Justice Committee on Feb. 4th, 2026

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you.

Mr. Fortin.

[Rhéal Fortin, Bloc, Rivière-du-Nord, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for your patience, Mr. MacKinnon and Mr. Poirier. I don't want you to think your comments aren't useful, quite the opposite. They are very useful to our work. We're all very happy to hear what you have to say.

My next question is for Mr. Poirier, from the Retail Council of Canada.

Mr. Poirier, do you think your members generally believe in the virtues of rehabilitating offenders?

[Matt Poirier]

Certainly. We work regularly with police forces and communities on prevention or to rehabilitate young people in this situation.

Rehabilitation is very important. We think it's part of the solution. However, we're seeing a problem in the stores, and that has to be dealt with upstream. Our work as an organization is to work on prevention and with other organizations on rehabilitation, especially with young people who often find themselves in situations where they're being taken advantage of. That is a concern for us, and we're working on resolving that issue. I would say that it's also important for a number of retailers.

[Rhéal Fortin, Bloc, Rivière-du-Nord, QC]

If I understand correctly, acts of violence or delinquency in retail establishments are mainly perpetrated by young people.

What is the ratio of young people versus adults perpetrators? Would you say it's half-and-half?

[Matt Poirier]

It depends. It can also be young people. Crime has no age and comes in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes, criminal organizations are involved, and they take advantage of young people and recruit them because the law isn't as hard on them if they are caught.

[Rhéal Fortin, Bloc, Rivière-du-Nord, QC]

Are you personally aware of any situations where criminal organizations have hired young people to commit crimes? Can you speak to that?

[Matt Poirier]

Sure. It's happening across the country. That's why we're pleased to see that Bill C‑14 proposes measures that target the likely leaders. We think these measures could also be strengthened to give authorities more power and to target those who take advantage of young people. That's one of our proposals.

[Rhéal Fortin, Bloc, Rivière-du-Nord, QC]

Is shoplifting the most common crime reported by your members, or is it violent acts?

[Matt Poirier]

I would say both. However, we're noticing an increase in violent thefts, which are dangerous. That's a source of concern. There are ways to manage shoplifting, but when it comes to dangerous acts where people are armed, it's much more complex. We can't manage that anymore, and it becomes an issue for police forces to handle.

[Rhéal Fortin, Bloc, Rivière-du-Nord, QC]

Okay.

We've heard from experts that incarcerating young people who have committed crimes or acts such as theft can often have a negative impact on them, as it can lead to family separation, job loss, loss of housing, and so on. It seems it can sometimes cause more harm rather than contribute to their rehabilitation.

I understand that you're not an expert in criminology, but as a representative of the Retail Council of Canada, what would you say if I told you that we need to keep those who commit violent crimes in custody, and focus our efforts on rehabilitating those who commit nonviolent crimes, or at least less violent crimes? What would you think?

[Matt Poirier]

We see that Bill C‑14 gives more power to the relevant authorities to manage these cases or make these decisions. We think it's important that the police and the justice system have these tools.

As I said earlier, we're working with organizations concerned about this situation. We see that young people are often trapped by criminal organizations, so targeting those who manage criminal organizations makes sense.

[Rhéal Fortin, Bloc, Rivière-du-Nord, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Poirier.

I will finish by acknowledging Michaël Akettia, sitting behind me, who has been working for me for five years. He didn't go get his medal earlier.

Thank you, Mr. Akettia.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you, Mr. Fortin.

We'll move into the second round.

We have Mr. Lawton for five minutes.

[Andrew Lawton, Conservative, Elgin—St. Thomas—London South, ON]

Thank you for joining us, Mr. Poirier.

Thank you, Mr. MacKinnon, for being here.

A couple of weeks ago, I had the great privilege of speaking to a group of high school civics students at St. Joseph's high school in my riding. Unlike my Liberal colleagues, I'm not sure they were as excited to have a member of Parliament come in to talk to them.

As is important to relate, I was trying to get them to understand some of the political implications of things that exist in the world around us. I asked how many of them feel safe when walking around downtown St. Thomas. It was not only that the answer was “no”, but that it was a punchline. They just laughed, because it has been so far from that in their experience.

This is something that we've seen degrade over the last 10 years. People do not feel safe walking down the streets that they have walked down for decades. We have not only mental illness, homelessness and addiction problems that are part of this, but also open and brazen criminality.

