The Next Step In Harper's Police State

So, Harper wants to connect the CRA with the RCMP.

Chantal Bernier, Canada's interim privacy commissioner, says she is concerned by the government's proposal to allow Canada Revenue Agency officials to voluntarily hand over taxpayer information to police if they have reason to believe such information is evidence of a crime. 

In her testimony before the House finance committee on Wednesday, Bernier urged the committee to properly demonstrate that information sharing between auditors and law enforcement is needed. 

"That is exceptional and therefore should be buttressed by an empirical demonstration of necessity," she said. 

The proposal, which is tucked away in the government's hefty 375-page omnibus budget bill, is an amendment to the Income Tax Act that would give auditors the right to disclose information found through the course of their regular duties to police.

In the middle of another one of Harper's omnibus bills, you say?  This has nothing to do with implementing the budget.  It has everything to do with a government who does not want to debate their legislation, and is incapable of being honest with Canadians about what its real agenda is.

As the Income Tax Act currently stands, officials are not allowed to disclose any information unless there's a criminal investigation underway or any serious circumstances with possible danger of death. In other words, only in rare situations. 

But under the government's intended changes, auditors can provide police with information if they believe it's evidence of crimes ranging anywhere from bribing public officials to motor vehicle theft to monetarily benefiting from acts of arson. 

Allison Christians, an associate professor at McGill University in Montreal who specializes in tax law, said this is further evidence of an "erosion of confidentiality — of privacy in general — from this administration."

This government appears hell-bent on stripping away any sense of privacy on the part of Canadians.  Their "anti-bullying" bill is nothing more than a retitling of the "Tell Vic Everything" internet spying bill a couple of years ago and this places the people that process taxes in the position of being an arm of the RCMP.

Harper has gone to extraordinary lengths not just to attack the privacy of Canadians, but he has also made enormous attacks on our judicial system - in particular in the form of "mandatory minimum sentences" which remove all discretion on the part of judges and place more people in prison for longer, but in a myriad of subtle ways which put more and more power in the hands of the police. 

Bill C-32: Is This Even Necessary?

As I start to review the content of Bill C-32, the so-called "Victim's Bill of Rights" legislation, I find myself wondering if this piece of legislation is even meaningful.  

The first thing that made me wonder about this was the following:  

11. Sections 380.3 and 380.4 of the Act are repealed.

I went on a fishing expedition and dug up the to be repealed sections of the Criminal Code, and what do I find but the following:

• 380.3 (1) When an offender is convicted, or is discharged under section 730, of an offence referred to in subsection 380(1), the court that sentences or discharges the offender, in addition to any other measure imposed on the offender, shall consider making a restitution order under section 738 or 739.Marginal note:

  Inquiry by court(2) As soon as practicable after a finding of guilt and in any event before imposing the sentence, the court shall inquire of the prosecutor if reasonable steps have been taken to provide the victims with an opportunity to indicate whether they are seeking restitution for their losses, the amount of which must be readily ascertainable.Marginal note:

  Adjournment(3) On application of the prosecutor or on its own motion, the court may adjourn the proceedings to permit the victims to indicate whether they are seeking restitution or to establish their losses, if the court is satisfied that the adjournment would not interfere with the proper administration of justice.Marginal note:

  Form for victims(4) Victims may indicate whether they are seeking restitution by completing Form 34.1 in Part XXVIII or a form approved for that purpose by the Lieutenant Governor in Council of the province where the court has jurisdiction or by using any other method approved by the court, and, if they are seeking restitution, shall establish their losses, the amount of which must be readily ascertainable, in the same manner.Marginal note:

  Reasons(5) If a victim seeks restitution and the court decides not to make a restitution order, it shall give reasons for its decision and shall cause those reasons to be stated in the record. 

  380.4 (1) For greater certainty, for the purpose of determining the sentence to be imposed on an offender, or whether the offender should be discharged under section 730, in respect of an offence referred to in subsection 380(1), the court may consider a statement made by a person on a community’s behalf describing the harm done to, or losses suffered by, the community arising from the commission of the offence.Marginal note:

  Procedure(2) The statement must(a) be prepared in writing and filed with the court;(b) identify the community on whose behalf the statement is made; and(c) explain how the statement reflects the community’s views.Marginal note:Copy of statement 

  (3) The clerk of the court shall provide a copy of the statement, as soon as practicable after a finding of guilt, to the offender or counsel for the offender, and to the prosecutor.

Wait a second ... isn't restitution one of the "big things" in bill C-32?

Why, yes, it is:

16. Every victim has the right to have the court consider making a restitution order against the offender.17. Every victim in whose favour a restitution order is made has the right, if they are not paid, to have the order entered as a civil court judgment that is enforceable against the offend- er.

The change the ReformaTories are making here is to remove the very specific and focused clauses already present in the Criminal Code and generalizing it.  This is a very foolish thing to do.  What is "restitution", but a form of economic punishment.  For economic crimes, that isn't necessarily unreasonable.  For other forms of crime, how do they propose that a judge make an assessment?  In cases of bodily injury, is the government going to come up with a table of values of some kind?  A broken finger is so much, a broken leg is more money and so on?

