Five shocking cases that prove criminals get off way too easy in Canada

In the last few weeks, Canadian judges have been letting criminal offenders get off with shockingly lenient sentences.

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In the last few weeks, Canadian judges have been letting criminal offenders get off with shockingly lenient sentences.

Here are five examples that critics say expose Canada’s broken, two-tiered justice system.

Take, for instance, a Quebec woman who admitted to joining the Islamic State.

Twenty-nine-year-old Oumaima Chouay was recently sentenced to a single day behind bars after admitting she travelled to Syria in 2014 to join the Islamic State terrorist group.

Chouay knowingly left Canada to marry an ISIS fighter and raise children under the group’s extremist ideology.

While she pleaded guilty to participating in terrorist activities, three other terrorism charges were dropped.

After 100 days in pre-trial custody, she was credited with time served—and sentenced to just one additional day in jail.

In Ontario, a Filipino immigrant charged with serious drug and firearms offences had his guilty plea delayed—because a judge was worried about his likely deportation.

Victor Bueron, 22, was arrested in a high-risk takedown by Barrie police on Jan. 17. Officers allegedly seized drugs and guns from his vehicle, and Bueron was also facing charges in an unrelated manslaughter case.

Yet Ontario Superior Court Justice Vanessa Christie refused to let him plead guilty, citing discomfort over the immigration consequences of a conviction.

Just weeks earlier, another Ontario judge issued a conditional discharge to Akashkumar Narendrakumar Khant.

Justice Paul Thomas O’Marra ruled on June 25 that a conviction would cause Khant “severe collateral consequences,” including possible deportation, a delay in his citizenship, and separation from his wife.

So instead of jail or a criminal record, Khant walked without a conviction.

Out west in British Columbia, two Indian international students, Gaganpreet and Jagdeep Singh, were sentenced to just three years each for a fatal hit-and-run that dragged a man more than one kilometre under a Mustang to his death before prying him from underneath the vehicle and tossing him on the side of the road.

The pair admitted to knowingly driving off after hitting a 47-year-old father in Surrey, leaving him to die. They’re “likely” to be deported after serving their sentences—but that’s hardly guaranteed.

One of the most horrific recent examples also occurred in British Columbia.

A man previously convicted of uttering threats and choking in an intimate partner violence case was released by a judge while he awaited sentencing on new charges.

On the very same day he was released, he allegedly killed his estranged wife in a violent daytime hammer attack.

James Edward Plover, 45, is now accused of murdering his estranged wife in a broad-daylight hammer attack, just hours after being released from custody.

According to police, Plover attacked two women who were returning from their lunch break on the afternoon of July 4, beating both of them with a hammer in a busy Kelowna, B.C., parking lot in an alleged daytime attack that left his estranged wife dead.

From ISIS fighters to killers to predators, Canada’s courts seem far more concerned about immigration status than public safety.