Peter Wronski ©1992-2002

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As a television chronology of Canada’s cultural underbelly, Crime & Punishment is thematically driven and circular in its linking of the past with the present. Selected themes are each explored from a starting point in the near present. For example:

• The story of rebellion in Canada unfolds from recent civil disorders in Quebec City, Windsor, Toronto, and Vancouver. In the look at the response of law and order to the 1990 Oka crisis in Quebec, the little known 19th century uprising in Oka is paralleled. From the riot in Toronto’s Queens Park in 2000, to those of the 1930’s Depression era on the same ground, down to the deadly clashes at St. Lawrence Hall in the 1870’s and firing of canon grapeshot up Yonge Street in 1834, our series illuminates a meaningful chain-of-events linking our historic past with the present;

• The history of the treatment of female offenders traces centuries of conflicting bawdy house and solicitation laws, works its way back through nineteenth century bylaws on female labour, indentured servitude, arriving at the story of Canada’s first recorded execution: the hanging in New France of a sixteen year old girl at a time when there were 162 capital offenses and a female condemned to death could escape the penalty by marrying her executioner;