THE NEW PROHIBITION

The Harper government, fresh from botching its alleged pander to the
libertarian wing of the Conservative party with its voluntary census
plan, appears to be having no problem steamrolling over the
libertarian wing's sensitivities on crime. In back-to-back
performances this week, two Cabinet ministers invoked harsh
tough-on-crime motives that show the Tories' concern about individual
rights to be a fleeting interest compared with their enthusiasm for
escalating the bonkers American war on drugs, gambling and sex.

Under the guise of fighting "organized crime," a global economic
sector created largely by government laws and regulations, the
Conservatives -- with hardly a peep from the opposition or critics --
this week expanded the Canadian division of the monstrous U.S.-led
war on drugs. For a government allegedly concerned about the
"intrusiveness" of a pollster extracting personal information under
threat of fines and prison, the Conservatives are disturbingly
unconcerned about a massive increase in police power to meddle in the
lives of its citizens in the name of fighting crime.

The government's bizarre crime declarations began Tuesday, when
Stockwell Day, as Treasury Board Secretary, defended a budget plan to
spend $9-billion building prisons at a time when crime rates are
declining. Mr. Day, reaching for an explanation, tried to link the
prison expansions to "the increase in the amount of unreported crimes
that surveys show clearly are happening." This was an obvious
head-scratcher for reporters: If the crimes are unreported, how will
the criminals perpetrating those crimes end up in the expanded prison
system? And, moreover, what is an "unreported crime"? Mr. Day rambled
around the subject, ending with the usual Tory calls for tougher
sentences and a warning that you can't take a "liberal view" of crime.

"We don't think serious crime should be treated lightly," he said.

It turns out the unreported-crime story may have some legitimacy as a
contact sport for the statistical statists who are otherwise at war
over the voluntary census. The Crime Victimization survey, conducted
by StatsCan, asks Canadians about car and bicycle thefts, residential
burglaries, pickpockets, robbery, unwanted sexual assault or
harassment, and other physical assaults. The survey, a voluntary
non-census effort, shows a discrepancy between the number of crimes
people say they experience in real life and actual crime statistics.
So what's real: The crimes reported, or the crimes not reported? Are
people getting robbed, raped and assaulted but not taking the crimes to police?

Before Canada's vociferous stats community could sort any of this
out, Justice Minister Rob Nicholson appeared the next day with a plan
that could generate the criminal numbers to justify the prison
spending. The government will apparently fill Mr. Day's prisons with
thousands of new criminals to be convicted under an expansion of the
definition of "serious crimes" under the Criminal Code.

Mr. Nicholson was accompanied by some of Canada's top police chiefs
as he explained how the government needed to escalate its war on
organized crime. The government, he said, had enacted regulations
that, effective immediately, would give police new powers to crack
down on a long list of activities that are already covered under
criminal law as relatively minor offences.

The list of crimes now considered serious is worth a close look,
especially in the context of Mr. Day's concern about unreported
crimes. They include:

- - Keeping a common gaming or betting house;

- - Betting, pool-selling and bookmaking;

- - Keeping a common bawdy house;

- - Trafficking in barbiturates and other chemical drugs;

- - Trafficking in any quantity of cannabis;

- - Importing, exporting, producing barbiturates.

Under the new get-tough regulations, keeping a common bawdy-house or
selling a couple of ounces of marijuana will now bring maximum prison
sentences of "at least" five years in prison. A low-level operator of
a bawdy-house could also face five-year prison terms.

More important for police and prosecutors, under the organizedcrime
umbrella, the full force of the gang-war and drug-war crime-fighting
machine will be unleashed on small-time players who may appear to
have organized-crime connections. These include wiretaps, tougher
bail regimes, the ability to seize the proceeds of crime, sentencing
conditions and parole rules.

One of the noteworthy characteristics of the new regulatory effort is
that it does not include any of the "unreported" crimes -- thefts,
burglaries and sexual assaults -- that Mr. Day seems to think will
soon be the source of an expanding prison population.

Take, for example, keeping a common bawdy-house. The sex trade is a
booming business in Canada. Nobody sees the transaction between a
prostitute and a john as an "unreported crime," mainly because there
is no underlying crime to report. There are no criminal victims. The
same goes for the thousands of Canadians who smoke dope and take
barbiturates or ingest steroids. Bookmakers and hockey-pool
organizers ply their trade across the country, but they are not the
unreported criminals Mr. Day said exist in "alarming numbers."

The people who are going to fill Mr. Day's jails are thousands of
small-time bookies, prostitutes, drug traffickers and others who are
seen by government to be a branch of the "organized crime " industry,
even though their crime is to deliver a service to Canadians who are
willing to pay for it.

Organized crime through the centuries has been the creation of
government law. A business gets organized as a crime because
government declares it to be illegal. Alcohol trade became an
organized crime under prohibition, and disappeared after alcohol was
legalized. Pornography was once controlled by organized crime, but
now the industry is legitimate and the criminal behavior --
smuggling, guns, violence -- that once surrounded it is gone. Want
porn? Turn on the TV, where it's available 24/7 on cable.

The criminalization of gambling over the decades created a major
outlet for organized crime syndicates -- until governments came along
and organized the crime themselves, in the form of national lotteries
and government-owned casinos. Still, private gambling among citizens
who like to bet on outcomes other than lottery draws is a continuing
business. Governments' war on private book-making and private poker
dens is more to protect their own monopolies than to eliminate crime.

Canada's Criminal Code definition of organized crime, adopted as part
of an international policing campaign a few years ago, is an open
door to extreme law enforcement. An organization "composed of three
or more persons in or outside Canada" is a criminal organization if
it "has as one of its main purposes or main activities the
facilitation or commission of one or more serious offences [see
above], that, if committed, would likely result in the direct or
indirect receipt of a material benefit, including a financial
benefit, by the group or by any one of the persons who constitute the group."

With that wide-open definition, the organized-crime enforcement
juggernaut already has spawned a largely futile attempt to curb biker
gangs, and an expensive and wasteful money-laundering data agency --
whose bureaucracy, incidentally, is to get a new $9-million budget
increase this year under the Conservatives.

There is no space or need here to review the already well-documented
grotesque criminal culture and social deterioration spawned by the
U.S.-led war on drugs -- a war the Conservatives are now bringing to
the streets of Canada. The enforcement of these new regulations,
aimed a low-level providers of services that have willing buyers,
will be as effective in curbing genuine criminal activity as the
other organizedcrime measures have been, which is not at all. They
are likely to make things worse.