Niagara Should Lobby For A New Prison Here

A Commentary by Doug Draper

Imagine a brand new prison in Niagara! Wouldn’t that be great?

Let’s put it this way. If we really believe, as Niagara Falls MP and Stephen Harper’s justice minister Rob Nicholson does, that we should be cracking down harder on law breakers, we ought to be the first ones in the country to welcome a new prison into our neighbhourhood, shouldn’t we?

Of course we should! And we’d be showing the whole country that we are doing our part as a community of proud Canadians to fight crime.

So I am urging all of my fellow Niagarians to call or email the constituency offices of Rob Nicholson and all of our other MPs and MPPs. Let them know that we want the new prison that Ontario is going to need when the Harper government passes its get-tougher-on-crime bill and the courts start sentencing more people who get fresh with the law to jail time located right here in Niagara. After all, why should the Greater Toronto area get everything?

This new prison, according to recent news reports, would wall off about 1,000 cells and would cost about $900 million to build. Think of all of the construction jobs and all of the recession-proof jobs that would be created just to run the place. It would be a real boost to a Niagara, Ontario region that has had more than its share of business closings and job losses over the past number of years.

Yet wouldn’t you know it. Ontario’s premier, Dalton McGuinty, and his correctional services minister, Madeleine Meilleur, are already complaining about the cost of the prison, which the province would have to cover. Let them complain all they want. The Harper government has made it clear that the crime bill is a done deal. So we might just as well see that the prison, and all the money and jobs it will bring, goes here. And there are plenty of good places in Niagara to put a prison too.

The first place I thought of was near Marineland in Niagara Falls. Last time I drove by, there was all kinds of vacant land out there behind Marineland and good urban planners are always looking for new development that is compatible with the buildings that are nearby. In this case, you would have two places that hold captive mammals. Seems like a perfect fit and Justice Minister Nicholson would be able to brag that he got the prison in his riding.

 If that doesn’t work out, how about somewhere out in rural West Lincoln. There are a lot of good staunch Conservative supporters out there who would probably be proud to play host to a facility that stands for real punishment. And just think, their MPP, Tim Hudak, would have ready access to prisoners to form those chain gangs he was promising during last year’s provincial election.

We might also want to consider a site in south Niagara. Poor south Niagara often seems to be last on the list when the government is looking for a place to build something. Maybe the prison would make up for the hospital services residents in the south end have been losing. Then again, I can already hear them complaining that the convicts are getting better health care in the prison hospital than they are getting out in the community. So that won’t work.

But hey, speaking of hospitals, how about next to the super hospital the Niagara Health System is building in west St. Catharines?  There is a railway line nearby and since the new crime bill is going to mean a lot more people going to jail, they’ll be able to ship them in on freight cars. Maybe a deal could be struck with the NHS to let the lower-risk prisoners out during the day to clean the hospital wards. These days, you always have to be thinking about partnerships that can save the taxpayers a little money. And who knows, maybe they will do a good enough job of mopping and scrubbing the wards that the rates of C. difficile and other infectious diseases will go down. If they do, maybe we can soften up a bit and shave a little time off their sentence for good cleaning.

As good as all of this sounds, you have to know there’ll be at least a few selfish people out there who won’t want a prison near their backyard. Count on them to come up with every frivolous argument in the book for trying to keep a prison out of their neighbourhood. If (for example) they picked west St. Catharines for the prison, we’d have people living in those jumbo-size houses out there claiming it would hurt their property values. But if they can stand that jumbled mess of strip malls, big box stores and junk food drive-ins and all the snarled up traffic that comes with it out there, what difference is a prison going to make?

Some of them – even those who cheered the idea of getting tougher on crime when they assumed the new prisons would go somewhere else – may also turn around and have the nerve to argue that we don’t need the crime bill and more prisons because statistics keep showing that crime rates across the country are going down.

They may even resort to the tired old line that what we should really be doing is focusing on crime prevention. But why should the rest of us have to put 12 extra locks on our doors, set leg traps in our hallways and go to bed with a baseball bat and can of pepper spray just because these people don’t want a prison in their backyard? If the good old U.S.A. can build enough jails to lock up as many as one out of every hundred of its citizens, why can’t Canada?

But never mind the soft-hearted wimps and naysayers. The good news is this. There isn’t a snowball’s chance that Harper, Nicholson and company are going to let crime statistics or anything else get in the way of following through on their crime-fighting mission. And don’t forget, there were enough of us out here who gave them the majority they needed in last year’s election to get the job done.

 So let’s make the best of it. If hundreds of millions of our tax dollars are going to be blown on new jails, let’s make sure those dollars blow our way. And I don’t want to hear anyone who has voted for this federal government and its war on crime turn around and say; ‘Yes, but don’t build the prison in my backyard. Build it in someone else’s”

 Let those of you who voted for this Harper government take responsibility when it follows through on the things they wanted it to do.

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