We spoke about this a bit with the earlier witnesses, but I was hoping you could speak—first you, Mr. MacKinnon—to exactly what the toll is on businesses, because this is not an issue that affects just customers. When customers stop going downtown, there are whole stretches of communities, large and small, that are very deeply affected.

[Paul MacKinnon]

It's no surprise that a lot of our members and those most affected are traditionally small business owners. They run restaurants and shops. They're owner operated. They're in the business every day, so they see life on the streets on a regular basis.

There's no question that there's been this bit of a dividing line—pre-pandemic and postpandemic—and a lot of things have happened over a number of years. I think that when business owners think about tariffs, supply chains or other inflationary pressures, those are just so far beyond anything they can deal with. That causes a lot of anxiety, of course, but they probably aren't thinking that there's much they or their local police force can do about that.

Shoplifting is something different. I think there is an expectation that if they're seeing the same person coming in week after week and stealing from them, seemingly with no consequences, that's frustrating to them. It's costing them money. It's making them angry and they can't really understand, from a common-sense perspective, how that could possibly be allowed in a country that runs on law and order. There are so many different things that small business owners can't control, but they really want to control the things that they can. I think this is really why this has risen to the top.

I think the other piece of this is that, as we look at crime stats—we've been trying to do a much better job of collecting crime stats, each of us in our local downtown and across the country—we see this big jump across multiple types of crimes, from 2020 or 2021 forward. A lot of them have kind of remained stable. They're higher than they used to be, but they're stable, whereas shoplifting in particular and theft under $5,000 seems to continue to escalate. It's a societal concern. Where it used to be something—

[Andrew Lawton, Conservative, Elgin—St. Thomas—London South, ON]

I only have limited time. I appreciate your answer there.

[Paul MacKinnon]

I didn't know I was eating into your time. I thought I was just taking my time.

[Andrew Lawton, Conservative, Elgin—St. Thomas—London South, ON]

I appreciate that.

When you talk about the effect of the catch-and-release bail policies in particular, I know that a lot of your members would have probably been quite frustrated. They're calling the police, who are quite frustrated because they know they have to respond to these over and over again. In any municipality, it is a very small number of people who are typically responsible for an overwhelming majority of the crime.

Do businesses get to a point where they just stop reporting it? Do they stop filing the insurance claim for the broken window and just eat the cost of shoplifting because there is no other recourse available to them?

[Paul MacKinnon]

Absolutely.

Something we try to always hammer home is that resources come following statistics. They chase stats. We tell our businesses that if their window is broken overnight, there's probably no chance that the person who did it is going to be held to account, but to please still make that call because that helps the statistics to accurately reflect the situation.

That is a real challenge. Businesses are too frustrated. They don't think anything's going to happen, so they don't report it. The stats are probably under-reported.

[Andrew Lawton, Conservative, Elgin—St. Thomas—London South, ON]

This will sound like an odd question, but it's fitting into a larger context here. As far as the priorities go, have any of your members ever told you that they think one of their top priorities is policing religious text or religious expression in Canada?

[Paul MacKinnon]

I don't think I've ever had a comment about that.

[Andrew Lawton, Conservative, Elgin—St. Thomas—London South, ON]

I thought so. You're dealing with people who are on the front lines, having their windows smashed in and their inventory taken away. That's a real priority. I'm glad we're dealing with this now.

I have just one final question for you, Mr. MacKinnon.

Where do you think the holdup has been? These calls from your members and from you are not new.

[Paul MacKinnon]

That's a good question. I don't know.

I know that over the past number of years we've been coming to Ottawa and having these meetings. It's become a much more important topic for our association much more recently, over the past couple of years. It did seem to gain real momentum with all the MPs across different party lines we were meeting with last year. We felt that great strides were made, particularly over the past 12 months.

What was driving that? I think we were just so happy to see something that we cared about also seemingly being cared about and addressed as well.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you, Mr. Lawton.

We'll go over to you, Mr. Chang.

[Wade Chang, Liberal, Burnaby Central, BC]

Thank you to the witnesses for your presence and patience while we waited for the Conservatives to finish their filibuster.

Mr. Poirier, can you please share with the committee a specific incident where repeat offending or bail conditions directly affected a retail worker or store?