Jamie Sarkonak: Why Māori criminals get racial sentence discounts in Canada

It’s official: Canada’s race-based sentencing regime applies to Māori New Zealanders — and it’s so powerful that it can shave what should be a seven-year sentence down to one, and protect offenders from being publicly identified.

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We learned this from a B.C. meth-trafficking case that was published Friday. It arose from a bust that happened at the Vancouver International Airport back in February 2025, in which a Māori-Tongan woman was intercepted in her attempt to fly 20 kilograms of methamphetamine back to Auckland in her suitcase. In Canada, if sold by the kilo, it was worth between $80,000 and $90,000; in New Zealand, it was worth at least four times that.

The judge said six years was the “low end” for this type of crime. The Crown prosecutor sought an eight-year sentence.

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But in this case, the judge landed on two years. The smuggler’s personal background played a large role, which made sense — this judge, Diana Vandor, was once the chair of the B.C. Human Rights Commission. The sentence amounted to time served: the offender had already spent a year and a half in jail, and for that received credit of an additional half-year.

What was so compelling about her backstory? It was tragic, similar to many people who get drawn up into organized crime. The woman’s father was absent and her mother was a drug addict. She witnessed meth use from a young age and bounced between homes, living with her mother some years, and aunts other years.

She dropped out of school at 14 and had a baby at 17 with her boyfriend, a drug dealer. He was abusive, and he was also the person who sent the woman to Vancouver to pick up the shipment of meth that landed her in Canadian jail. For the duration of her imprisonment in Canada, she was separated from her infant child, who was three years old by the sentencing hearing.

These details came out in what is called an Impact of Race and Culture Assessment (IRCA) — a report assembled for court by a writer whose job is to interview non-white offenders, and others in the offender’s circle, to gather their personal history particularly in relation to racism. In the case of the Māori-Tongan smuggler, the report writers did indeed blame some of her plight on colonialism and racism.

“The IRCA report documents a childhood of profound deprivation, neglect, and cultural dislocation,” wrote Vandor. “Trauma compounded the neglect. Although her grandparents retained some understanding of Māori genealogy and heritage, she was not raised within the Māori worldview and does not speak the Māori language. She was considered an outsider by her maternal family and called by a racial slur because of her father’s Tongan heritage and left feeling, in her own words, ‘the odd one out.’ ”

Vandor also found it notable that the Māori comprise 20 per cent of the New Zealand population, but make up over 50 per cent of the country’s prisoners. Altogether, the judge found that the woman’s moral culpability was reduced to the point of deserving a “culturally grounded, rehabilitative disposition rather than a lengthy penitentiary term that would only deepen the dislocation of a young Māori mother far from her child and her community.”

You can perhaps see some problems with the IRCA system from just that alone. Here, the report pointed to prison demographic statistics, and the judge accepted wholeheartedly that this was proof of racism. Even the prejudices of one indigenous group against another were considered factors relevant to the IRCA. Compare this extra consideration to what the rest of offenders get, and it becomes incredibly unfair.

For this woman, the extra consideration played a large role in getting her a sentence of time served. The woman’s infant was still back home and the judge was impressed that the pair had been accepted into a Māori-focused rehab program for mothers with children under age five. The woman had done well with the programming available in Canadian jail, and had co-operated with police from the moment she was caught. Here was an opportunity that would disappear if the woman remained in Canadian prison for much longer — and seeing how there is no prison transfer agreement with New Zealand, the judge thought it best to let the woman go.

Vandor also went an extra mile and censored her decision “by removing the name of the offender and of her daughter, as well as other information, to preserve their privacy to the greatest extent possible.” A gentle approach, but an extremely concerning one. The judge violated Canada’s open court principle because the offender before her had a tragic background, and because she had a child. Widespread adoption of this practice would keep the names of many criminals off of the public record.

To the extent that locking an infant’s mother away for many years may set that infant up for failure, the sentence was a good one. But in every other respect, it was not. Lightening sentences because of racial factors is discriminatory to everyone else. Enabling the meth trade in Canada is a profoundly toxic thing to do. Going easy on Canadian meth exports to New Zealand only paves the way for more harm to that country in the future.

It was just in 2023, by the way, that a 21-year-old New Zealand man died from mistakenly drinking a can of liquid meth from Canada because it was disguised as beer; Canadian police never charged anyone for it.

In the case of this young New Zealand mother, there was a just path available. Had the judge not trivialized the serious crime of supporting the Canadian meth business (and attempting to supply New Zealand’s vulnerable communities with the drug), the woman might have been sentenced to several years in prison. At that point, it should have been up to the justice minister to do the right thing. Summon the New Zealand ambassador, explain the unique circumstances of the offender, and arrive at an agreement to transfer this particular prisoner to a New Zealand facility so that she can access prison programming closer to home — and more importantly, have access to her child.

The onus should be on the federal justice minister to make special arrangements in situations like these. It should not be on judges to bend the law so much that sentences fall comically short of even the “low end” of what’s acceptable. If the Canadian justice system is going to start concerning itself with the fate of vulnerable communities abroad, it could start by reflecting on its own contributions to their destitution.

National Post

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