WHAT A CRACKED UP GOVERNMENT LOOKS LIKE ON THE STREET

So, you wonder what the government means when it says it can't govern
and must take the country into an election few people want.

Well, a story.

You'd think getting picked up with 26 ounces of cocaine would be a
slam-dunk jail term. It's as addictive as hell, ruins lives, marriages
and careers and that would be enough to keep hundreds of people
buzzing for a weekend. And, if you were thought to be even remotely
associated with the Hells Angels, think of a number and double it, and
that should be the sentence.

However, in Vancouver last month a young fellow described as "an
alleged associate of the Hells Angels" was handed an 18-month
conditional sentence for trafficking.

In other words, house arrest. The prosecution had asked for three
years in the pen but, in the felicitous words of his lawyer, the
culprit is now looking forward to moving on with his life and working
with horses on his family's farm.

That's a dysfunctional Parliament at work, one where the minority
government's legislation is introduced into the House of Commons, then
gets bogged down between readings in committees where the combined
opposition members can always out-vote the government members.

As a result, bills introduced on steroids emerge as skeletal as a
refugee.

Take the omnibus crime bill the Conservatives introduced not long
after they took office, and which would have meant mandatory jail for
trafficking.

Factoid: In the last years of the Liberal government, about a third
of traffickers got
off with conditional sentences.

Now, either one thinks drugs are a problem, or one doesn't. The
Conservatives do, hence the mandatory jail time.

However, the Justice Committee gutted the Conservatives' crime bill
that would have got rid of conditional sentencing for trafficking and
almost 80 other offences, including most car thefts, arson, break and
enter and theft over $5,000. As a result, most of the roughly 15,000
people sentenced every year to house arrest still do time at home.

And that's not hard time. House arrest for a Canadian drug trafficker
does not mean what it does for a human-rights advocate in a
third-world dictatorship where the government guards the front door.
In this country, those under house arrest can go to work or school,
and even slip out to take care of a little business. Calgary readers
will recall that's what convicted cocaine trafficker Efrem Kuflom was
thought to be up to when he was shot dead in his car last month --
while under house arrest. It's no overstatement that the dots join his
death to house arrest, and opposition MPs on the Justice Committee who
don't think people like him should be jailed.

True, having an all-party group of MPs review bills is generally good
practise. In committee, perverse consequences can be quietly flagged,
and the unconsidered impact on an affected party accommodated. In
theory at least, this kind of legislative tune-up should mean better
laws.

However, during this Parliament, committees have not been used to
improve laws, as to block an agenda.

This could be either over-amendment as described above, a fate which
befell the government's Accountability Act when supervision of Indian
band finances by the auditor general was stripped from it, and also
its Clean Air Act, which was so rewritten in committee that the final
summary didn't bother highlighting the changes, there being so little
left of the original.

Or a committee can be used to simply stall legislation.

Delays running into months are not unusual: For example, C-6, the
Visual Identification
of Voters Bill was introduced Oct. 26, went to committee Nov. 15 and
has yet to come out
of it. Same story with Bill C-17, the government's attempt to amend
the Immigration and
Refugee Protection Act: It had second reading Nov. 1, 2007, and
remains in committee
today, 315 days later.

Bills setting term limits for senators and encouraging provinces to
hold elections for senatorial nominees are similarly in abeyance not
for the purposes of improving the wording, but simply as a way for the
opposition to frustrate the government's intentions.

Not everybody found this situation so bad in the immediate aftermath
of the January 2006 election. The new minority government was an
unknown quantity that owed a lot of its success to good organization,
but even more to the Liberal meltdown that followed Adscam. Canadians
wanted a change of government, but a majority had not chosen a radical
break with the past: Yes, Prime Minister Stephen Harper was welcome to
drive, but if all the opposition together could reach the brake pedal,
that was alright too.

Perhaps some Canadians still feel that way, though in these troubled
times a government that can't govern is not in their best interests.

In any case, Harper wants to know whether the public is with him, or
the amenders and the stallers and the people who think drug
traffickers with biker connections should be at home on the couch.

One can see why.