VIC TOEWS' UNFINISHED BUSINESS

Almost one year ago, our votes piled up in such a way that we elected
a Conservative government with a short leash attached to its neck. The
39th Parliament has been able to pass a few useful measures, but in a
splintered House of Commons, the government's agenda remains trapped
within narrow limits in many areas. Unfortunately for Canadians, one
of these areas is criminal justice, one of the Conservatives'
strongest electoral suits.

In the past, Canadians have tolerated, rather than celebrated, the lax
policies of Liberal governments on crime and punishment. In cities
across the country, the career criminal who kills someone while out on
bail has become a fixture of page-one crime stories. And Canadians
were shocked in March, 2005, when four Mounties were killed in
Mayerthorpe, Alta. by James Roszko, a psychopathic drug criminal and
sex offender who had somehow managed to beat the justice system for
most of his adult life.

The Conservatives were supposed to change all this. But so far,
Justice Minister Vic Toews has found majority backing in the Commons
only for two minor reforms -- a street-racing bill and legislation
circumscribing the more absurd uses of house arrest as an alternative
to imprisonment. His broader reform agenda remains
unfulfilled.

Mr. Toews is eager to press forward with increasing sentences for
impaired driving and gun crimes, and making it easier for prosecutors
to use dangerous offender status to put away violent, habitual,
incorrigible criminals. The individual pieces of legislation that
comprise his unfinished agenda can be criticized at the margins, but
the resistance they are meeting across the floor seems to be founded
on a more general knee jerk principle that it is simply hopeless or
obtuse to punish criminals. Liberal Derek Lee, for one, scornfully
summarizes the Minister's approach as, "Put more guys behind bars."

Well, pardon us for asking, but who -- aside from a handful of turtle
necked criminologists still hopelessly bogged down in the 1960s --
says that putting more criminals behind bars won't work? There is
statistically powerful and widely accepted evidence from south of the
border that increased imprisonment really is the best single means of
reducing crime. Rates of serious offences in the United States doubled
between 1965 and 1980, when average criminal sentences and the odds of
imprisonment for convicts plummeted under the influence of liberal
nostrums. Sentiments changed during the Reagan years, capital
punishment came back into vogue, and around 1990 states began to adopt
minimum sentences and "three-strikes" laws. In some cases, states went
overboard, throwing away the key on petty criminals whose third strike
consisted of stealing a Mars bar or some such. Still, there is a
pattern: Whenever U.S. governments have strengthened anti-crime
incentives and taken outlaws off the streets permanently, crime rates
have responded the way any sensible person would predict.

Meanwhile, despite similar economic conditions, the opposite has
happened in Great Britain. Thanks to liberal policies and weak
incentives, a society that was once much more orderly and safe than
the United States has become markedly less so.

To be sure, the high overall U.S. rate of imprisonment is a symptom of
grave and unredressed social problems. And it is certainly wrong for
society to seek safety by making criminal justice too vicious. But by
arguing that imprisonment doesn't reduce crime -- that criminals, in
essence, are immune to the incentives and risk judgments that guide
the everyday lives of the rest of the human species -- Canadian
parties of the left are adopting a cheap guise of pragmatism to
conceal their inherent sympathy for criminals and their faith in
rehabilitation.

These impulses deserve a place of high esteem in a civilized socie ty,
but they would not need disguising if Canadian voters did not believe
they had already been carried much too far by our courts and
correctional institutions. Let us therefore wish that Mr. Toews can
finish in 2007 what he started in 2006.