To this point, the notion of restitution has been focused quite clearly in specific areas of law where the concept of restitution is relatively clear.  In making this change, the Harper Government has turned it into something which is effectively an arbitrary additional punishment to be levied on top of whatever other punishment the court metes out.

Then there is this little gem, which rewords the sentencing guidelines in the Criminal Code:

718. The fundamental purpose of sentencing is to protect society and to contribute, along with crime prevention initiatives, to respect for the law and the maintenance of a just, peaceful and safe society by imposing just sanctions that have one or more of the following objectives:(a) to denounce unlawful conduct and the harm done to victims or to the community that is caused byunlawful conduct;

(2) Paragraph 718(f) of the Act is replaced by the following:(f) to promote a sense of responsibility in offenders, and acknowledgment of the harm done to victims or to the community.

This is changed from the following:

718. The fundamental purpose of sentencing is to contribute, along with crime prevention initiatives, to respect for the law and the maintenance of a just, peaceful and safe society by imposing just sanctions that have one or more of the following objectives:(a) to denounce unlawful conduct;(b) to deter the offender and other persons from committing offences;(c) to separate offenders from society, where necessary;(d) to assist in rehabilitating offenders;(e) to provide reparations for harm done to victims or to the community; and(f) to promote a sense of responsibility in offenders, and acknowledgment of the harm done to victims and to the community.

R.S., 1985, c. C-46, s. 718;

 R.S., 1985, c. 27 (1st Supp.), s. 155;

 1995, c. 22, s. 6.

This is a completely unnecessary change to the sentencing guidelines part of the Criminal Code.  What it fundamentally attempts to do is write into the laws of this country a philosophy that the Harper Government has been trying to ram down Canadians' throats for years - the idea that criminal justice is about punish, Punish, PUNISH.  We already know, from the example of the United States, that when you make the punishments all the more harsh, that you will simply create a situation where you have more and more people in prison, and those caught in that system have nothing to lose.

Then, as if to drive home my point for me, the Harper Government inserts the following into the sentencing guidelines:

739.1 The offender’s financial means or ability to pay does not prevent the court from making an order under section 738 or 739.

This underscores the fundamental unreasonableness of this legislation in my view.  A restitution order is utterly meaningless if the offender has no means to meet it.  All that this will do is create another obstacle to meaningfully rehabilitating and reintegrating an offender into the broader fabric of society once their term of incarceration is completed.

On top of it all, several provinces have already implemented significant "Victims Rights" legislation already.  It seems gratuitous for the Federal government to add this sloppy bill to the mix.  So, do we need this legislation at all?

Speech From The Throne

As expected, yesterday's Speech From The Throne was a mixed bag of feel good items and attempts to set political traps for future governments.

As expected Harper starts off by trying to brag about his economic record:

• Last year’s deficit was less than forecast. Our Government will balance the budget by 2015. 

  §  And it will go further. Our Government will enshrine in law its successful and prudent approach. Our Government will introduce balanced-budget legislation. It will require balanced budgets during normal economic times, and concrete timelines for returning to balance in the event of an economic crisis.
  
  §  Our Government has already set an ambitious debt-to-GDP target of 25 per cent by 2021. And it will reduce that ratio to pre-recession levels by 2017. 

• 
  

Oh ... the deficit was smaller than anticipated?  For those who had forgotten, Harper came to power in 2006 with the Federal Government in a budget surplus position (we were paying debt off in 2006).  By 2008, he had already spent Canada into a deficit position ... and that was before the financial crisis happened!  For Harper to claim a "reduced deficit" as some kind of an achievement is damning himself with faint praise.  

Remember That Obscure Concept Of Due Process?

The Harperites are busy erasing it.

Remember Mr. Abdelrazik?:

Under a UN Security Council resolution, Ottawa has the power to punish anyone who provides Abdelrazik with material support.

Even if he got a paycheque, he couldn't withdraw funds from his bank account. After a court battle, he won an injunction that allowed him limited monthly withdrawals from his credit union account.

Both CSIS and the RCMP have acknowledged they have no evidence against Abdelrazik. He was exonerated of any ties to al-Qaida by the Sudanese Justice Department in 2005.

But efforts to have his name removed from the list have been unsuccessful. The federal government and other authorities have continued to apply the sanctions.

Does anybody else see something horribly wrong here? We have a man whose life is being constrained not because of a crime he committed, but because his name got on some arbitrary list somewhere and the agencies of government involved have refused to remove his name from it - in spite of having absolutely no evidence to support the allegations that got his name on the list in the first place!

Someone please explain to me how this is even remotely related to the concept of justice - much less the more ill-defined terms of "security" in the post-9/11 world, where our government seems to have decided that "security" means invading people's lives without cause and casting suspicion upon all in the name of extending the government's invasion into our lives.

North America is starting to sound a lot like the stories we used to hear coming out of the old Warsaw Pact countries.

We Can't Afford The Harper Con$ Criminal Agenda

When Canwest's writers are starting to twig to the dogmatic, ideologically bound Harper Con$ervatives agenda - and pointing out the problems with it - you know it's bad.

