HARPER HAS HIS JUSTICE PLATFORM LOCKED UP

Criminal justice policy is not, as some politicians and journalists
seem to think, a peripheral subject of interest only to lawyers,
criminals and victims. It is a vital part of social policy. Get it
wrong and individuals, families, communities and societies suffer.

And Canada is about to get it very wrong. The justice platform of the
incoming Conservative government is -- aside from a very modest nod
toward helping youths at risk -- all about punishment. Mandatory
minimum sentences of five and 10 years for a long list of gun crimes.
A presumption of dangerous-offender status for anyone convicted of
three violent or sexual offences. Consecutive sentences for certain
violent or sexual crimes. And on and on it goes.

These promises received no real scrutiny during the campaign. All the
public heard was that the Tories were calling for a "crackdown," and
that sounded pretty good after the horrific Boxing Day shooting in Toronto.

What went unnoticed is that the Tory platform is essentially a
condensed version of the policies that have dominated U.S. criminal
justice for the last 25 years. What Stephen Harper is proposing is
nothing less than a profound Americanization of the Canadian criminal
justice system.

Does that matter? He only has a thin minority. Much of the Tory
platform will be impossible to pass. Can the Conservatives really
effect a radical transformation of the justice system with such a
weak hold on power?

Yes, they can. And they will. Mr. Harper has said criminal justice is
one of his top five priorities. But, more important, his get-tough
platform is ideal for a prime minister in a tight spot.

During the election, all parties promised to expand mandatory minimum
sentences for gun crimes and it's unthinkable that in the current
environment any party would oppose the Tory plan. This is Mr.
Harper's trump card.

The other sentencing changes will be much less popular. But now that
the opposition parties have stated that mandatory minimum sentences
are an effective way to stop gun crimes, it will be difficult for
them to say otherwise about other crimes.

The Tories could ratchet up that difficulty by putting all the
sentencing changes in one bill. It would make legislative sense and
it would be hellishly difficult to vote against. Imagine Jack Layton
rising in the House to explain why he supports mandatory minimums for
gun crimes but not for knife attacks and sexual assaults. Why not,
Mr. Layton? Don't you take those crimes as seriously as gun crimes?

The Liberals are in a particularly difficult position. Many Liberal
MPs support the "get-tough" approach. And those opposed will know
that if they succeed in blocking the Tory plans, crime will be a
major issue in the next election -- a major advantage for the Conservatives.

The Liberals will buckle. Most or all of the Tory justice platform will pass.

But if the U.S. experience with these ideas is anything to go by,
that won't be the end of it. It will just be the beginning.

Crime has been with us since Cain slew Abel and inevitably there will
be awful crimes such as the Boxing Day murder of Jane Creba in the
future. When they occur, people won't question the effectiveness of
mandatory minimum sentences. They never do. Instead, the assumption
will be that the sentences aren't tough enough. And up they will go.

The Creba murder illustrates the point. Canada has had mandatory
minimum sentences of four years for serious gun crimes since 1995 and
we have had mandatory life sentences for murder ever since capital
punishment was abolished more than 30 years ago. Still, no one said
after the killing, well, there's another awful crime mandatory
minimums did not deter. No, the response from across the political
spectrum was that to stop such terrible crimes we needed more and
longer mandatory minimum sentences.

In the U.S., this escalation has been going on for 25 years. As a
result, the prison population has quadrupled to more than two
million. One in four prisoners on the planet is American. A black man
has almost a one-in-three chance of seeing the inside of a cell in
his lifetime and criminal records are more common than high-school
diplomas in many poor minority neighbourhoods.

Contrary to what David Frum wrote recently in the National Post, this
incarceration binge did not make the United States safer than soft
old Canada. (More on this in a later column.) But it did cost Americans dearly.

Between 1982 and 2001, state spending on cops, courts and prisons
rose 452 per cent to $58.8-billion U.S. a year. Total spending by all
levels of government in 2001 was $166.9 billion. That money had to
come from somewhere, of course, and so, between 1980 and 2000, while
the share of all state and local spending that went to prisons and
jails grew 104 per cent, higher education's slice of the pie shrank
21 per cent.

This is the road down which Canada will soon begin to walk.