Nationalism, Retentionism, and Punitiveness: The Fragility of the Death Penalty's Abolition in Canada

The historiography of retentionism – the resistance to the death penalty’s abolition – focuses on countries that part from the global abolition trend. On grounds of national sovereignty and cultural and religious traditions, countries such as Saudi Arabia and China dismiss international human rights. However, statutes, court rulings, and constitutional revisions neither cauterise retentionist sentiment nor prevent calls for reinstatement in countries currently in the abolitionist camp. In Canada, where an amendment to the Criminal Code in 1976 removed the death penalty, retentionists triangulated its shifting operation and disputation in the U.K. and the U.S. In the decades leading up to abolition, the salience of American death penalty politics and penal culture sharpened in a discourse of Canadian penal nationalism. Although a national border separated Canada from a country with a patchwork of state statutes on the death penalty, Canadian retentionists characterised American capital justice as lax. According to the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, professional gun-slinging criminals would turn Canada into their happy hunting ground if the death penalty were abolished. Another failing was America’s experimentation with “modern” means of death – electricity and gas. Neither mode could retain the horror and ignominy of execution by hanging, a practice rooted in British tradition. Finally, abolishing the death penalty in the “white Dominion” would threaten peace, order, and good government by encouraging vigilante justice, including racial lynching. Retentionist nationalism remained potent as Parliament chipped away at the death penalty, first narrowing its scope then through moratoria. Yet, in 1976 the majority of Canadians still supported retention and Parliament came close to reinstating it in 1987. On the post-abolition landscape, the legacy of nationalist reinstatism lingers in a uniquely Canadian form of populist penal envy; however, it should remind historians of the death penalty of abolition’s fragility, not its finality.