Why the Harper Conservatives would want to adopt such a tragically failed social and fiscal strategy beggars understanding.

"We don't govern on the basis of statistics," Nicholson told reporters Wednesday.

Of course not. Why pay attention to facts, to evidence, or to logic, if they don't support your pet ideological agenda?

If we want to understand the real costs of the HarperCon$ ideological agenda, we only need to look south of the border where various states have implemented the very policies that the Harper government is trying to force upon Canada:

The United States has spent two decades experimenting with the same "tough on crime" philosophy the Harper Conservatives now espouse. The results have been economically and socially disastrous.

In South Carolina, for example, the state adopted tough new "truth in sentencing" laws in the mid-1990s. From 1983 to 2008, spending on prisons went up 600 per cent, while the number of prisoners soared from 9,000 to almost 25,000.

In California, according to data from the Pew Center on the States, more than 755,000 people are either in prison or on parole; the state spends almost $10 billion US a year on corrections, helping to drive it into financial meltdown.

Over all, spending on corrections in America has jumped from $11 billion US 20 years ago to $50 billion US today. One out of every 100 adult Americans is in jail, and one in 31 is on probation or parole. As the respected conservative magazine The Economist put it last week, "Never in the civilized world have so many been locked up for so little."

It is truly a sad statement when they are willing to ignore the unmistakable fact that the crime rate in Canada has been dropping for most of the last two decades, and instead insist that there is a phantom "unreported crime" epidemic as justification for their agenda.

The Harper government is going to drive Canada into bankruptcy with a "tough on crime" policy that has enormous costs and virtually no real impact on the crime rate. Funny, for a party that has campaigned on "better governance", and "greater transparency", that they should be so wilfully blind to the realities of their own policies ... unless of course they were lying to the public - which would hardly come as a surprise.

"Get Tough On Crime": Expensive and Unnecessary

With Canada's crime rate continuing to drop - even without Harper's "get tough on crime" laws in force - we might want to consider just how necessary that very political agenda is.

While the statistics show a long-term decline in crime rates, the federal government continues to stress the threat.

Public Safety Minister Vic Toews own web site says: ``Unfortunately, our safe streets and healthy communities are increasingly under threat of gun, gang and drug violence.''

So...according to the HarperCon$, we need to spend more money on prisons, lengthier incarcerations and so on.

If we put more people in prison for longer, the natural consequence of that will be a need for more prisons. The United States has already gone down this particular road - and the US has the largest documented population of prisoners - at what cost?

Canada's taxpayers are going to foot the bill for Harper's fear-laden agenda - monies which arguably would be better used elsewhere - education, health care and the like come to mind as a starting point.

Instead of paying attention to the numbers, we find Harper's minions running about trying to make us all afraid, so that they can write more bad legislation.

Hell Must Be Freezing Over

First Flaherty introduces legislation which I can actually support.

Then we find Conrad Black pointing out what's horribly wrong with the HarperCon$ approach to crime and punishment:

This Roadmap--which was released in 2007, and which the Harper government began officially responding to in its budget in 2008, setting out a five-year plan -- turns the humane traditions of Canada upside down. It implicitly assumes that all who are convicted are guilty and have no remaining claim to decency from the state, and that treating confinees accordingly is in the interest of the legally unexceptionable majority.

The Roadmap does not mention prisoners' rights, beyond basic food, shelter, clothing and medical care, and assumes that they are probably not recoverable for society and that the longer they are imprisoned, the better it is for society. Almost no distinction is made between violent and non-violent offenders.

I won't profess any great love or respect for His Lordship - frankly I think he's no better than that great fraudster Charles Ponzi, but he is certainly much more articulate than most of Harper's cabinet seems to be.

The Roadmap holds that anything beyond the necessities for physical survival must be "earned." Traditionally, the punishment is supposed to be the imprisonment itself, not the additional oppressions of that regime, and the proverbial debt to society is paid when the sentence has been served; it does not continue as a permanent Sisyphean burden. In the interests of eliminating illegal drugs in prison, the authors of the Roadmap want all visits to be glass-segregated, no physical contact. This is just a pretext to assist in the destruction of families and friendships.

The importation of contraband by prisoners' visitors can be stopped by strip-searching the prisoners before they leave the visitors centre, as happens to us here, unless the prison staff, who have the unfathomable delight of inspecting us au naturel, are on the take, which is, of course, the problem, as correctional officers in many prisons are frequently caught smuggling, and aren't well enough trained to command higher salaries to make them more resistant to temptation. It is a problem, but it will not be solved by targeting unoffending relatives of inmates. The Roadmap also has naively exaggerated confidence in certain types of scanning devices.

No surprise here, really. Harper and his band of reactionaries are completely oblivious to the long term consequences of their actions. If nothing else, this "roadmap" is one more step on Harper's unstated agenda of making Canada into a right wing, totalitarian state. Taking the worst of prison practices around the world and through history will do nothing to improve public safety.

