Crime bill: expensive, ineffective and entirely political

The Conservative government’s omnibus crime bill is such a sprawling mess of wrong-headed provisions that some future administration will need years to untangle it. By then, our courts and prisons will be overflowing with a generation of hardened jailbirds, and we won’t be one bit safer.

The Safe Streets and Communities Act is a misnamed hodgepodge of provisions, few of which make sense if the real goal is to reduce crime. It will make the justice system more expensive and less effective. As Conservative party campaign rhetoric, it worked because it defined the Tories against their opponents. As law, it’s a disaster.

The government hasn’t produced a shred of evidence that the measures to impose new mandatory minimum sentences, to lengthen other sentences and reduce sentencing discretion for judges will deter crime. In democracies, laws should address demonstrated needs of society and should not be enacted unless they do. On that standard alone, the bill fails.

Crime is going down in Canada, not up. It has been moderating for 30 years, a phenomenon documented in dozens of studies. Moreover, our aging population is a powerful demographic that will only reinforce that trend over time. But the government’s "tough on crime rhetoric suggests the opposite: It portrays us cowering from gangs of hood-lums dominating our streets.

The Conservatives have exploited the reality vs. perception gap with great success. Crime is scary and most people don’t bother finding out the facts. Never mind that rates are down, we’re still scared. The Tories have learned to stimulate that fear and win votes by stomping around like hick-town sheriffs.

In the disjointed logic of politics, facts rarely get in the way. Heritage Minister James Moore expressed that succinctly on Twitter the other day: "this … is what we campaigned on, what we were elected on & we will move forward.

But at what cost? Already the provinces are wondering how they’re going to pay for all the punishment. Provinces pay a lot for justice. Even little Nova Scotia spends more than $1.3 billion a year. Provinces should worry about any measure that will incarcerate people who shouldn’t even be in jail, keep them inside longer and sweep away many distinctions between the criminal and the sick.

It also means that marginalized Canadians — aboriginals, racial minorities, the poorly educated and the mentally ill — will crowd our jails in ever-larger numbers. That isn’t fair.

We’ll also spend billions to build more prisons, hire more guards and pay for more protracted trials. Because the bill removes judges’ sentencing discretion in many cases, defendants will be motivated to fight to the finish. So our crowded courtrooms will just get more crowded, more expensive and less effective.

This is what happens when governments, of any stripe, start believing their own propaganda. The Liberals worshipped economic nationalism and, in 1973, created the job-killing Foreign Investment Review Act. It took 11 years and a change of government to fix that one.

Ditto the National Energy Program of the late 1970s. That was a law so ill-conceived that not only did it fail as an economic program, but it alienated Western voters from the Liberal party. A generation later, they’re still turned off.

No party is immune from legislative blunders and this is a doozy for the Conservatives. They’ll pass it with their majority, that’s certain. But perhaps the opposition will be able to demonstrate that damaging civil rights does not guarantee civil safety. And civil rights will certainly be damaged by parts of this law.

The Tories got elected not because of their swaggering talk about crime, but because Canadians felt they could do the best job of managing the economy and controlling the size of government. Yet after six years of Tory rule, government is actually bigger. The crime bill will grow it some more by adding more jails, police and prisons: government money pits with absolutely no economic value.

The Conservatives can still rise above their campaign rhetoric on crime and do what is just. That’s what "a stable national majority government is supposed to do and what Canadians have a right to expect.

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Source: Chronicle Herald