Compensation by Offenders in Canada: a Victim’s Right?

The central purpose of this chapter is to consider the validity of a deceptively simple proposition: that victims should have a legal right to compensation 1 in the criminal sentencing process. Surely, it is argued, criminal sentencing has become out of balance; it has become far too concerned with maintaining the criminal law on an abstract plane and with protecting the rights of the offender; surely the courts have forgotten that crimes often entail actual or substantive harm to real people and not merely symbolic harm to the social order. Surely, therefore, the victim not only has a right to be heard and to make a claim in the sentencing process but a right to a compensation order, a compensation order enforced routinely by criminal justice administrators. Perhaps the needs and rights of the actual victim of crime should indeed be a matter of priority in our total response to crime. Perhaps the victim should have the right to have all the harm or damage done properly assessed and to legal assistance in court quite separate from the prosecutor and the defence counsel. Surely such proposals are consistent with the common moral principles of our society and a matter of simple justice. Perhaps they are also consistent with the rehabilitation of offenders because they hold offenders morally accountable for the wrong they do. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.