IS THIS FISCAL AUSTERITY?

Tories' Crime Agenda Costs More Than Chump Change

It's a centrepiece of the Conservative platform - getting "tough on
crime." But does the Conservative tough-on-crime agenda actually stand
up to scrutiny? Opposition politicians don't think so. And the Harper
government seems to be going out of its way to ensure that the real
costs aren't revealed.

"We're deliberately being told they're not going to tell us," says the
NDP's justice critic, Joe Comartin. Even after a leak hinted that
Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan had asked cabinet for a budget
increase of anywhere between a quarter billion dollars to three
quarters of a billion, Van Loan has since cited cabinet secrecy and
refused to give up the numbers.

"We don't know for sure what numbers he put in front of them, but if
he put in a figure of say, a quarter billion, it's nowhere near going
to do what is going to be necessary to accommodate the number of
additional prisoners we're going to have," Comartin says.

All the Commons' justice committee ever gets from Justice Minister Rob
Nicholson are what Comartin terms "bland assurances" that the
Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) will be able to handle the
increase in prison population from these bills, though no opposition
Parliamentarian actually believes that.

After all, housing more prisoners in an already-crowded penal system
is expensive.

"We know that on average it costs $102,000 per year to keep a person
in a federal penitentiary," says gay Liberal MP Rob Oliphant, a member
of the Commons public safety committee.

"If people are in half a year longer, or a year longer, or five years
longer, you multiply it by $102,000," Oliphant says.

The remand bill, which eliminated the two-for-one credit for time
served awaiting trial, was estimated to have increased prison
populations by 11 percent, though without proper figures from CSC,
there is no way to be certain.

When Liberal Senator Joan Fraser chaired the Senate legal and
constitutional affairs committee, she said the government was no more
forthcoming with the numbers for them.

"I think there are 27,000 prisoners in federal institutions now,"
Senator Fraser says. "That would be another, let's say, 3,000
prisoners to the population, and the Correctional Services
investigator, Mr Sapers, has warned us that the prisons are
overcrowded now.

"You dump another 3,000 in there, and what does that mean in terms of
prison capacity, budgetary implications both for buildings and for
ongoing staffing, and for programming?"

In the Senate committee, Nicholson said that they would have to ask
Van Loan those questions, and yet Van Loan has refused to appear.

And this was for only one bill.

Comartin says that corrections related NGOs have told him that if the
government's raft of crime bills were passed and enforced, we could
see an increase in prison populations of between 30 and 50 percent.

"When you look at those kinds of numbers, the estimate is that we
would have to build at least two more large super-prisons, and the
capital price tag for that is running at a quarter billion for each
one," Comartin says.

While prorogation has killed the crime bills currently on the Order
Paper, they are likely to be resurrected shortly after Parliament
resumes, some of them at the same stage they were in at dissolution,
though that would require the consent of other parties.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives new plurality in the Senate could wreak
havoc on the work of the upper chamber. For instance, another crime
bill mandating minimum sentences for certain drug crimes died in the
Senate after being amended. Now that the Conservatives have filled all
Senate vacancies, they may reintroduce the bill without the amendments
and see it pass.

Public Safety Canada did not respond to Xtra's requests for
information.