The whole concept of prison should be terminated, except for violent criminals and chronic non-violent recidivists, and replaced by closely supervised pro bono or subsistence-paid work by bonded convicts in the fields of their specialty. Swindlers and embezzlers, hackers and sleazy telemarketers are capable people and they should serve their sentences by contributing honest work to government-insured employers.

Hmmm...interesting. When you've lost one of the godfathers of right wing ideology in Canada, I'd say you're way off the course you should be on.

Why Should The Opposition Cooperate?

With parliament about to restart, Justice Minister Nicholson wants his bills reinstated.

Frankly, I think the opposition's answer to Nicholson should be "no". Harper is the one who prorogued parliament, it was his actions which killed those bills - let the government clean up the mess it created.

Given that these are the same awful bills that the HarperCon$ have been trying to push through since 2006, and they've been killed numerous times by Harper's actions, I'm of the opinion that Harper has nothing to bitch about. He screwed over parliament for naked personal gain, I think it's high time that accountability included him having to actually clean up the mess that his actions create.

First They Came For ...

As if it was any real surprise, but the Conservatives are making yet another attack on people that they don't think have any voice, rights or for that matter might not even be human in their eyes.

This time, it's more of the ugly truth of the Conservative agenda - the one that Harper and his buddies don't talk about out loud.

The Conservative government plans to bring in an American-style prison system that will cost billions of taxpayer dollars and do little to improve public safety

A panel led by Rob Sampson, a former corrections minister in Ontario's Mike Harris government, drafted the government plan, which is being implemented by the Correctional Service.

In addition to constructing super prisons and implementing work programs, the program will eliminate gradual release and deny inmates rights that are now entrenched in the constitution.

By stressing punishment rather than rehabilitation, the plan ignores lessons of the past, which led to the prison riots and killings that dominated Canadian news in the early 1970s, said Jackson.

"My greatest fear is with this road map's agenda and its underlying philosophy, we will enter a new period of turmoil and violence in Canadian prisons," he said.

Great. Just great. Let's emulate the US system - where California's prisons are so overcrowded, the courts have ordered them emptied, and nearly a full percent of the US population is incarcerated under "get tough on crime" laws that incarcerate blindly, and take no steps to rehabilitate the prisoner.

Worse, the HarperCon$ are plotting to set up an environment where the already acknowledged legal rights of the prisoners are denied. How delightful. Considering that they have already gone after "Women, special interest groups and socialists", and that they are now setting the stage for an ideologically based attack on prisoners (a group which has even less political clout), just whom might be next on their agenda of establishing a hierarchy of rights? (You know, where those who vote Tory Blue get preferential treatment)

... and they are doing this behind closed doors. This is not being proposed in Parliament; there is no debate over whether such policy directions are either constitutional or practical. (Those who have lived in Alberta will recognize this pattern as consistent with the sense of entitlement that the PC's have developed here - they not only don't believe that they are accountable to the public, they don't even consider the public interest - it's purely ideology)

So ... who will speak for you when they come?

No Big Surprise Here

The HarperCon$ continue to dodge their duty to Omar Khadr - this time by appealing the court verdict of a few weeks ago.

“The Government of Canada has consistently stated that Omar Khadr faces serious charges,” said a statement from the department of Foreign Affairs.

“After careful consideration of the legal merits of the ruling from the Canadian Federal Court issued on April 23, the Government of Canada has decided to appeal the decision.

“As the matter is currently under litigation, we will provide no further comment at this time.”

Ummm...no Khadr is not facing serious charges. At most he is facing a bunch of "charges" that only stand up in a faux court concocted by the Bush II government to get political convictions.

You couldn't put Khadr into a criminal court in either Canada or the United States and have the charges stand up for more than about thirty five seconds - you know, about the length of time it takes to point out that he was underage at the time and that most of the "corroborating" evidence was extracted under torture. (Oh wait - they didn't "torture", did they? It was "enhanced interrogation" - by means of such helpful techniques as near drowning people)

If Khadr is in fact chargeable with "serious crimes", then repatriate him, and try him in Canada's courts. But then, I'm pretty sure that any sentence he might receive has been more than made up by his incarceration in Guantanamo Bay.

And then there's the latest bunch of idiocy to be tabled regarding Mr. Abdelrazik:

He should get himself off the United Nations's 1267 list, Elizabeth Richards, a Justice Department lawyer, replied, referring to the Security Council's list of terrorist suspects, named after UN Resolution 1267, which created it.

“But how are you supposed to respond [to the secret allegations] when you don't know why you are on the list?” the judge asked.

There was no answer from Ms. Richards.

...
Mr. Abdelrazik, the only Canadian on the UN blacklist, was added by the Bush administration in 2006. But no reason or evidence has ever been made public. He has denied any links with al-Qaeda and, before the Harper government agreed to ask the UN to delist him in 2007, he was cleared of criminal and terrorist links by both the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Last month, two hours before he was to fly home – 200 Canadian chipped in to buy him a ticket – Mr. Cannon rescinded previous promises of a one-way travel document and designated him, without giving reasons, a national security risk.

