This article presents a critical examination of the general weight that modern deterrence theory assigns to cost–benefit rationality in its conception of criminal acting out. Following Niklas Luhmann and Spencer Brown, who state that observation means handling distinctions, we reveal what the distinctions in deterrence theory themselves conceal, in particular with respect to these “other rationalities” (that is, rationalities other than rationality defined in terms of cost–benefit calculation), which may, in certain circumstances, have a significant influence on the decision-making process involved in acting out. In empirical terms, based on excerpts from qualitative interviews we conducted with individuals who had committed “serious” crimes, we support this hypothesis by showing the operating procedure for an alternative defined in terms of the rationality of risk. In relation to criminal law, our analysis therefore challenges an entire set of assumptions dear to deterrence advocates; in relation to science, it reopens a now-stagnant debate regarding the criteria for the effectiveness or operationalization of criminal deterrence.

The use of criminal-law powers to respond to people with HIV who place others at risk of HIV infection has emerged as a focal point of AIDS advocacy at global, national, and local levels. In the Canadian context, reform efforts that address the criminalization of HIV non-disclosure have been hampered by the absence of data on the contours, scale, and outcomes of criminalization. This article responds to that gap in knowledge with the first comprehensive analysis of the temporal trends, demographic patterns, and aggregate outcomes of Canadian criminal cases of HIV non-disclosure. The authors draw on insights into the role that rendering social phenomena in numerical terms plays for the governance of social life in order to make criminalization “visible” in ways that might contribute to activist responses. The article examines temporal trends, demographic patterns, and outcomes separately. In each instance, the pattern or trend identified is described, potential explanations for findings are offered, and an account is given of how the data have informed efforts to reform criminal law. Particular attention is paid to the following key findings: a sharp increase in criminal cases that began in 2004; the large proportion of recent criminal cases involving defendants who are heterosexual Black, African, and Caribbean men; and the high proportion of criminal cases resulting in conviction. The article closes with suggestions for future research.

This research note begins by situating some of the major areas of inquiry within social-science research on the criminalization of HIV/AIDS non-disclosure. The evolution of the use of this criminal justice measure in the attempt to regulate HIV/AIDS transmission illustrates what has been termed “criminalization creep,” whereby steadily increasing numbers of people are charged with increasingly severe crimes. We outline some of the key and precedent-setting cases in Canadian law in order to explore the problematic of criminalization and suggest avenues for future research on this subject.

“Home” to more than 150,000 children from the 1870s until 1996, the residential school system was aimed at “killing the Indian in the child” and assimilating First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children into white settler society. It was, in short, a genocidal policy, operated jointly by the federal government of Canada and the Catholic, Anglican, United, and Presbyterian Churches. Children as young as four years old were torn from their families and placed in institutions that were chronically underfunded; mismanaged; inadequately staffed; and rife with disease, malnutrition, poor ventilation, poor heating, neglect, and death. Sexual, emotional, and physical abuse was pervasive, and it was consistent policy to deny children their languages, their cultures, their families, and even their given names. While some children may have had positive experiences, many former students have found themselves caught between two worlds: deprived of their languages and traditions, they were left on their own to handle the trauma of their school experience and to try to readapt to the traditional way of life that they had been conditioned to reject. Life after residential school has been marred for many by alcohol and substance abuse, cycles of violence, suicide, anger, hopelessness, isolation, shame, guilt, and an inability to parent.

First Nations leader Phil Fontaine catalysed the struggle for redress in 1990 when he stunned Canada by speaking about his residential-school experience. The second major catalyst was the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) of 1991–1996, which broadly exposed the horrors of residential schools to Canadians and called for a public inquiry.

Remembering Inninimowin is a two-year-long documentary film project on the personal journey of a Cree woman, Jules Koostachin, a member of Attawapiskat First Nation, as she starts to remember her first language, Inninimowin (Cree).

When we talk about truth and reconciliation commissions, we are accustomed to speaking of “transitional justice” mechanisms used in emerging democracies addressing histories of grave injustices. Public inquiries are usually the state response to past injustice in the Canadian context. The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is the result of a legal settlement agreement involving the government, representatives of indigenous peoples who attended residential schools for a period lasting more than a century, and the churches that operated those schools. Residential schools have been addressed in a series of public inquiries in Canada, culminating in the TRC. I argue that some of Canada's previous public inquiries, particularly with respect to indigenous issues, have strongly resembled truth commissions, yet this is the first time that an established democracy has called a body investigating past human-rights violations a “truth commission.” This article considers some of the reasons for seeking a truth commission in an established democracy and looks to a previous public inquiry led by Thomas Berger, the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, for some useful strategies for the TRC as it pursues its mandate. In particular, I suggest that a commission can perform a social function by using its process to educate the broader public about the issue before it.

Over time, the Canadian state has used a variety of mechanisms to address its troubled relationship with its indigenous population, the most prominent of which so far was the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP). RCAP was mandated to develop both a constitutional framework and a comprehensive social-welfare policy. Staffed predominantly with constitutional lawyers, it articulated a sophisticated constitutional theory, which was not implemented, and did little to ameliorate the living conditions of Aboriginal people. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools (TRC), while arising from the settlement of a national class action, can be seen as a successor commission to RCAP. It follows in the procedural footprints of RCAP in a number of ways, including in the profile of its key appointments. This article argues that looking back at the successes and failures of RCAP can be instructive for the TRC as it carries out its mandate, allowing us to predict some areas that will be particularly challenging. In these areas, the TRC will require a departure from the RCAP blueprint if it is to achieve the ambitious goals of a TRC in a non-transitional-justice context.

Building on a cultural studies framework, this article addresses the implementation of the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement by cataloguing specific reconciliatory events, public forums, and media coverage that occurred in 2010. Revealing the contradictory nature of Canada's reconciliation project, the author situates the IRSSA within a larger infrastructure of policies and procedures that have limited Indigenous nationhood and autonomy in the Canadian settler society. Specifically, this article identifies a need to trouble categories of trauma and victimhood that may engender outcomes of cure, which ultimately constitute a foreclosure on the past in Canada's reconciliation process. While therapeutic language is less apparent in the IRSSA, the author suggests, it is still deployed under the guise of closure and “settlement.”