The highly contentious crime bill currently weaving its way through Parliament could see fewer than 100 additional prisoners being sent to federal prisons in its first years.
The cost of enforcing the legislation, according to the government, is $78.6-million over five years.
The average annual cost of maintaining a federal inmate was $162,000 in 2008-09, according to the federal budget officer.
If both costing-estimates are accurate (the government’s figure has been questioned), the federal funds set aside for the enormous and sweeping piece of legislation would only fund 97 federal prisoners in a given year.
That number, of course, decreases when administrative costs of enacting new legislation are taken into consideration.
The price tag government has hung on the omnibus bill only reflects the bottom line for Ottawa; it doesn’t include any costs to provinces and territories, whose governments will be expected to foot all costs the new laws impose on them.
What the provinces are in for:
The federal costing has been criticized for lacking any methodology or supporting material.
Trying to figure out what impact the new legislation will have on the provinces’ courts, jails and already stretched budgets only beckons more question marks.
Together, provinces and territories spend slightly more than $1.4 billion operating their jails, compared to $299 million supervising criminals in the community, according to Statistics Canada.
Neither the federal government, Parliamentary Budget Office, nor provincial legislatures has so far completed a comprehensive and extensive calculation of how many more people will be tried, how many of those will be thrown into jail, and how many will receive sentences of less than two years (the sentence terms for which provinces are responsible).
A spokeswoman for Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty – who is demanding Ottawa pay for the extra costs of its legislation -- said preliminary estimates indicate an increase of “hundreds of inmates and millions of dollars.”
The Parliamentary budget office, which is working on a detailed costing of the bill, has said the provinces may be looking at $500 million in extra costs per year.
Potential changes:
Gauging whether the new laws will have a massive or immaterial impact is tricky.
Within the proposed federal legislation are new provisions that would, among other things, create new offences under the criminal code, introduce mandatory minimum sentences for some drug offences and toughen the youth justice system.
Much of the cost burden associated with a resulting uptick in inmates would fall to the provinces, since any person incarcerated for less than two years is a provincial responsibility.
However, it’s difficult to say how many people charged with these crimes will actually end up in jail.
Since 1996, judges have had the option of handing guilty offenders “conditional sentences” – a sentence served outside of a penitentiary, but which comes with conditions including house arrest, for example.
For years, the Conservatives have been against these sentences, of which 9,086 were handed down in 2009-10, according to Statistics Canada.
Conditional sentences must be less than two years in duration, and the offence the offender was found guilty of cannot be punishable by a minimum mandatory sentence.
There are other exceptions, some of which the omnibus crime bill will change.
Predicting whether those changes will result in more or fewer prisoners in penitentiaries remains difficult, since a judge may decide to offer probation rather than imprisonment.
The average cost to a province for keeping a prisoner in 2008-09 was $84,225, according to a report the budget office released last year.
So if every offender who would have been handed a conditional sentence is instead sent to jail for less than two years, the annual cost would be more than $765 million.
Whatever the true costs, the premiers of Ontario and Quebec have made it clear they won’t be picking up the tab -- at least not alone.
In a recent interview with The West Block, Prime Minister Stephen Harper made it equally clear he expects the provinces to pay as part of what he said was their constitutional responsibility.
Origin
Source: Global
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