“The refusal of a passport on national-security grounds does not violate the Charter,” Ms. Richards told the court yesterday.

Ms. Richards and her Justice Department colleague, Anne Turley, insisted that the whole long litany of promised one-way travel documents that were never delivered – because the government kept changing what Mr. Abdelrazik had to do to get them – was no longer an issue that they need to consider.

Canada's Conservative government has apparently become a bunch of apologists for the worst aspects of the Bush II regime. Still more evidence that Canadians should be embarrassed by Harper and Co.

Understanding Why NCR Laws Do Not Need To Change

In recent weeks, there has been a certain amount of "why isn't Vincent Li accountable for his actions"? being bandied about.

The Globe and Mail does a great job of explaining just how things failed at every step of the way where Mr. Li was concerned.

“The stigma around the illness is so severe,” said Mary Alberti, executive director of the Schizophrenic Society of Ontario, “that people are afraid to talk about it, afraid to come forward because they are afraid of how they will be treated by society.”

That's an understatement - especially for a condition as severe as schizophrenia, which most can only guess at how it affects its victims.

He was picked up by police and taken to William Osler Health Centre in Etobicoke. “He was vague, seemed to be hallucinating, staring into space,” a doctor there noted. “He has not slept or eaten for three days.”

He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and given medications that he refused to take.

Believing Mr. Li was at risk of harming himself or others, doctors placed him on two involuntary admission certificates and could have legally detained him for 14 days. For reasons still unclear, he walked away from the hospital after just 10 days.

There's a significant point here. We need to recognize that Mr. Li probably didn't understand that anything was really wrong with him. The disruption in thought that schizophrenia creates is sufficiently severe that from within, it can seem normal.

This is one of the reasons why we cannot ethically hold him liable for those actions. They took place under circumstances which the person we know as Mr. Li was "not in the building" so to speak. If we treat Mr. Li, and manage to restore him to a modestly stable condition, are we in fact punishing the same person that committed those crimes? In such a situation, it's extremely hard to say yes or no.

In his mind, he and his trusty buck knife had just slain a demon. With blood smeared across his face and three of the demon's body parts stuffed in his pocket, he couldn't understand why police surrounded him as soon as he landed, or why they “put cuffs on my hand and then they took me to the police station and treated me like a murderer,” he later told a psychiatrist.

It took weeks of treatment before Mr. Li realized the extent of his actions the night of July 30, 2008: that a major psychotic disorder had compelled him to stab, dismember and disembowel a 22-year-old stranger aboard a Greyhound bus bound for Winnipeg.

It sounds like he's aware of what he was did now (in which case, I pity the man, for he will remember both the incident and the process of digging out his role in it for the rest of his life, and he will have to find a way to understand, and accept, his role in that event - a punishment far worse for most than any prison cell).

The whole story around this man is one of a series of failures - on the part of Mr. Li, the medical system, those around him and society. Society probably holds the biggest weight here, for collectively, we continue to treat mental illness with a mixture of fear and contempt. Fear because we do not adequately understand it, and contempt because it is so difficult to empathize with someone whose illness is not physical.

Our medical institutions are woefully inadequate when it comes to treating mental health conditions, and we continue to underfund the area, meaning that treatment beds are at a premium; and the ability to track patients with severe, long term treatment needs is virtually non-existent.

When incidents like that of July 2008 occur, we should be cognizant of the fact that they represent more than a failure of an individual. They often represent a systemic failure that could well have begun years before.

So Much For That "Principled Statement"

Remember in 2007, when Stockwell Day said that the government would not seek clemency for Canadians who face the death penalty abroad?

Well, it appears that the judiciary thinks otherwise, and has ordered the government to actually move.

“The decision by the government of Canada to withdraw support for Mr. Smith was made in breach of the duty of fairness, is unlawful and is set aside,” Judge Barnes said. “In the absence of any new clemency policy, I am ordering the government to continue to apply the former policy of supporting clemency on behalf of Canadians facing the death penalty in any foreign state to Mr. Smith.”

He said that it may be open to the government to change its policy on clemency for Canadians facing foreign execution, but that “it is another thing altogether to make specific unfavourable comments about an individual's case for relief which might jeopardize his legal status.”

The evidence that the HarperCon$ just don't get it keeps on rolling in, doesn't it?

There's A Difference Between Justice and Revenge

I don't think there was ever a lot of doubt that Vince Li was clinically insane when he stabbed Tim McLean to death.

While I sympathize with the McLean family's expressed grief and outrage, I do take considerable exception to this statement from Ms. deDelley:

“My concern is protecting everybody else from people like this,” said Carol deDelley, Mr. McLean's mother, who has been pushing for a new law that would prevent anyone designated NCR from being released. “For Mr. Li's safety, he needs to be in a locked treatment facility. For me, I don't care if it's in a penitentiary or a treatment facility.”

The odds of Mr. Li getting out any time soon is practically nil. This appears to be one of the rare cases where there is little dispute about his mental state, and what is necessary to treat that condition. (at least to the best of our limited abilities) Mr. Li is apt as not to be locked up in a psychiatric facility for the rest of his life - schizophrenia, especially when it results in violence, is exceptionally difficult to treat, and the odds of any treatment being declared "successful" are pretty slim. Ms. deDelley is asking for revenge, not justice.

