Article content continued

The report, by Rick Audas and Benjamin Perrin, singled out Saskatchewan for “serious deficiencies overall” and a “good deal of room for improvement.”

“The greatest weakness for Saskatchewan was in terms of public safety,” Audas explained during an interview. “We have five measures of crime rates, and Saskatchewan is the worst out of all Canadian provinces on all five of them,” he said, noting in particular high rates of violent and property crimes. On the plus side, the police do a good job of clearing cases, he added.

Fenwick said Saskatchewan has a focused serious violent offender initiative targeting the “relatively small amount of people who are most likely to reoffend and occupy a lot of the justice time.

“If we concentrate on those worst offenders, we can have a huge impact,” he said.

One area that particularly jumped out for Fenwick was the mediocre grade for victim support. “That was a surprise and quite frankly a bit of a disappointment,” he said. “Not only are our benefits as good or better than most places across the country, we’re in the process of completing expansion of our services across the province.”

The study also took aim at Saskatchewan for having the highest number of failures to appear in court per 1,000 crimes, and a high proportion of probation breaches.

“It gives a little bit of a sense of sort of criminals run amok … And that’s a worrying thing,” said Audas. “And it puts a lot of pressure on the rest of the system to respond.”