Pubdate: Fri, 13 Oct 2006
Source: Globe and Mail (Canada)
Copyright: 2006, The Globe and Mail Company
Contact:  http://www.globeandmail.ca/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/168
Author: Jeffrey Simpson

'TOUGH ON CRIME' JUST ANOTHER POPULIST PRONOUNCEMENT

Here's a brainteaser for your morning pleasure: What's the difference 
between a Pacific Gateway Strategy and an Asia-Pacific Gateway and 
Corridor Initiative?

Answer: $1-million, and an election.

Almost a year ago, the Liberal government committed $590-million for 
infrastructure improvements in Western Canada, mostly in British 
Columbia. The Liberals called their plan the Pacific Gateway Strategy.

This week, the Conservative government committed $591-million for 
infrastructure improvements in Western Canada, mostly in British 
Columbia. The Conservatives called their plan the Asia-Pacific 
Gateway and Corridor Initiative.

You surely see the difference - $1-million and a new name. You also 
see a sad, cardinal rule of politics: Never give your predecessors 
any credit, even when you swipe their policies, take their minister 
(David Emerson), and slap a new and more cumbersome name on their project.

Ah well, it's announcement week for the Harper government.

Whenever the House of Commons is in recess, the government makes an 
announcement a day. The reason is simple: The opposition is scattered 
and lacks a platform without Parliament.

This Liberal business of making policy declarations outside the 
Commons used to drive the Conservatives to distraction. How they used 
to rail against the Liberals' blatant disrespect for Parliament.

Announce things in the House, the people's chamber, and be held 
accountable, here and now.

That was then and this is now, as they say, so with the insouciance 
that once so irritated the Conservatives, their own Prime Minister 
grabs the limelight, finds a televisually attractive backdrop, and 
announces policy.

So it was yesterday that, with police officers beside him (a 
favourite George Bush touch), the Prime Minister announced part of 
his "tough on crime" package to warm the hearts of those who, against 
almost all available evidence, believe that longer sentences and 
heaving more people into jail will lower crime. Canada already has 
one of the highest incarceration rates in the Western world. The 
U.S., of course, throws way more people into jail than any Western 
society, and also has the highest violent crime rate.

So, if people in jail means lower crime rates, it's hard to find the evidence.

That doesn't stop the tabloid press - which, when it comes to crime, 
means even the so-called serious papers - from feasting on crime 
stories, the more lurid the better. And it doesn't stop the "tough on 
crime" campaigners from disregarding the evidence, domestic and 
international, in pursuit of a nostrum they just accept as fact.

"Tough on crime," or what Stephen Harper called yesterday a "tougher, 
clearer" justice system, is a great slogan, provided it is blended 
with another idea: "tough on the causes of crime."

People must be accountable for, and be held accountable for, their 
own acts. Blaming society for individual criminal acts, thereby 
removing individual responsibility from the equation, is the kind of 
victimization stuff that Conservatives are right to reject.

But individuals don't float around in society separated from their 
surroundings, background and prospects. Everything we know about 
crime suggests links with poverty, family structure, weak parental or 
community discipline, lack of proper role models, and other social 
factors, the kind of stuff that Conservatives conveniently forget.

Mr. Harper candidly acknowledged that his measures will put more 
people in jail and keep some of them there longer, thereby costing 
more money in the short term. But, he insisted, "in the longer term, 
we expect to provide real strong disincentives for criminal behaviour."

In the longer run, of course, we are all dead. Meantime, it would be 
useful for the government to point to any evidence that measures such 
as those announced yesterday will do anything to lower the crime rate.

Short of such evidence - and it will be empirically hard to find - 
yesterday's announcement must be chalked up as another in a string of 
populist, image-making pronouncements that convey the impression of 
resolute action that are regrettably divorced from the very objectives sought.

As in, the useless and counterproductive GST cut, the over-the-top 
Federal Accountability Act that will make government less effective, 
the use of "energy intensity" to combat climate change that will 
allow greenhouse-gas emissions to keep on rising, the mythology of 
the fiscal imbalance that exists in rhetoric but not in fact, and now 
a "tough on crime" package that has police officers cheering but will 
do nothing about crime rates.
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MAP posted-by: Elaine