'TOUGH ON CRIME' JUST ANOTHER POPULIST PRONOUNCEMENT

Here's a brainteaser for your morning pleasure: What's the difference
between a Pacific Gateway Strategy and an Asia-Pacific Gateway and
Corridor Initiative?

Answer: $1-million, and an election.

Almost a year ago, the Liberal government committed $590-million for
infrastructure improvements in Western Canada, mostly in British
Columbia. The Liberals called their plan the Pacific Gateway Strategy.

This week, the Conservative government committed $591-million for
infrastructure improvements in Western Canada, mostly in British
Columbia. The Conservatives called their plan the Asia-Pacific
Gateway and Corridor Initiative.

You surely see the difference - $1-million and a new name. You also
see a sad, cardinal rule of politics: Never give your predecessors
any credit, even when you swipe their policies, take their minister
(David Emerson), and slap a new and more cumbersome name on their project.

Ah well, it's announcement week for the Harper government.

Whenever the House of Commons is in recess, the government makes an
announcement a day. The reason is simple: The opposition is scattered
and lacks a platform without Parliament.

This Liberal business of making policy declarations outside the
Commons used to drive the Conservatives to distraction. How they used
to rail against the Liberals' blatant disrespect for Parliament.

Announce things in the House, the people's chamber, and be held
accountable, here and now.

That was then and this is now, as they say, so with the insouciance
that once so irritated the Conservatives, their own Prime Minister
grabs the limelight, finds a televisually attractive backdrop, and
announces policy.

So it was yesterday that, with police officers beside him (a
favourite George Bush touch), the Prime Minister announced part of
his "tough on crime" package to warm the hearts of those who, against
almost all available evidence, believe that longer sentences and
heaving more people into jail will lower crime. Canada already has
one of the highest incarceration rates in the Western world. The
U.S., of course, throws way more people into jail than any Western
society, and also has the highest violent crime rate.

So, if people in jail means lower crime rates, it's hard to find the evidence.

That doesn't stop the tabloid press - which, when it comes to crime,
means even the so-called serious papers - from feasting on crime
stories, the more lurid the better. And it doesn't stop the "tough on
crime" campaigners from disregarding the evidence, domestic and
international, in pursuit of a nostrum they just accept as fact.

"Tough on crime," or what Stephen Harper called yesterday a "tougher,
clearer" justice system, is a great slogan, provided it is blended
with another idea: "tough on the causes of crime."

People must be accountable for, and be held accountable for, their
own acts. Blaming society for individual criminal acts, thereby
removing individual responsibility from the equation, is the kind of
victimization stuff that Conservatives are right to reject.

But individuals don't float around in society separated from their
surroundings, background and prospects. Everything we know about
crime suggests links with poverty, family structure, weak parental or
community discipline, lack of proper role models, and other social
factors, the kind of stuff that Conservatives conveniently forget.

Mr. Harper candidly acknowledged that his measures will put more
people in jail and keep some of them there longer, thereby costing
more money in the short term. But, he insisted, "in the longer term,
we expect to provide real strong disincentives for criminal behaviour."

In the longer run, of course, we are all dead. Meantime, it would be
useful for the government to point to any evidence that measures such
as those announced yesterday will do anything to lower the crime rate.

Short of such evidence - and it will be empirically hard to find -
yesterday's announcement must be chalked up as another in a string of
populist, image-making pronouncements that convey the impression of
resolute action that are regrettably divorced from the very objectives sought.

As in, the useless and counterproductive GST cut, the over-the-top
Federal Accountability Act that will make government less effective,
the use of "energy intensity" to combat climate change that will
allow greenhouse-gas emissions to keep on rising, the mythology of
the fiscal imbalance that exists in rhetoric but not in fact, and now
a "tough on crime" package that has police officers cheering but will
do nothing about crime rates.