The sad thing here is that there are two victims in this horrific crime - Mr. McLean, and Mr. Li. We should not lose sight of the tragedy that either of these people represent.

Stephen Harper: Not Getting It

No, Stephen, it's not "soft on crime", it's about being effective in addressing the issues the crime presents.

Says Steve:

"The truth of the matter is, those who say that the tougher penalties on perpetrators will not work don’t want them to work because they don’t believe in his kind of approach," he told reporters.

"We know that we’re going to hear these critics, and we know that we’re going to hear the opposition parrot some of these critics because they all believe in soft-on-crime policies."

No, you moron. As I point out back here, what the Conservatives are proposing is fundamentally unable to address the real issues that lead to gang violence. At most, you're going to fill up our jails with petty thugs, meanwhile the serious criminals - the ones who run the illegitimate 'businesses' that these gangs are the front lines of, continue to get away with it unchallenged.

Michael Chettleburgh, a criminal justice analyst and author of Young Thugs, which chronicles the rise of Canada's homegrown gang culture, said the Tories' measures won't add much clarity to how ill-equipped the justice system is to handle gang violence in Canada.

"Right now we are navigating in the fog around the gang issue," he told CBC News from Toronto.

"For many gang members, tougher laws doesn't matter. They don't pay attention to tougher laws."

He said Canada is lagging behind compared to the recent changes made in the United States, such as allowing the testimony of witnesses against gangs to be entered into court records without the witness having to stand before the court.

This legislation, like just about every other "major" piece of legislation I've seen come out since 2006 is barely window dressing - and in this case, it's less than that.

Alberta Bill 50 - A License To Harass?

This week, Alberta passed Bill 50 which gives the crown the power to seize and sell assets used in the commission of crime.

On the surface, this sounds fairly reasonable - the government has an agreed upon right to establish the penalties that are associated with crime in general - from fines to incarceration.

However, there are aspects of Bill 50 that are quite troublesome. First of all, the bill does not specify any limits to its application. The powers that the bill asserts can be invoked for just about any offense. The example that has been in the media is the seizure of a car used in transporting drugs. Sure that sounds good, but is this appropriate in other situations? For example, if you are charged with "copyright piracy" under the proposed DMCA-clone the HarperCon$ tried to introduce twice last year, should you find your house forfeit because it was where you copied a handful of MP3's?

More troubling is this set of clauses in S 19.4:

(3) With respect to an application for a restraint order,
(a) it is not necessary for the Minister to establish that any
person has been charged with, found guilty of or
convicted of or otherwise held responsible for any illegal
act in relation to any matter related to the property in
respect of which the application is made, and
(b) the Court may grant a restraint order notwithstanding
that a person has not been charged with, found guilty of
or convicted of or otherwise held responsible for any
officer or a civil enforcement agency;
(c) providing for matters that are ancillary to any direction
given under clause (a) or (b).

In essence, all that the government is obliged to do is assert that property has been used in a "crime", and presto, you could find yourself facing seizure. While there are time limits on the restraining orders involved, it's not hard to see that there is a real risk that an overzealous crown attorney or law enforcement officer could use this mechanism as a tool to harass someone over some slight or another.

Bill 50 strikes me as a piece of legislation that while well intentioned, is poorly thought out - and subject to significant abuse, with few constraints on the government bodies involved.

Confusing Justice With Revenge

I'm sympathetic to the family of Tim McLean (not to mention everybody else that was on that bus to Winnipeg). There's no question that their son was murdered in a horrifying and brutal act that we still do not really understand.

However, in calling for "stiffer sentences", they are grossly misunderstanding something.

Carol deDelley, Mr. McLean's mother, has said that she's concerned the man charged in her son's death might eventually be released if he is found not criminally responsible by the courts.

She wants the federal government to amend the law so that no one gets off lightly because of mental illness.

The odds of Tim McLean's murderer ever being released from psychiatric care is between slim, nil and none if his found "not criminally responsible".

Law professor Sanjeev Anand said defence lawyers don't often argue criminal responsibility because the person stands to be detained indefinitely as opposed to being jailed for a limited sentence.

Even if someone is convicted of murder, Mr. Anand said they have a chance of parole.

“I understand the family's concern but if this individual poses a danger to the public, he'll be detained,” said Mr. Anand, who teaches at the University of Alberta.

“The restrictions on his liberty will be just as great.”

In short, if the accused in this case is found to be 'not criminally responsible', they face a much more ambiguous sentencing status - namely indefinite detention in a locked psychiatric facility.

We should recognize that no plea has been entered yet in this case, nor has any evidence been heard in a court.

Superficially, the description of events that has been presented in the media certainly sounds consistent with a psychotic episode - and may be an indicator of a more serious mental illness that has been progressing quietly for years.

