Canada: Community, reintegration, restoration and aboriginal responses

Abstract

Canada is a vast country geographically (second only to Russia) with a population of around 35 million people. The scale of the country impacts practice so that even within provincial or territorial boundaries, the interpretation of the 2002 Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA) and the subsequent implementation of restorative justice (RJ) approaches are operationalised differently by the 13 provinces and territories that make up the country (Fox and Arnull 2015). With this in mind, I am going to explore how RJ is practised in the province of British Columbia and within the Fraser Valley, a 100-mile stretch of land that follows the Fraser River from Hope to the coast in Vancouver.