CRIMINAL SPENDING

By the time Parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page is through putting
a price tag on the federal government's tough-on-crime agenda, even
those who support the concept in principle might well be asking: "Why
are we doing this?"

That could turn into a $10 billion question, or more, before all the
costs are tallied, according to some estimates. Page is expected to
release a report this week on ongoing and future costs of the
government's crime bills, something the federal government has failed
to do and may not have even calculated for its own benefit,
considering the difficulty both Page's office, MPs, and senators have
had gathering financial data. Early indications are that provinces
will be on the hook for the bulk of the costs associated with one of
those crime bills, the Truth in Sentencing legislation, also known as
the two-for-one sentencing law.

As Craig Jones, executive-director of the John Howard Society puts it:
"The government is asking Parliament to cut a blank cheque on the
basis of no research on the cost implications and they are going to be
horrendous."

Knowing the cost of a legislative shift of this magnitude is crucial,
particularly given the size of the numbers involved, and a legitimate
costing of the agenda should have been done before now, by the government.

The enormous drain on the public purse that the government's
law-and-order agenda represents is, however, not the only reason to
question its value. As criminologists, lawyers and other justice
experts have repeatedly noted, the policies championed by the Harper
government are not likely to make Canadians safer, one reason being
that we're already pretty safe.

Violent crime is generally on a downward trajectory. It's true that
voters will say "crime" when asked what issues concern them, but it's
an established fact that perceptions of crime don't match the actual
risk. It's bad enough that Conservative operatives and politicians
decline to set the record straight and disabuse Canadians of their
misguided fears about unsafe streets. Worse, the Harper Conservatives
have helped stoke these fears in the cynical belief that doing so is
to their political benefit.

It's pure populism. Anyone who dares point out that the the
Conservative justice "reforms" could cause more harm than good is
tarred as soft-on-crime. But look at the research. The University of
Toronto's Centre of Criminology, for example, says mandatory minimum
sentences -- a favourite Tory idea -- undermine the prosecution
process by "fostering circumventions that are wilful and
subterranean." In other words, mandatory minimums encourage those who
can afford good lawyers to reach plea bargains to avoid harsh
mandatory sentences. More importantly, the research makes clear that
40 years of study indicates they do not deter crime.

What these policies will do is substantially increase prison
populations across the country, which is going to cost taxpayers a lot
of money. Thanks to parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page, we may be
getting some sense of exactly how exorbitant this will be. The
question the government must answer is: What are we getting for our
money?