The Tory Crime Bill – or the Blind leading the Blind

Crime bill to cost $78M over 5 years – Politics – CBC News.

A Justice Minister who quotes the cost of a bill but has no idea how that figure was obtained. A government that ignores statistics from Statistics Canada that show that crime is at its lowest level in years. A minimum $2.7 billion dollar package to build megaprisons for criminals that don’t exist. It sounds like the plot of a bad political thriller, whereas in reality it’s what’s really happening this week in Ottawa.

This is just one of the embarassingly obvious efforts to hide information on the part of Stephen Harper and his Conservative government, only this time his lackeys are taking the fall.

Case in point, the following quote: “Toews said officials from different departments came up with the numbers and he couldn’t specify the methodology. “I don’t figure out the math, I give that to the officials who have all of the available data,” said Toews.” (from above article)

So the Justice Minister of Canada has absolutely no concept of how these figures were obtained, but trusts that the information is the best possible because it came from his officials. Did they pull it out of a hat? If Justice Minister Nicholson was working for a major corporation and proposed a major programme and gave a one page document to list costs and had no idea how the costs were obtained or what methodology was used, he’d be laughed out of the boardroom. This move is so utterly and entirely bush league, but at the same time symbolizes the iron grip that the Conservatives had had on any information that opponents could use to fight back against their wrong-headed bill.

Nicholson aside, this omnibus crime bill (mirroring the decision to scrap the long-form census) is yet another step in which the Conservatives take all of the failed policies that have been tried in the US and try to implement them in Canada. The US trialed scrapping the long-form registry and then reinstated it when they realized they no longer had reliable census data. And now the Conservatives want to build mega-prisons, and we all now how well the mega-prison system has served the Americans (in case you didn’t know, terribly.) But ignoring the abundance of evidence against your policies is a hallmark of Stephen Harper’s conservative government. $2.7 billion is not an amount we can afford to waste on the folly of the Conservatives.