The finding that he is 'fit to stand trial' doesn't tell us a lot about his psychiatric status at the time of the act - at best it indicates that the individual is able to understand the proceedings coherently. If he has a psychotic episode during the course of the trial that could dramatically change the course of proceedings - leading to an indefinite incarceration, with the trial suspended indefinitely as well.

Recent pleas for harsher laws in this case I presume to have more to do with the family's grieving for a lost son, and are not rooted in a clear understanding of either the situation or the current state of the laws involved.

An Interesting Ploy ... But What Good Will It Do?

I'm not particularly opposed to the idea of tracking parolees electronically, but I find myself wondering just what the point really is.

"Corrections officers can monitor exactly the whereabouts of an offender at any given moment – these are very precise, satellite-driven devices," Day said in Halifax as he held up one of the black, circular gadgets.

"It makes the job of the correctional officer more efficient."

The devices use Global Positioning System technology to report parolee movements to a monitoring network that streams data on a regular, but not real-time, basis

Okay, in a perfect world, you can tell approximately where someone is. Of course, any such system is going to be somewhat error-prone. I don't share Stockwell Day's confidence in the technology - Satellite systems are surprisingly brittle, and easily disrupted by something as simple as the weather; and that doesn't even begin to open the can of worms around the fact that someone who wants to can come up with all sorts of ways to disrupt them.

But critics panned the initiative, saying the technology is flawed and prone to being abused by crafty parolees who can outsmart the devices by cutting them off, disabling them or, as one is reported to have done, fool officials by strapping it onto a pet cat.

Just to be clear, the device has to be removable for a number of basic reasons - safety and hygiene among the top of the list. You can't just clamp one of these to someone's leg and tell them never to take it off. (Anyone who has ever worn a tensor bandage or cast for any length of time can tell you just how bad that can get if you can't clean the area regularly.

Even if I presume that most parolees would just wear the thing, I find myself puzzled by just what this system will prove. At best, it might make it easier to detect occasions where someone violates 'no go' restrictions in their parole order. There's a limited amount of utility to that.

One of the questions that we have to consider is the costs of maintaining such a system. Consider a parolee with an order to stay 50M away from playgrounds. Even if you have a handful of playgrounds within a 10Km radius of where the parolee is living, there's a lot of geographic detail that has to maintained in the database to detect when a violation has occurred. (To be truly meaningful, I suspect that one needs the geometry of the park recorded in the database) The costs of maintaining the database, as well as the rules engine required to describe the various restrictions being imposed, is going to be quite high - especially once you have more than a handful of cases being tracked.

The other thing that does worry me is this little tidbit:

...but that officials at a monitoring centre in the United States are quickly alerted to any breaches and follow a protocol to determine whether police are dispatched.

With the often dramatic differences in Canadian and US laws - and the related complexity, I wonder about having monitoring centers that are run by US companies. There are also concerns around the data being shared across the border. The American government has laws on the books that give them access to the contents of any server on American soil, and that raises serious questions about both the confidentiality of data and privacy violations.

In Harper's World...

It seems that in the world of Stephen Harper and the HarperCon$, citizenship is conditional, and the government's willingness to support its citizens abroad is even more so conditional.

Since Harper came to power, there has been a string of cases where Harper has failed to intervene on behalf of Canadians held in dubious circumstances abroad. Whether we are talking about the Celil case in China, Brenda Martin in Mexico, or Omar Khadr detained in Guantanamo Bay, we have a string of cases where Harper's involvement has been superficial, late and ineffective.

In the case of Omar Khadr, we find the government trying to sidestep providing material to the Khadr defense team. Khadr is charged with some very serious crimes, and worse, Canadian officials have been active participants in interrogating the man (who has been rotting in US custody for six years or so now), and have copies of "evidence" that the US government will only allow access to a highly redacted version of.

Half-baked comments about national security issues are sophistry. The real issue here is whether or not Khadr stands even the faintest chance of a fair trial in Bush's extra-judicial system of show courts set up to handle these detainees. When Bush has gone out of his way to construct a court system that is deliberately stacked against the accused - while still having the ability to avail itself of the most drastic of punishments.

What is at issue here is not national security, but whether or not the HarperCon$ have even the slightest concept of what "fair trial" means, much less just how ludicrous it is to accuse someone of "war crimes" at the age of fifteen - especially in a combat zone! Given the number of attempts that Bush has made at concocting these bogus "courts", he's already in the very questionable game of making criminal law that is retroactive - and that doesn't even address the problems with concurrently claiming and denying military involvement on the part of Guantanamo Bay detainees.

As Canadians, we don't have to like the Khadr family's exploits, but we absolutely should be disgusted and horrified by the cavalier approach that the Harper government has taken towards Canadian citizens held in questionable circumstances abroad.

Locking 'Em Up ... and Throwing Away The Key?

I see that the provincial PC's are starting to bang on the "Get Tough On Crime"(™) drum.

The first gem is this:

The Youth Criminal Justice Act is near the top of Stevens' agenda.

He wants a complete review of the act launched early in the new year, and would like to see more aggressive pre-trial detention for youths, so they can't reoffend while awaiting trial.

