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Into the past darkly

Bad Stevie, bad. Where's that rolled up newspaper? Oops, careful; might be mistaken for a big joint and land me in jail.
opinion_maxedout1

Bad Stevie, bad. Where's that rolled up newspaper? Oops, careful; might be mistaken for a big joint and land me in jail.

In yet another bold step backwards in time, Canada's new Know Nothing party, ignoring three-plus decades of social science, direct observation, common sense and experience, have set this country down the failed road of America's prison society. Feel the pride, Canada.

Being unable to find anything meaningful to accomplish, or perhaps simply being mean and stupid by nature, Stevie Harpo's Cons have fired their long-promised salvo in the War on Imaginary Crime. Using their majority-in-name-only, the Conservative Party passed Canada's new omnibus crime bill, Bill C-10, or, as the spin cycle of the Joseph Goebbels Memorial Ministry of Propaganda likes to call it, the Safe Streets and Communities Act. Cue the puppies and kittens.

Bill C-10 is a piece of legislation so good, so efficient, so deft at defying the laws of space and time that it's already made Canada's streets some of the safest in the world. Safer now than they were, well, long before this act was ever even conceived of by the nascent Reform Party way back when. But that kind of thinking is so fact-based; it has no real place in a party that muzzles its own scientists and sees foreign terrorists hiding behind every environmental cause. You see, in Know Nothing world, it's a jungle out there and the only way to tame the beasts lurking behind every bush — and in the heart of every person — is to build more prisons and sentence more and more and more people to mandatory terms behind their bars.

In the Conservative world view, people are bad; business is good, environmental activism is bad; short-term profit is very good. Far better to be seen as tough on crime, by people who don't seem to have the capacity or inclination to actually think very hard about complex problems, than to really do something that might reduce what crime there is out there... as opposed to the imaginary stuff.

So instead of launching an initiative that might make Canadians proud of their country — for example, building an education system that grapples with a shameful dropout rate and fails to prepare people for jobs that go begging, doing something other than paying lip service to health care wait times, rebuilding sagging infrastructure or doing any of the things known to actually reduce crime — the Cons are going to put people in prison. New prisons. Lots of new prisons with lots of good prison guard jobs.

Why? You're guess is as good as mine. There is plenty of fact-based evidence this plan won't do much to reduce real crime and will be expensive, both in terms of dollars and social costs. One doesn't even need to translate some obscure social science text from Russian or Chinese or Burmese, there's plenty of data from our misguided neighbours to the south who have been chasing this chimera for decades.

Long after the Americans decided to get tough on crime what have they accomplished? The statistics are impressive. At least as impressive as the U.S. energy consumption numbers. With 5 per cent of the planet's total population, the U.S. is indeed number one... with 25 per cent of the world's incarcerated people. Of course, most of those behind bars don't look like Harpo or the Conservative caucus, or Whistler for that matter.

As Adam Gropnik wrote in The New Yorker in January, "... there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system ...than were in slavery (in 1850). Over all, there are now more people under 'correctional supervision' in America — more than six million — than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States."

Sadly, over half the federal prison population are there because of yet another proven failure — prohibition. Drug offences. Ironically, they have access to some of the best drugs in America in prison.

That Canada has willfully decided to travel this road is, well, criminal. Bill C-10 will squander vast sums — the governments of both Quebec and Ontario have already objected to both the punitive nature of the legislation and the burden of implementation, estimated at $500 million and $1 billion, respectively — and create a new underclass that will ripple throughout Canadian society.

Some of the bill's more onerous features include increased penalties for drug crimes including mandatory minimum sentences, stripping out many of the protections of the Young Offenders Act, reducing judicial discretion in sentencing, politicizing the decision to transfer Canadians convicted in another country back to Canada and enshrining a victim's right to participate in parole hearings.

While I'm certain the last item on that list will prove popular, it illustrates the Conservative view of criminal justice and how it is at odds with centuries of Common Law. Conservatism, in its historical roots, is deeply suspicious of human nature, change and longs to return to the 'way things were,' a phrase popular with Canada's current Justice Minister.

As embodied in Bill C-10, the criminal justice system is personal, it's about punishment and retaliation, as opposed to rehabilitation and reform. But that vision is at odds with the way criminal justice has developed, at least in Common Law countries such as Canada.

In this system, crimes are crimes against the Commonwealth, not against individuals. When Crown prosecutors bring the force of the state to bear on a person accused of committing a crime it isn't The Victim versus Joe Blow, it's the Queen, as the embodiment of the force of law. Victims of crime, like victims of fraud or negligence, can pursue perpetrators through the civil courts; only the government can pursue wrongdoers through exercising the power of the criminal justice system. A crime against one person is a crime against all persons under this system and a recitation of the suffering of the victim isn't, and shouldn't be, the deciding factor in meting out criminal justice or determining parole eligibility.

Apologies for the history lesson. I'll just wait for the hate mail from victims' rights groups.

But c'est la vie. Until we can vote these bozos out of office, we're doomed to walk a dark, dark road. Despoilers of the earth, assaulters of basic democratic concepts, imprisoners of the many, champions of the wealthy, we'll march proudly into the past and call it progress. Heck, maybe if we work hard at it we can beat the Republicans to banning abortion, criminalizing birth control, demonizing immigrants, putting gays back in the closet and disenfranchising everyone who isn't rich and white.

Oh dear lord, don't give them any ideas.