WHEN MENARD SPEAKS, COLLEAGUES LISTEN

It's Been A Long Climb Up The Legal Ladder For MP Serge Menard.

He's done it all - provincial Crown in Montreal, federal Crown,
defense lawyer, president of l'Association des avocats de la defense,
then Batonnier of the Quebec Bar, and finally ends up Quebec justice
minister, taking on the Hells Angels and beating them into submission.

Today Menard is a Bloc Quebecois MP in Ottawa, the party's public
safety critic, and a recognized expert on criminal law. When he
speaks, colleagues listen.

The other day in the Commons, Menard went after the controversial
mandatory minimum penalties in bill C-2, the Conservatives' crime legislation.

Conservatives believe stiffer minimums and less leeway for judges in
sentencing means a better, safer society. Menard says tying the hands
of judges is not the answer.

Nor are "bogus solutions" from "south of the border. "I would not
want this country to follow in its neighbor's footsteps only to end
up with the same results," he says.

The U.S. option for more jail has led to more crime. The U.S. has
seven times Canada's incarceration rate. It has three times more
homicides per capita, and five times more spouses killed per capita.
If more jail were the answer, the U.S. would be like heaven.

American politicians keep cranking up mandatory minimums and filling
their jails as their crime rate keeps going up. Jail more people;
build more jails. More than two million Americans are in jail right
now. (That's like the population of Manitoba and Saskatchewan
combined - all sitting in jail.)

Young black American males today have a better chance of ending up in
jail than attending university.

The Conservatives' wish for more jail (a $245-million bill for
another jail came in last week) has to do, Menard says, with
manipulating perceptions.

The Conservative plan is to position the debate on crime heading into
the next general election to make Conservatives appear tough on crime
and the Opposition as soft on crime.

Menard notes Harper aborted the last session and re-introduced his
crime bills this fall to re-start the crime debate in the lead up to
the next election.

Menard says he's watched the Conservatives MPs. When they talk about
crime, they only cite the worst cases and the worst criminals. They
don't talk about the vast majority of cases filled with all sorts of
mitigating circumstances.

One size does not fit all, and should not either when it comes to
sentencing, Menard says. That's why judges must not have their hands
tied. The punishment must fit the crime, not the legislation of
electoralist politicians.

Menard hauls out an anecdote. He says when he began as a Crown in
1966, the mandatory minimum for importing marijuana was seven years.
It came as a shock to him.

"It was one of the harshest penalties in the Criminal Code," he says.

Did it lower marijuana use, he asks? No, not at all, he answers.
Marijuana use just kept going up and up all through the 1980s.

Ironically, the new Harper legislation would raise the current
seven-year minimum for growing marijuana to 14 years - double the
jail time. It would make growing weed worse than second-degree murder
in Harper's Canada.

Weed worse than Murder II.

Menard has a "success" story to cheer up the House.

He remembers impaired driving. It used to be a major problem,
especially among young people. But instead of raising minimum
sentences for impaired driving, the politicians put their money into
awareness campaigns for drivers. It worked. There was a massive
decrease in impaired driving. People took it seriously.

When police began spot checks on highways, they used to stop up to 10
per cent of drivers. Today they sometimes haul in less than one per
cent. Some police no longer bother setting up spot-check operations.

Menard says even his own kids, when they go out, have a designated
driver. These are habits learned without fear of a longer prison term.

"Does anyone really believe that criminals think about the length of
sentence they could serve if caught?" he asks. "It's fear of being
caught they worry about, not the length of sentence. If they believe
they will be caught, they change their behavior."

Crime prevention is important too.

"When I began practising law," he says, "Montreal was the armed
robbery capital of Canada." Today, no one can remember the last bank
robbery in Montreal.

It wasn't longer sentences that did it; it was intelligent preventive
measures. Banks are built differently. They have cameras, better
alarms, special cash drawers, money packs, and exploding dye.

"The risk of being caught in relation to profits is not worth it
anymore," says Menard.

His best example is the death penalty, he says, abolished 25 years
ago. The number of murders has declined ever since.

We should be up to our ears in murders today if execution had been a deterrent.

Menard says handing down mandatory minimums forces a judge who has
gone over a case and weighed all the factors - individual and general
deterrents, seriousness of the crime, circumstances surrounding the
crime, background, recidivism, home life, outside influences, and
dozens of other factors - to end up sentencing someone to three years
who should be getting 18 months. That's no way to do law.

Some days it's worth sitting in the Commons gallery listening to MPs
who have something intelligent to say.

Richard Cleroux is a freelance reporter and columnist on Parliament Hill.