ZERO TOLERANCE FOR DAY'S LAW-AND-ORDER POLICIES

You do the crime, you do the time. It's one of the major campaign themes
for Stockwell Day, the man likely to be crowned leader of the official
opposition after tomorrow's voting for the Canadian Alliance leadership is
tallied.

Day, who passed through Montreal yesterday for a $35-a-plate luncheon, has
a comprehensive law-and-order plank to his platform, as you would expect of
a strong social conservative. The message is largely reserved for Western
audiences, who cheer his hang-'em-high rhetoric as he dismisses, as he
must, "the numbers game" played by those inconvenient bean-counters who
note that the crime rate has been falling steadily over the past few years.
Instead, Day talks to the real people, law-abiding citizens who nonetheless
jealously guard their "property right" to own guns and who know the real
truth is that the justice system has gotten out of control.

"The truth is that no one came in the middle of the night and stole it from
us," Day told an audience last April in Langley, in the middle of B.C.'s
Bible Belt. "The truth is that we let it get away from us by not paying
attention to what was happening and today's dishonest soft-on-crime
approach is the result."

Just like George Bush in 1988, Day has his own Willie Horton. His name is
Albert Foulston, a parolee who murdered Edmonton police officer Ezio
Faraone in the early 1990s. Never mind that Foulston was released on his
eighth parole in 1990, three years before the Chretien government was
elected, Day uses Foulston in his speeches to pummel the Liberals. It's one
of the most egregious mistakes made in the Canadian parole system, but Day
uses Foulston as a representative reason to enact "truth in sentencing"
laws - "when a judge tells you what your sentence is, that's what your
sentence is!"

Along with stiffer parole, longer sentencing and multiple sentences, a Day
government would inevitably be faced with radical expansions to the prison
system, just like we've seen in the republic to our south. The U.S. prison
population has more than tripled over the last 15 to 20 years, and
outstrips other developed countries with a rate of imprisonment - at 645
detainees per 100,000 population - that is five times the level it was in
1973. Not even South Africa in the days of the apartheid regime was
throwing as many of its citizens into jail as does the U.S. currently. All
those new prisoners need beds and bars, and some states are now spending
almost as much on their prison systems as they do on education.

Worst of all, if the U.S. experience with zero tolerance has anything to
teach us, it's that the justice system isn't always blind and has become a
way to disenfranchise minority groups. Alabama permanently bars people
convicted of felonies from voting. More than 100,000 black Alabama men - 31
per cent of the black male population - are denied the franchise, according
to a report in Progressive magazine. A report put out by the Sentencing
Project, a public interest group in Washington, D.C., estimated that 1.4
million black men - or 13 per cent of the entire black male population in
the U.S. - were disfranchised. And behind the large number of blacks denied
the right to vote is the war on drugs. In 1997, more than 271,000 people in
state or federal prisons were incarcerated for drug offences; 100,000 of
those for mere possession. Blacks are convicted of drug offences at about
five times the rate of whites, even though both groups use drugs at a
comparable level. In Canada, you can substitute "black" for "Indian" and
find the same pattern in our own justice system. But in Canada, we also
tend to admire politicians who come clean with admissions of youthful drug
use. We like the honesty and most of the baby-boomers who now dominate the
media can identify. Many 50-something pundits smirk and offer up a cliche
along the lines of "Well, if you can remember the 1960s (or 1970s,
depending), you weren't there."

Stock Day was no different, sporting the long hair and muttonchop sideburns
that all my older male cousins wore in their late teens circa 1973. And he
cheerfully admitted to regularly smoking pot at parties during his student
days at the University of Victoria. (Some things never change. My
first-year orientation day at UVic in 1984 featured our dormitory floor
counselor giving advice on which bushes near the residence to use for
smoking up.)

Nowadays, of course, Day calls for zero-tolerance policies for "drugs in
schools." One can't help wondering what potential for a national political
career Day would have today - especially among the social conservatives who
have made the difference in his campaign - had he been busted, prosecuted
and convicted as a student back in the early 1970s.

Lyle Stewart is a Montreal writer. His E-mail is l.stewart4@sympatico.ca