Already Illegal

There is a move in lawmaking that is hard to see because it wears grief on its face: a tragedy that exposes a failure to use the powers that exist becomes the argument for granting new ones. A police officer is murdered by a man who was already forbidden, already prohibited, already out on a release he should not have had — and the lesson drawn, loudly, is that the law was too weak. But the law was not too weak in this case. It was not applied. This case is about the distance between those two sentences — the law failed and the law was not enforced — and about who pays when a government collapses the first into the second and calls eighty changes a tribute.

§01 · What the record carries

Start with the loss, plainly. On 27 December 2022, Ontario Provincial Police Constable Grzegorz "Greg" Pierzchala, twenty-eight, of the Haldimand County detachment, was shot and killed responding to what looked like a routine call — a vehicle in a ditch on Indian Line near Hagersville. That same morning he had learned he had passed his probationary period. On 25 April 2025, a jury found Randall McKenzie and Brandi Stewart-Sperry guilty of first-degree murder; each was sentenced to life with no parole eligibility for twenty-five years. Appeals have been filed.verified The conviction is a finding, not an allegation. Hold the officer at the centre of this: nothing that follows lessens what was done to him.

Now the part the headlines skip. The man convicted of pulling the trigger had been prohibited for life from possessing any firearm since 2018. In 2021 he was charged with several firearm offences and with assaulting a peace officer, and was released on bail on conditions that included staying in his residence and possessing no weapons. By December 2022 he was, on the public record, a person under a lifetime weapons ban, on release, bound by conditions — and in possession of a gun.verified Every element of his conduct was already unlawful before any new statute was written. The question the case poses is not "what law was missing?" It is "why was the law we had not used to keep him in custody?"

§02 · Already illegal

Lay the failure where it actually sits. A lifetime firearms prohibition is not a guideline; it is a standing court order. Bail with conditions is not an absence of law; it is the law deciding, case by case, whether the grounds to detain are met. For a person already under a lifetime ban and facing fresh firearm and assault-of-an-officer charges, the legal grounds to argue for detention existed under the Criminal Code as it stood. He was released anyway. Whatever combination of an overloaded court, a release decision, a missed flag, or a failure to act on a warrant produced that outcome, it was a failure to operate the system — not a gap in the statute the system runs on.contested

This matters because the remedy a failure invites depends entirely on which kind of failure it was. If the law lacked the power to hold him, you change the law. If the law had the power and it was not exercised, you fix the practice — the resourcing, the decisions, the accountability of the people who let him walk. Reaching for new powers when the existing ones went unused does two things at once: it leaves the actual failure unexamined, and it hands the institutions that failed a larger tool instead of a harder question. The new law cannot fail the way the old one did, because the old one did not fail. It was idle.

The law was not too weak in this case. It was not used. Those are different failures, and they call for opposite remedies.

§03 · Eighty changes on a coffin

Watch what the death is made to carry. Pierzchala's killing became a centrepiece of the case for sweeping bail and sentencing reform, and in June 2026 that case crossed the finish line: the Bail and Sentencing Reform Act (Bill C-14) received Royal Assent on the fifteenth, making more than eighty changes to the Criminal Code, the Youth Criminal Justice Act and the National Defence Act, with the bulk taking effect that July. At its core it widens reverse onus — the rule that flips the burden at a bail hearing onto the accused to show why they should be released, rather than on the Crown to show why they should be held.verified It is one of four crime bills the government advanced in a single legislative season.

Two things are true about that package, and the case insists on both. First, it is not nothing — some of its targeted measures may genuinely close real gaps, and the case does not claim every clause is theatre. Second, and decisively: the death it is named for does not demonstrate the need for most of it, because the man it commemorates was already detainable under the old law. Even some of the police and legal voices welcoming the reforms concede the obvious — that whether eighty changes will actually prevent the next killing is, at best, contested.contested A reform sized to a whole population, justified by a single case the existing rules already covered, is a remedy chosen for its symbolism, not its fit.

Counter: bail reform can be defensible on its own merits, and a high-profile death can legitimately focus public attention on a real problem. Granted — and the case does not say otherwise. The objection is specific: when a death is used as the proof that new powers are necessary, and the death in fact proves only that existing powers were unused, the proof has been swapped. The grief is real; the syllogism is not.

§04 · Who pays for the expansion

A law named for one man is enforced against everyone, and that is where the laundering lands. Widening reverse onus does not narrow itself to people like the man in this case; it shifts the default toward detention for whole classes of accused — people who are, in law, still presumed innocent. And the record on who fills Canada's remand cells is not in dispute: pre-trial detention falls hardest on Indigenous, Black and poor accused, who are over-represented at every step where discretion meets disadvantage.contested The cost of a remedy justified by an officer's death is paid, disproportionately, by people who had nothing to do with his death and who have been convicted of nothing at all.

That is the precise shape of the move. You did not need to widen the net for everyone in order to hold the one man the system already had grounds to hold. Doing it anyway converts a targeted failure — one release decision, one unused prohibition — into a standing, population-wide tilt toward custody, with the heaviest weight on the least powerful. The officer is honoured in the title; the bill is sent to a remand cell occupied by someone the title never mentioned.

§05 · What is being laundered, named plainly

What is being laundered is accountability — specifically, the accountability for an enforcement failure, converted on the strength of a death into a mandate for expanded power. The question that the case actually raises, why did a man under a lifetime weapons ban walk out on bail?, is answered not with an audit of that decision but with eighty changes aimed at everyone else. The institutions that failed to use the powers they had receive larger powers and no reckoning. The grief is genuine and the officer is real; only the logic has been switched, so that a failure to enforce reads as a failure of the law, and the cure for the first is sold as the cure for the second.

The case claims this, and only this: that the specific failure behind Constable Pierzchala's death was an enforcement and bail-decision failure under laws that already prohibited everything his killer did, and that invoking the death to pass a broad, reverse-onus-widening expansion launders that failure into a mandate it did not earn — at a cost borne disproportionately by accused people, presumed innocent, unconnected to the case. It does not claim the death is exaggerated, that the bail system functioned, that the killer should have been free, or that every measure in the package is worthless. The two errors it refuses are twins: the official one, that the law was too weak and eighty changes are its tribute (which buries the failure); and the cynical one, that it is all mere theatre and nothing matters (which buries the real death and the real harm the expansion will do). Keep the failure named AND the cost named — and both dissolve.