people.
These reports, which have become known as “Gladue reports,” examine background information about the indigenous person, such as substance or mental health issues, and whether members of their family have had experience with the residential school system.
Gladue reports only apply to the roughly 5 percent of Canada’s population that is indigenous, but IRCAs are much broader. They can be used not only in cases involving black Canadians, but also for all “racialized” Canadians.
According to the most recent Census data, around one in four people in Canada are what the federal government refers to as “racialized.”
IRCAs go beyond incidents of outright discrimination to encompass “indirect” or even assumed racism.
In one case in 2024, an Ontario judge considered an IRCA for a Canadian-born man of Filipino heritage found guilty of a vehicular hit-and-run. The report delved into “racialized experiences living in a predominantly white rural community, cultural obligations that children of immigrants bear to succeed in Canada, and encounters with law enforcement.”
The IRCA report in this case is 27 pages long and goes into granular detail about the man’s upbringing as a young boy in Alliston, a small Ontario town the report notes was 96.6 percent white when his family moved there from Toronto.
Incidents of racism described in the report include being “mistaken for Chinese,” classmates teasing him with “slanted-eye gestures,” and being selected for random checks at the Canada-U.S. border.
The judge in this case ruled that the court “can and should consider the existence of anti-Asian racism in Canada” and its impact on the offender “in analyzing his moral culpability for the purpose of sentencing.”
The IRCA report argues there are heavy “family expectations and obligations” among Filipinos in Canada, citing a situation where the offender’s father was angered that his son did not make the honour roll. The judge echoed this, saying “cultural and familial pressure to succeed” was likely one of the factors that influenced the offender to leave the scene of the accident.
The offender was given a conditional sentence.
Pushback
Not all provinces are receptive to the federal government’s aim to incorporate racial assessments into the justice system.
Quebec has refused all federal funding offered to the province to boost IRCAs.
While acknowledging the existence of racism, Premier Francois Legault has repeatedly denied that there is “systemic racism” in his province. “My definition of systemic racism is that there’s a system in Quebec of racism, and I don’t think there’s a system,” Legault has argued.
But even without federal funding, IRCAs have still been used in the justice system in Quebec.
In one high-profile case last year, Frank Paris, a black Canadian, had his sentence cut from 36 to 24 months after pleading guilty to trafficking cannabis and hashish. The Viola Desmond Justice Institute, a nonprofit, had brought forward an IRCA which explained that Paris is a descendant of slaves who has experienced racism.
Christopher Skeete, Quebec’s anti-racism minister, came out against the Paris decision.
“Creating two classes of citizens, based on their origin, is troubling,” he said.