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.

Facts Don't Matter When It's Ideology

According to Stockwell Day, statistics don't matter.

During a news conference on Tuesday in Ottawa, Day said the government has received indications that more and more people are not reporting crimes committed against them.

"It shows we can’t take a liberal view to crime which is, some would suggest, that it is barely happening at all," Day said. "Still, there are too many situations of criminal activity that are alarming to our citizens, and we intend to deal with that.

Really? There's been a steady decline in the crime rate in Canada for more than a decade - but according to the HarperCon$ it's all because people aren't reporting the crimes. Horsefeathers.

This is nothing more than making up facts to fit current Con$ervative dogma. This is typical of how the HarperCon$ have done things from day one - only more blatant. When the facts and reality don't mesh with your dogma, make up a fiction that does and repeat that as if it is the reality.

We've seen this with the long-form census, with various members of the Con$ervative cabinet ridiculing questions which never existed on the long form in the first place, and now we see Con$ervative ministers lying to the public to justify their unnecessary "get tough on crime" nonsense - a fiction which is going to cost Canadians billions of dollars as more and more people are imprisoned for longer periods of time.

Really, do the Conservatives want to explore why the 'unreported crime rate' is going up on THEIR WATCH?

If We're Safer, Why Resurrect Bad Laws?

According to Stockwell "Doris" Day, Canada is safer than it ever was before 9/11.

I'm not so sure about that, but then again, 90% of what has been presented as "security" enhancement has been little more than window dressing in the first place as far as I'm concerned.

However, Mr. Day wants to attack civil liberties and freedoms by extending police powers once again:

Opposition parties banded together to refuse parliamentary approval for renewing two controversial provisions of the act dealing with investigative hearings and preventive arrest. Those controversial measures gave police the power to compel witness testimony and to hold possible terrorist suspects for up to 72 hours without bail.

As well, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down key provisions of the national security certificate process, used to detain suspected terrorists and other potential threats to national security. The court said the process violated the Charter of Rights because detainees were not allowed access to the evidence against them.

Mr. Day said Friday that he wants to resurrect all three provisions.

Waitasec - in the "shock" following 9/11, I can understand a certain amount of overreaction. Our lawmakers were smart last time - they put in sunset clauses on the most egregious parts of the "Anti-Terrorism Act". Clauses that in five years were not used once by law enforcement agencies - in spite of numerous arrests that ostensibly were related to "terrorism". Arrests accomplished within the framework of laws that existed long before 9/11.

The only piece of "anti-terrorism" law that has been used in Canada was the so-called "security certificates" - which the government abused by using them to indefinitely imprison someone without providing any form of recourse.

So...if Canada is in fact safer than it used to be, why would we want to resurrect badly written and considered laws that were either abused or never exercised by law enforcement agencies?