As always, our Gladue program remains very busy. In the first six months of this fiscal year, we have written 200 Gladue Reports and Letters. We are clearly back to working again at pre-pandemic levels. This means that literally every day an Indigenous person is sentenced with the benefit of one of our Gladue Reports or Letters in courts in southern Ontario and the near north.
Gladue Reports and Letters have a major impact at sentence. In some cases, people receive a noncustodial sentence where, without a Report or Letter, such a sentence would not have been possible. In other cases, the length of sentence is reduced. Reports and Letters provide information to decision-makers in court that they would not otherwise have. The result of that information is often that sentencing becomes more difficult and challenging, and that’s a good thing – sentencing should not be easy or rote.
A good example of the impact of a Gladue Report is found in the case of R. v. L.C., (2024 ONSC 5427 (CanLII), https://canlii.ca/t/k74p4), a decision of Justice Mirza of the Brampton Superior Court. The decision in the case was almost 250 paragraphs and Justice Mirza extensively relied on information from the Gladue Report. He wrote: “The Gladue report author, provided the court with essential particulars, context, and historical information. The Crown accepts the entire contents of the report.”