I see...so the first thing this nutjob wants to do is start locking up kids because they have been accused of committing a crime. Please remember, even though we are talking about young offenders here, they are still legally presumed innocent until proven otherwise. In other words, if you incarcerate them leading up to a trial, there had better be either a substantial past record, or the case has to be exceptionally vile (as in what happened in Medicine Hat a couple of years ago), demonstrating that the accused poses a real danger.

There's also heated debate about legislating credit for time served in a remand centre. Lawyers and criminals are "playing the system," he said, because they know they can get anywhere from three-to-one or five-to-one credit for serving time in remand.

Justice ministers would like to see a maximum 1.5-to-one for exceptional circumstances and one-to-one credit for the vast majority cases.

Again, I question the complaint here. Remand Centres are jails. Let's be honest here. The accused who are held in custody are still technically innocent. Their legal rights are substantially restricted while they are held in custody, yet the case against them has yet to be proven in court.

There may be "just cause" to hold them, and I have no objection to that. However, we are also obliged to acknowledge that the period of detention prior to trial is unquestionably not related at all to punishment for the crimes they are accused of.

While they are detained, the accused have no means to earn an income, no freedom, limited access to their families and a host of other day to day constraints that are the reality of prison life. Economic assets such as houses may be seized by banks as a result of non-payment and a variety of other events may come to impact them as a result of that detention.

All of this is taking place during the time when the accused is still legally innocent.

Are we, as a society, obliged to compensate for "hard time" prior to trial? Absolutely. If, as Minister Stevens suggests, we stop doing so, then we create a more serious problem for ourselves, as we erode the notion of "Presumed Innocence" to the point where it is little more than a phrase with little meaning.

I have little problem with the idea of providing "credit for time served" as a multiple of raw time. If we take that away, then we are essentially saying that accusation is equivalent to guilt, and that punishment starts the day you are accused. Can you imagine the lawsuits that will start flying about - someone who is accused of a crime and is later found "not guilty" would suddenly be quite free to start suing the government for compensation.

What is "fair compensation" for time already served? I'm not sure - I can't say I've personally had the opportunity to compare and contrast between remand centres and penitentiaries (nor do I especially want the chance, thank you). I see compensatory time as a way to reflect the impact of detention on the accused while they remain legally innocent, as well as a means to ensure that the justice system does not drag its heels too long in bringing a case to trial.

While I might agree that a 5:1 ratio is perhaps a bit more generous than I would expect, a 3:1 doesn't necessarily give me the same impression. Taking away a full year's worth of someone's ability to earn an income is a pretty harsh punishment to start with - worth an arbitrary amount from $20,000 to as much as over $100,000 depending on the individual. That's a pretty harsh penalty to levy on someone prior to being convicted of anything.

Should we allow people we consider dangerous (or a significant risk) to simply walk the streets because they are presumed innocent? Of course not. But, if we fail to appropriately recognize the impact of that detention on citizens who are still held to be legally innocent of a crime, then I believe we open the criminal justice system from the police through the courts to a raft of compensatory lawsuits from people both convicted and serving their sentences and those who are ultimately found not guilty.

Of course, the current crop of what passes for "conservative" these days doesn't seem to quite get the notion that accusation is not a synonym for conviction. Federally, the HarperCon$ have shown a disdain for the concept of "presumed innocence", and it seems that Alberta's Ron Stevens is equally thick-headed about the subject.

Welcome To Harper's Canada: It's A Police State

Jeepers, as if it wasn't evil enough that this bastard Prime Minister wants to undermine key legal principles such as "Presumption of Innocence" by resurrecting what was bill C-27 as part of Bill C-2, we also find Harper insisting that we need to give police the right to detain without charge, as well as an attempt to resurrect the extra-judicial "Security Certificate" process.

In Harper's Canada, if you aren't a Canadian Citizen, you can be locked up without trial, and without recourse because of what someone whispers you might do. I didn't like the Security Certificate system when I first started hearing about it, and after the royal fuck up that was the Maher Arar case, anything that breaks the fundamental, and essential right to contest your detention before a court of law is just plain wrong in my view.

Similarly, five years after originally providing police with broad powers of both detention and the right to compel suspects to testify in terrorism investigations, we find two basic facts:

1) No terrorism investigation required those powers - including the ones that resulted in arrests.
2) By then it was quite clear that allegations that Canada was a hotbed of "terrorist cells" (coming mostly from hysterical American politicians) were obviously a crock.

The basic observation in that five year period has to be that those extraordinary powers are neither necessary, nor are they particularly useful to the people on the ground doing investigations. The first go-round on those clauses was in the wake of 9/11, and in a manner similar to the October Crisis, some overreaction is understandable - if problematic.

In the (hopefully) more rational light of today, it seems to me that we have little or no reason to renew extraordinary powers in any ongoing manner. Powers to detain without charge, and compelling testimony are abusive of fundamental principles of a civil society and subject to even greater abuse if they are actually exercised.

Harper's latest round of "Gettin' Tough" on things is nothing more than a blatant attack on civil liberty at all levels, and typical of what passes for "thinking" among the Con$ these days is based on blithe assumptions that simply are not borne out by reality.