Mike on Crime

By Jim Brown
THE CANADIAN PRESS
OTTAWA — The thing about law and order is that no matter how many laws you pass, there never seems to be enough order — at least not at election time.
More than two years after they took power vowing to crack down on crime, the federal Conservatives are set to argue in the coming campaign that there’s more work to be done.
Never mind that the latest figures from Statistics Canada, released in July, showed the national crime rate was in decline for the third straight year.
“We are not governing by statistics,” Justice Minister Rob Nicholson declared after seeing the numbers.“We are governing by what we promised Canadians in the last election and what Canadians have told us.”
By those criteria, the Tories clearly think they have a winning issue. But it remains to be seen whether they can use it to pry enough votes away from their opponents to make an electoral difference.
“It appeals to their traditional voters, but it certainly doesn’t appeal to people who vote Green, NDP or Liberal,” said Neil Boyd, a criminologist at Simon Fraser University.
He noted that recent polls show crime is “nowhere near the top of the public agenda for most people”
The Tories will point, nevertheless, to a bevy of bills that became law under their stewardship. Included was legislation that:
— Curbed the use of non-custodial sentences, such as house arrest, for many violent offences.
— Made it harder for those accused of gun crimes to win bail while awaiting trial, and boosted the mandatory minimum sentences they face upon conviction.
— Made it easier to lock up repeat violent and sexual offenders for indeterminate terms — in effect a life sentence — by declaring them dangerous offenders.
— Raised the age of sexual consent to 16 from 14 in an effort to prevent exploitation of youths by adult predators and pimps.
— Tightened the rules on drunk and drug-impaired driving and gave police more tools to combat street racing.
A number of other bills went into the legislative hopper but didn’t pass before the election writ was issued.
Among them were measures to impose mandatory minimum sentences for trafficking hard drugs, crack down on car theft rings, and toughen sentencing rules for juvenile offenders.
Nicholson was promising further youth crime measures for the fall session of Parliament that was scuttled by his boss’s election call.
And Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day was pondering controversial proposals to build regional super-jails and end the practice of releasing most offenders at the two-thirds point of their sentences if they show good behaviour.
Opposition critics say the Tory initiatives may put more people behind bars, but there’s no evidence they will prevent them from committing crimes in the first place and thus make the streets safer.
“The legislation that has been passed has had probably no effect at all,” said NDP justice critic Joe Comartin. “What we were doing in almost all of these bills was fine-tuning.”
Ujjal Dosanjh, the Liberal public safety critic, accuses the Tories of spending more time trying to brand their opponents as soft on crime than addressing real problems.
“It’s all about pandering and posturing and demonizing and vilifying the opposition,” said Dosanjh.
Certainly Prime Minister Stephen Harper has not been above grandstanding.
A year ago he announced he was making five of his anti-crime measures a confidence matter and threatened a snap election if the opposition tried to block them.
The fact was that four of the five initiatives had already overcome most opposition objections. When all five sailed into law, Harper claim a dramatic victory that had never really been in doubt.
On another occasion the prime minister painted Liberal Leader Stephane Dion as soft on terrorism for opposing extraordinary powers like preventive arrest of suspects and forcing unwilling witnesses to testify in terror cases.
Dion stood firm and the measures went down to defeat — only to see Harper reintroduce them eight months later with amendments to safeguard civil liberties.
The new version won Liberal support but died on the Commons order paper with the election call. Like the rest of the unfinished law-and-order agenda it’s now available for use in a new campaign platform.
The conventional wisdom is that the Conservatives can use that platform to help cement their core vote of mainly rural, mainly older, mainly male supporters.
Party strategists insisted they can do more. They claim criminal justice issues will also resonate with urban, younger and women voters — the people they need to win over to transform a minority government into a majority one.
Less partisan analysts don’t buy that proposition.
“I’m skeptical whether it’s going to do much positive for them,” said Henry Jacek, a McMaster University political scientist.
“Elections usually centre on one or two big issues like the economy. . . . For the marginal people in the swing ridings, law and order is going to be much less important.”