FIRST READING: Courts keep deciding that stabbing people doesn’t carry ‘intent to kill’

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After an altercation with a man outside a Windsor, Ont., daycare in 2022, 30-year-old Malique Calloo pulled an illegal firearm from his waistband and shot his victim 15 times.

In July, a court declared Calloo guilty of manslaughter, meaning that the magazine of bullets he had discharged at his victim at close range had not carried an “intent to kill.”

Given the time he’s already spent in pre-trial sentencing, Calloo is expected to be free no later than 2030.

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More recently, Inderdeep Singh Gosal plunged a knife six times into the torso of 37-year-old father Paul Schmidt at a Vancouver Starbucks. Schmidt had confronted Gosal about vaping in front of his daughter, escalating it to a physical fight following an argument.

The case became infamous due to widely circulated cell phone footage of Schmidt stumbling out of the coffee shop and collapsing motionless on the front patio.

Again, just last week, a court accepted the defence’s argument that it was manslaughter, not second-degree murder as originally charged. Gosal had stopped taking his schizophrenia medication and had been drinking, so he couldn’t be expected to appreciate that the stabbings would kill Schmidt. The fatal stabbings were an “overreaction due to mental illness.”

Manslaughter exists in Canadian law for crimes in which an offender caused someone’s violent death but didn’t mean to: A fluke punch in a bar fight, a recklessly fired gun, a tainted drug sale.

But in one of the more conspicuous trends ensuring lax sentences for Canadian violent criminals, manslaughter is often being applied to homicides where an offender shot or stabbed their victim.

It was only a few blocks away from the 2023 Paul Schmidt killing that saw a similar case of an offender plunging a knife into the chest of his victim, only for a B.C. court to rule that the action hadn’t been intended to kill.

In a 2020 incident at the biltmore, a Vancouver low-barrier shelter, 31-year-old Anthony Woods fatally stabbed a man in the building’s elevator who had been confronting him about his disruptive behaviour.

Woods had been kicking and pounding on doors, and 72-year-old Alex Gortmaker appears to have raised objection with Woods, “slightly pushing him” in the process.

Woods’ response was to produce a knife, stab Gortmaker in the upper chest, and then shove the man from the elevator where he collapsed and bled to death.

In October 2024, Judge Reginald Harris would not only accept Woods’ plea that he was guilty only of manslaughter, but granted him a suspended sentence that resulted in his immediate release from custody.

Meanwhile, the same week that Gosal received a manslaughter conviction in B.C. for killing Paul Schmidt, an Ontario court ruled that a man who shot his girlfriend in the head had not intended to kill her.

Keith Savile of Stratford, Ont., was already subject to a lifetime firearms ban due to prior criminal convictions. In late 2024 – after a night of repeatedly threatening to shoot his girlfriend with an improvised handgun – he claimed it was an accident when he discharged the gun into her temple around 5 a.m.

On Sept. 2, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice accepted Savile’s guilty plea for manslaughter in lieu of his initial charge of second-degree murder. Given a nine-year sentence, he’s expected to be free by 2032 at the latest.

The sister of victim Kassidy Bal­lantyne-Holmes told Postmedia in a message that the sentence was a “joke.” Another family member said “he’ll be in his 40s when he gets out and can live a full and happy life, and she’s still gone.’”

A throughline with many of these cases is that they’re done in coordination with prosecutors: the Crown accepts a guilty plea of manslaughter rather than proceed to trial on a murder charge.

That’s what happened last year in a high-profile case involving a chronically abused eight-year-old Alberta girl found dead in a hockey bag in the back of a pickup truck.

When the Crown accepted guardian Ashley Rattlesnake’s guilty plea to manslaughter (and an eight-year sentence), it prompted a rare public condemnation from Edmonton police urging the Crown to proceed on a murder charge.

“Our position is that to allow this plea deal to go ahead would be to bring the administration of justice into disrepute and constitute a significant miscarriage of justice,” wrote Megan Hankewich, the Edmonton Police Services’ acting executive director of legal and regulatory services.

More recently, it was a factor in the June manslaughter conviction of 31-year-old Ahmed Abdi Hassan of Alberta who fatally shot a man in the back of the head. In March 2024 Hassan shot seven rounds from an illegal handgun at victim Liban Abdirahman, hitting him three times.

Although Hassan was charged with second-degree murder, prosecutors Carla MacPhail and Margot Engley accepted a guilty plea of manslaughter after negotiations with defence lawyers.

Another common throughline is that the offender is Indigenous, or falls into any other identity category that – under Canadian law – is entitled to differential sentencing on the grounds that their background gave them reduced “moral culpability.”

This indeed factored into the recent sentencing for Savile in the shooting of his girlfriend, with Justice Jennifer Moser noting that he’d suffered “destruction in his relationship” with his Indigenous mother and “significant instability in childhood.”

It’s a major reason why, statistically, murdering an Indigenous woman is more likely to yield a manslaughter conviction than a tougher sentence of second- or first-degree murder.

In a 2023 analysis of Indigenous homicides, Statistics Canada found that between 2009 and 2021, manslaughter charges “were twice as common when the victims were Indigenous women and girls (41% of homicide charges) than when they were not (20%).”

One reason being that most of these killings were perpetrated by Indigenous men. Said the statistics agency: “manslaughter charges were also more common when the accused person was Indigenous.

It was China who first announced this week that, after an extended period of no-contact with the Canadian Department of National Defence, the two militaries were “coordinating” once again. As an English-language statement on China’s official Ministry of National Defense website put it, “the two sides had a candid and in-depth exchange of views on international and regional issues of mutual interest.” Although this might seem like the result of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s stated goal to seek a new “strategic partnership” with Beijing, in this particular case Canada was doing what it’s traditionally done in terms of national security and simply following the line of the U.S. The “coordination” cited by Beijing happened at the Indo-Pacific Chiefs of Defense Conference in Victoria, B.C., which was also attended by the U.S. (U.S. officers even took smiling photos with their Chinese counterparts).

The U.K. House of Commons just voted down a bill to legalize assisted suicide – a somewhat surprising result given that chamber is dominated by a Labour majority. But it follows the defeat of a similar bill in the Scottish Parliament in March. In both cases, opposition against legalized euthanized grew in part in response to the experience of Canada. Lawmakers in both Scotland and England reviewed Canadian evidence outlining how, among other pitfalls, the MAID program rapidly chalked up multiple instances of patients being offered death in lieu of care.

First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.

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