On the facts, this is an ordinary drug case. Steven Armstrong, of Newmarket, Ont., has pleaded guilty to importing cocaine into Newfoundland and Labrador during the pandemic; his co-conspirators were caught with 3.4 kilograms of cocaine, worth $1 million, secreted in a customized module with a hydraulic release system inside the passenger airbag compartment of a Honda Ridgeline pickup truck. Ordinarily this story ends with a judge imposing a prison sentence and everyone going home. But at a sentencing hearing in Toronto on Thursday, reported by CBC’s Ryan Cooke, something stranger happened: Justice Louis Strezos of the Ontario Court of Justice called the lawyers back into court to ask whether prison is the right tool at all.
The reason is that Armstrong is a single father, and his son Jackson is seven years old. The court heard that the boy has challenges requiring care that Armstrong is the only person able to deliver. If Armstrong goes to prison, his son does not go to an aunt or a grandmother. He goes into the child welfare system. “Is there not a concern that Jackson may repeat the sins of his father if I make him an orphan?” Strezos asked the lawyers.
The two sides are unusually far apart on what should happen. Defence lawyer Adam Boni is asking for a conditional sentence order of less than two years — house arrest, essentially. Crown prosecutor Christopher Kalantzsis had asked for up to seven years in prison, but on Thursday he cut that request to four to five years, after learning what the co-conspirators got in Newfoundland. Dion Wilson Lee Rodgers and Edmond Dorman Pickett pleaded not guilty and were convicted by a jury in Gander, N.L.; Rodgers was sentenced to 39 months and Pickett to 34 months. So the men who fought the charges at trial received less than the Crown originally wanted for the man who admitted his.
The scheme itself was patiently documented. The Newfoundland court heard that police began investigating in 2018, after noticing Armstrong making frequent, short trips to the island on the Marine Atlantic ferry. He was stopped during one visit in 2019 and no drugs were found. Investigators kept tracking him into 2020 and learned he planned to move a pickup truck to Newfoundland; the province’s March 2020 pandemic lockdown kept him out. That September, police watched Armstrong leave Ontario in the truck and head for the ferry terminal in Nova Scotia, while Rodgers and his stepfather boarded the ferry on the Newfoundland side. The stepfather climbed into the Ridgeline on arrival and drove it back, where police stopped him. A first search turned up nothing. Then officers intercepted a message between Rodgers and Armstrong, looked inside the passenger airbag compartment, and found the cocaine.
Armstrong is not a sympathetic paper record. He has a lengthy criminal history, and his last convictions brought federal time in 2011. Kalantzsis calls him a “recidivist drug offender”; Boni counters that the record is dated and that Armstrong has not reoffended in the five years he has been on bail for these charges. The court also heard Armstrong never knew his father and grew up in the child welfare system himself — which is where this stops being a biographical footnote and becomes, in a sense, the central exhibit. “In a twist of cruel fate the young boy’s challenges and the nature of the care he requires and the fact that Mr. Armstrong is the only person who can deliver it has actually commenced the process of rehabilitation in the intervening period,” Boni argued. “The connection between this boy and his father is not only relevant from the collateral consequence on the boy, but is also relevant to the rehabilitation of this offender in a marked way.”
Strezos, in his questions, seemed to be running the same calculation. “The undisputed record before me is that this child will become an orphan and will go to group homes, right? That’s the record ... I’m left in the situation where I have a child who is now eight? Seven? Who will go to a group home and potentially be subject to the very forces and dynamics that led to Mr. Armstrong’s criminality.” He added that a sentence like house arrest offers an avenue to “break that cycle ... and it’s on my mind.”
Sentencing usually asks one question: what does the offender deserve? The Crown’s argument is the classic version — a sentence should reflect the gravity of the offence and the moral blameworthiness of the offender, not just his odds of staying clean. What Strezos is doing is quietly repricing that. A prison sentence has costs that never appear on any prison budget: Jackson’s group home will be paid for out of a different department’s books, and if the boy one day generates his own criminal file, that will land in yet another department. The judge is roughly the only person in the whole apparatus who gets to see all the invoices at once. He seems aware of it. Kalantzsis, notably, did not dispute the harm — “There is no doubt about that,” he said of the consequences for the child; his argument is only that the harm cannot be the whole decision.
Strezos will give his decision on Nov. 12. Whatever he chooses, someone in the system pays for the alternative. Group homes and foster placements are not free either; they just do not show up in the sentencing report.