What’s With All Of The Crime And Punishment Bluster?

A Commentary by Doug Draper

Let me begin with a few rhetorical questions.
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How safe do you feel in this country? Do you go to bed preoccupied with a fear that someone might burst into your house in the middle of the night and brutalize you or your family or that you could get shot or stabbed walking down the street the following day?

Don’t get the wrong idea. I’m not saying it couldn’t happen. Anything can happen. You could climb into a car tomorrow and get killed in a traffic accident. And actually, your chances of getting killed a traffic accident are several times higher than your chances of being a victim of a violent crime, according to government statistics.

Those same figures (no wonder the Stephen Harper government wants to dewclaw Statistics Canada) show that this country has one of the lowest crime rates in the world and the rate of violent crime has actually declined in Canada over the past decade – even while the federal Liberals were in power and Harper’s Conservatives accused them, every chance they could get of being “soft on crime.”
So what is all of this we-got-to-get-tougher-on-crime stuff all about?  Do we really need to build more prisons to cram more people into when the crime rate is going down – even while the Conservatives have been in power and during a great recession? Does that now have to be one of Canada’s top public work’s projects with all of the other challenges we face in this country?

Kevin Page, a veteran economist and our federal parliament’s budget officer, says the cost of all this additional court time and prison wards could exceed more than $5 billion over the next five years. But Rob Nicholson, the MP for Niagara Falls and the Conservative government’s just minister, recently estimated it would “only” be around $2 billion.

Only $2 billion! I’ve always found it interesting how there always money for so-called “wars on crime” and other wars, like the one in Afghanistan, and we can never seem to find enough for health care, and education and cleaning up our environment.

But hey, Nicholson and his Conservatives must be on to something because they were swept back into office this spring with their crime-and-punishment agenda flag flying high. And not to be outdone, Tim Hudak, Ontario’s opposition Conservative leader, announced last week that he wants to get prisoners away from writing classes, yoga and whatever other soft “rehabilitation programs” the province’s Liberal government are offering, in compliance with those bleeding hearts at the John Howard Society, and get them picking up trash and clearing brush and so on in our public parks and along our roads and highways.

Just what I’m looking forward to. Going out to a park for a family picnic and having jail guards, presumably packing heaters, supervising people in prison garb, picking paper coffee cups and pizza boxes around our table. If I want to see that, I’ll move down to Texas or Mississippi.

And I think I know what some readers may be thinking. Draper’s soft on crime. But that most certainly isn’t true. I’d love to see some of the people responsible for mismanaging a billion dollars of our tax money in Ontario being charged with something. And that is just one of many examples of people abusing our hard-earned money. But I don’t hear Harper or Hudak vowing to go after white-collar criminals very much.

There will be at least one reader who sends me an email, as they have before that says something like ‘How would you feel if someone broke into your home with a gun or knife with the intention of harming your family.’ My response would be that if I was closer than he was to my Louisville Slugger, there might not be any need for a trial, except for me.’ I’d probably be charged with assault or manslaughter or something worse for defending my home.

Remember, David Chen, the Toronto shopkeeper who got fed up with some guy robbing his store repeatedly? The police never responded fast enough to catch the guy and he finally chased him out of the store and pinned him down. He was charged with unlawfully detaining and assaulting the perpetrator and it took him a year to clear his name. The punch line is that the police offered the thief a lighter sentence for testifying against Chen.

What kind of nonsense is this? I think Chen was charged because he took justice into his own hands and was cutting the multi-billion-dollar justice industry out of some of the action.

So I appeal to you. Don’t be distracted by crime-and-punishment rhetoric tailored to tease our baser instincts. Most of us surely know we are a better country than that.

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