Capital punishment in Canada

The post of executioner in New France was briefly held by André Bernard in 1645, but was not permanently occupied until 1648, when a military drummer stationed at the French garrison in Ville-Marie, New France was sentenced to death for sodomy by the local Sulpician priests.[3] After an intervention by the Jesuits in Quebec City, the drummer's life was spared on the condition that he accept the position of New France's first permanent executioner.[3] As only the drummer was placed on trial, some historians have suggested that his sexual partner may have been a First Nations man who was not subject to French religious law.[4] The drummer's real name has never been confirmed in historical records, however; in his 2006 book Répression des homosexuels au Québec et en France, historian Patrice Corriveau identified the drummer as "René Huguet dit Tambour",[5] although other historians have challenged this identification as no known historical records place a person of that name in New France any earlier than 1680.[6]

With the role of executioner being unpopular, it was common in New France that a male criminal who had been sentenced to death could have his life spared if he agreed to take the job of executing others, while a female prisoner could have her life spared if the executioner agreed to marry her.[7] Similar cases included Jacques Daigre, who was sentenced to death for theft in 1665 but managed to avoid being executed by agreeing to testify against and execute his associate,[8] and Jean Corolère, who took the job in 1751 and simultaneously saved the life of fellow prisoner Françoise Laurent by marrying her.[9]

In 1749, Peter Cartcel, a sailor aboard a ship in the Halifax harbour, stabbed Abraham Goodsides to death and wounded two other men. He was brought before a Captain's Court where he was found guilty and sentenced to death. Two days later he was hanged from the yardarm of the vessel as a deterrent to others.[10] This is one of the earliest records of capital punishment in English-speaking Canada. It is difficult to accurately state numbers of capital punishment since there were no systematic efforts to accurately record names, dates, and locations of executions until after 1867, and many records have been lost because of fires, floods, or decay.[11]

The execution of Stanislaus Lacroix, March 21, 1902, Hull, Quebec. At top right, onlookers watch from telephone poles.

After Confederation, a revision of the statutes reduced the number of offences punishable by death to three: murder, rape, and treason. In 1868, Parliament also stated that the location of the execution was to be within the confines of the prison instead of public hangings.[12] By the 1870s, the jails had begun to build the gallows 5 feet (1.5 m) from the ground with a pit underneath instead of the previous high scaffold, the platform of which was level with the prison wall.[13]

Robert Bickerdike was a businessman, politician, and social reformer, who believed the abolition of capital punishment was an imperative and to some extent his life’s mission. Few spoke as loudly or as eloquently as he did for this reform. As a Member of Parliament, in 1914 and again in 1916 he introduced a bill to replace the death penalty with a life sentence. He opposed capital punishment on many grounds, considering it an insult to Christianity and religion in general and a blot on any civilized nation. "There is nothing", he stated in the house, "more degrading to society at large ... than the death penalty." He also spoke of class disparities, pointing out that the punishment was administered to the poor far more often than to the wealthy. He refuted the notion that state-sponsored killing acted as a deterrent to murder and cautioned against the possibility of mistake.[14]

In 1950, an attempt was made to abolish capital punishment. Ross Thatcher, at that time a Cooperative Commonwealth Federation Member of Parliament, moved Bill No. 2 in order to amend the Criminal Code to abolish the death penalty. Thatcher later withdrew it for fear of Bill No. 2 not generating positive discussion and further harming the chances of abolition. In 1956, the Joint Committee of the House and Senate recommended the retention of capital punishment as the mandatory punishment for murder, which opened the door to the possibility of abolition.[15]

In 1961, legislation was introduced to reclassify murder into capital and non-capital murder, later renamed to first degree and second degree murder. A capital murder involved a planned or deliberate murder, murder during violent crimes, or the murder of a police officer or prison guard. Non-capital murder did not carry the death sentence.[16]

Following the success of Lester Pearson and the Liberal Party in the 1963 federal election, and through the successive governments of Pierre Trudeau, the federal cabinet commuted all death sentences as a matter of policy. Hence, the de facto abolition of the death penalty in Canada occurred in 1963. On November 30, 1967, Bill C-168 was passed creating a five-year moratorium on the use of the death penalty, except for murders of police and corrections officers. On January 26, 1973, after the expiration of the five-year experiment, the Solicitor General of Canada continued the partial ban on capital punishment, which would eventually lead to the abolition of capital punishment.[17] On July 14, 1976, Bill C-84 was passed by a narrow margin of 130:124 in a free vote, resulting in the abolition of the death penalty for murder, treason, and piracy. It was given royal assent on July 16[18] and came into force July 26, 1976.[19]

