LAW-ORDER AGENDA MAY SPUR NDP SHOWDOWN

Election Looms If Opposition Defeats Tory Bills in Parliament

OTTAWA -- The New Democratic Party is considering "really playing
hardball" in the new session of Parliament, to remind the Conservative
government to listen to the views of all Canadians, particularly as it
pursues a contentious law and order agenda that could bring defeat and
a fall election.

"We're very troubled by the approach the government is taking, which
is 'do it our way,' when they've only got support of a third of the
country," Windsor MP Joe Comartin, the New Democratic Party's justice
critic, said Friday. "There very much is the need for
consensus-building here and we're trying to bring pressure to bear on
them to think along that line, as opposed to what we saw from the
prime minister" this week.

Comartin was referring to Prime Minister Stephen Harper's defiant tone
in Wednesday's news conference, in which he suggested there could be a
whole series of confidence votes following the Oct. 16 throne speech.
Under parliamentary tradition, the speech itself is treated as a
confidence matter, whose passage is necessary for a government to
continue governing.

But Harper said he would treat legislation flowing from the throne
speech as matters of confidence. Under those terms, the defeat of even
routine legislation would cause the government to fall, triggering an
election.

Within that adversarial new context, among the thorniest areas will be
criminal justice and public safety. Harper has staked out law and
order as a priority for his government which the opposition parties
have had trouble with.

Even if Harper's minority government survives a confidence vote on the
throne speech, the prospect of an election may continue to loom large,
hinging on how hard the government pushes its law and order agenda,
and how hard the opposition pushes back.

Only a united opposition, with the NDP, Liberals and Bloc Quebecois
voting together, can bring down the government.

When Parliament was prorogued, three law-and-order bills before the
Commons died on the order paper. One would have abolished the gun
registry, another would have toughened the treatment of repeat
dangerous offenders, and a third would have increased penalties
against impaired drivers.

Three bills before the Senate also died, including measures to
increase minimum penalties against gun offenders, increasing the age
of sexual consent to 16 from 14, and the so-called reverse onus bill,
which would have required some categories of accused persons to
demonstrate why they should not remain in custody.

In order to reinstate a bill and pick up where the process was
interrupted by prorogation, the government would need unanimous
consent from all parties; without it a vote would be held to reinstate
the bill.

One way for the NDP to rein in the government on these bills would be
to make its support for reinstatement of some or all of the justice
bills conditional on the government reinstating C-30, an environmental
bill that the opposition parties amended to comply with the Kyoto
accord previously abandoned by the government.

"We think it's actually improper to do that kind of trading off,"
Comartin conceded in an interview. But he added that the decision has
not been made whether to play that kind of "hardball."

Conservative House leader Peter Van Loan's office declined to comment
on which bills the government would seek to resurrect. But a statement
said the government remains "fully committed to our agenda to make
communities safer by tackling crime."

The Bloc Quebecois has supported certain law-and-order measures,
particularly legislation to crack down on street gangs, but is opposed
to other key Tory positions. For example, it wants to preserve a form
of gun registration and is opposed to biometric identification or any
other types of crime-control measures that could lead to racial
profiling. The party also insists on measures to attack the root
causes of crime, such as poverty, inequality and social isolation.