Whenever someone like Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre suggests tightening up bail laws in Canada, someone else — a criminologist, prisoners’ rights advocate, Liberal cabinet minister — is quick to point out that crime fell 3.6 per cent across the country in 2024.

For instance, last fall when Poilievre first suggested his “Jail, Not Bail” reforms aimed at the Liberals’ bail changes of 2019, an Ontario lawyer, Michael Spratt, wrote in Canadian Lawyer magazine that this was dangerous sloganeering, “driven by harmful political grift.” He accused Poilievre of “massively oversimplifying things … loudly and misleadingly.”

The underlying message of such criticism is that easier bail, even for defendants with violent criminal pasts, is not the cause of Canada’s recent rise in violent crime,

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