Capital murder was replaced with first degree murder, which carries a mandatory life sentence without eligibility for parole until the person has served 25 years of the sentence.[20]

On June 30, 1987, a bill to restore the death penalty was defeated by the House of Commons in a 148–127 vote, in which Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, Minister of Justice Ray Hnatyshyn, and Minister of External Affairs Joe Clark opposed the bill, whereas Deputy Prime Minister Donald Mazankowski and a majority of Progressive Conservative MPs supported it.[21][22][23][24]

Certain military offences under the National Defence Act (committed by members of the Canadian Armed Forces) continued to carry the death penalty (cowardice, desertion, unlawful surrender, and spying for the enemy), with mandatory death penalty if committed traitorously. Bill C-25 replaced their penalty with life imprisonment, resulting in the de jure abolition of the death penalty when it came into force Sep 1, 1999, although it received royal assent on Dec 10, 1998.[25][2]

The last two people executed in Canada were Ronald Turpin, 29, and Arthur Lucas, 54, convicted of separate murders, at 12:02 am on December 11, 1962, at the Don Jail in Toronto.[26] [27] [28]

The last woman to be hanged in Canada was Marguerite Pitre on January 9, 1953, at Bordeaux Prison in Montreal, for her part in the bombing of Canadian Pacific Air Lines Flight 108.[26]

The last person sentenced to death was Mario Gauthier on May 14, 1976, for the murder of a prison guard in Quebec. He was reprieved when capital punishment was abolished for all common crimes on July 14 the same year.[26]

Last executions in each province and territory[26]

Province	Date	Inmate(s)	City/town
Alberta	November 15, 1960	Robert Raymond Cook	Fort Saskatchewan
British Columbia	April 28, 1959	Leo Anthony Mantha	Oakalla
Manitoba	June 17, 1952	Henry Malanik	Winnipeg
New Brunswick	December 11, 1957	Joseph Pierre Richard	Dalhousie
Newfoundland and Labrador	May 22, 1942	Herbert Augustus Spratt	St. John's, Dominion of Newfoundland
Northwest Territories	June 1, 1954	Fredrick Cardinal	Fort Smith
Nova Scotia	December 15, 1937	Everett Farmer	Shelburne
Nunavut	N/A	None	N/A
Ontario	December 11, 1962	Arthur Lucas and Ronald Turpin	Toronto
Prince Edward Island	August 20, 1941	Earl Lund and Fredrick Phillips	Charlottetown
Quebec	March 11, 1960	Ernest Côté	Montreal
Saskatchewan	February 20, 1946	Jack Loran	Regina
Yukon	March 10, 1916	Alexander Gogoff	Whitehorse

During the First World War, 25 Canadian soldiers were executed. Most were shot for service offences such as desertion and cowardice, but two executions were for murder. For details of these see List of Canadian soldiers executed during World War I.

One Canadian soldier, Pte. Harold Pringle, was executed during the Second World War for murder. [29] Furthermore, four Germans were shot after being convicted in war crimes trials held by Canadian courts.

John Radclive was Canada's first professional executioner, placed on the federal payroll as a hangman by a Dominion order-in-council in 1892, on the recommendation of the justice minister Sir John Thompson.[30] Radclive is often described as having trained under British hangman William Marwood although there is no documentary proof for this. He can be shown to have hanged at least 69 people in Canada, although his life total was likely much higher. At his death, the Toronto Telegram said he had 150 executions. He died of alcohol-related illness in Toronto on February 26, 1911, at the age of 55.[31]

Arthur Ellis was the pseudonym of "Arthur B. English", a British man who became Canada's official hangman in 1913, after Radclive's death. Ellis worked as a hangman in Canada until the botched execution of Thomasina Sarao in Montreal in 1935, in which she was decapitated.[32] He died in poverty in Montreal in July, 1938, and lies buried in the Mount Royal Cemetery.

The Arthur Ellis Awards—named after this pseudonym—is an annual literary award presented by the Crime Writers of Canada. Ellis is prominently featured in the 2009 documentary Hangman's Graveyard.

The executioner who worked as Camille Branchaud, a pseudonym, succeeded Ellis. Branchaud was on the Quebec government payroll as a hangman, and executed people elsewhere in the country on a piecework basis. The hangman was traditionally based in Montreal where between 1912 and 1960 the gallows at Bordeaux Prison saw more executions (85) take place than any other correctional facility in Canada.[33]

Branchaud carried out many executions (for which he was not paid) in the postwar period in Canada, such as the double hanging of Leonard Jackson and Steven Suchan of the Boyd Gang at the Don Jail in 1952, and Robert Raymond Cook's execution in Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta, in 1960.[34]