HARPER'S AIM STRAYS

Stephen Harper is right that pedophile Peter Whitmore fell
inexcusably through the cracks of this country's dangerous-offender
law. But the Prime Minister has not explained how his proposed
toughening of that law, to be introduced in Parliament next week,
would have pre-empted Mr. Whitmore's career as a predator.

It wouldn't have. Mr. Harper, speaking to a police union audience in
Toronto yesterday, reaffirmed his government's promise to bring in a
three-strikes law for repeat offenders. But there's a catch. Those
are three federal strikes, meaning crimes that are punished by two
years or more in a penitentiary. Applied to Mr. Whitmore, that would
have allowed the predator the very freedom the current system
permitted, to such harmful effect. (His latest escapade ended in a
standoff with police at a Saskatchewan farmhouse this summer, where
he was found with two boys. He was charged with abduction and major
sex offences.)

Mr. Harper might seem to be adopting a remorseless sentencing model
from the United States. In fact, he is very much in the milder
Canadian tradition. Canada has had habitual-offender laws in various
forms since 1948. While allowing for indefinite sentences for repeat
offenders, those laws have also provided for parole hearings; the
door never quite closes, even on rapists, as it does on thieves of
pizza slices or chocolate-chip cookies in California. (Those crimes
are consideredfelonies for repeat offenders in that state.) Canadian
law requires parole hearings after seven years, and every two years
thereafter. Seventeen of 345 declared dangerous offenders have been set free.

Under the Conservative government's proposal, anyone who committed
three major violent or sexual offences would have to show why he
should not belocked away indefinitely. There is no threshold now to
guide Crown attorneys, judges and defendants. The law is simply
reserved for the "worst of the worst" -- those whose brutality
horrifies, and who are deemed by psychiatrists to be incurably violent.

Mr. Whitmore was not brutal in the sense of administering extreme
beatings. That may be why he slipped through the dangerous-offender
net. For his first major sexual offence, the abduction of an
11-year-old boy, whom he detained for 24 hours and sexually
assaulted, he received just 16 months in jail -- a provincial term,
not a federal one. Only nine days after his release, he used cunning
and planning to abduct a young girl and hold her for three days while
sexually assaulting her. That crime, and a sexual assault on a young
boy, earned him his first federal sentence -- five years. That should
have been the time to declare him a dangerous offender.

The question is whether a threshold of three federal sentences would
address the dangerous-offender law's problems or make matters worse.
If three were the line in the sand, Crown attorneys and courts might
simply wait for that number of offences before seeking an indefinite
sentence. Predators like Mr. Whitmore would thus receive more chances
than they deserved, not fewer, to harm children and communities.