TORY TACTICS ON CRIME ARE CRIMINAL

WELL, IT looked like a bull market in the fear trade yesterday. In
Toronto, a conference was scheduled on Asian organized crime; in London,
Ontario's acting solicitor-general was to strike a task force on biker
gangs.

Down at the Crime Control Commission, they must have been ordering up
Chivas Regal all round. A little judicious quoting here and there and the
province could be made to sound like something from A Clockwork Orange.

Some day, a doctoral thesis will probably be done on the CCC and its
imaginary crime wave. On the one hand, it shows just how willingly this
government exploits the powerful (often irrational) human responses of fear
and loathing. On the other, it demonstrates again how masterful the Harris
government has been at using loaded language to frame debate and market
itself.

Think of the Job Quotas Repeal Act, ending employment equity. Why, it
sounds almost heroic, like the end of slavery. Then there was the Fewer
Politicians Act, which no one would object to the way they might had it
been named, oh, the Reduced Service and Representation Act.

But best of all is the Crime Control Commission.

For starters, the thing is an audacious fraud. Crime, by almost every
meaningful measure, is dropping. What the government has found, however, is
that the same inexorable demographics that show us aging and less able or
inclined to commit violent crime also make us more fearful of it.

Just to say ``crime'' is to conjure dread images. No one pictures computer
fraud. It's usually savagery of the sort that dominates the media but which
constitutes only a fraction of offences. Studies show almost everyone
overestimates the extent of it.

Now, the word ``control'' allows us to regard this so-called commission as
confronting some alien species, like rodents or cockroaches.

After all, criminals are not like us. Oh, no, not we who have never so much
as inflated an insurance claim, driven while impaired, used an illicit
drug, failed to declare something at the border, illegally copied computer
software or videos, fished without a licence, dumped trash, fiddled
business expenses, taken souvenirs from a hotel room. No, they are not us.

Finally, the word ``commission'' offers the succour of thinking some
powerful authority has been brought to bear against this rising threat.

But sadly, if crime has been exaggerated, so too has the commission. The
Crime Control Commission is just three obscure Conservative backbenchers,
whose perverse task it is not to control crime but to incite fear of it.

For this is a government fuelled by fear and loathing. It has already wrung
about as much of this as it can from the deficit and welfare recipients. It
needs a new demon. And what could be better than someone skulking at the
window?

They know the game they're playing. One of the commissioners, I'm told,
likes to amuse his caucus pals by rising from his chair, drifting toward a
window and making as if to align his watch with some celestial
co-ordinates. Inevitably, someone asks what he's doing. Checking, he says,
for calls on his Batphone.

In public, though, it's all tough talk and photo ops, slamming shut cell
doors, promising an end to ``hugs and kisses'' for young offenders, vowing
zero tolerance for everything.

And if anyone dares say crime statistics hardly warrant all this huffing
and puffing, they say that's notwhat the public believes. (Failing to add
that a sizable portion of this same public believes in extraterrestrial
visitations and that Elvis is alive.)

It would normally be laughable to watch three guys who couldn't control so
much as a jaywalker carrying on as if they were Clint Eastwood.

Laughable, if only it didn't work so well.