harper

By. Jim Rankin, Toronto Star

 

On a sticky day in June, Eric Cromwell changed into the clothes he’d worn when he was arrested two months earlier on an assault charge and walked out of the Toronto West Detention Centre on Disco Rd.

 

He was given a TTC token but possessed little else.

 

He did have a bachelor apartment where his rent is automatically deducted from his welfare cheque, but that’s where the latest trouble had occurred. There’d been an incident with a neighbour and conditions placed on him forbid him from going anywhere near home.

 

He’d been in and out of jail a number of times, and on this occasion, as had been the case before, he had no home to go to. But he knew where to go. He took public transit to the Maxwell Meighen shelter at Queen and Sherbourne Sts. Read more »

By Haroon Siddiqui, Toronto Star

 

When you have finished laughing at Stockwell Day — for building jails for criminals he cannot find — think of the failed American regime of crime and punishment.

 

To his estimated $9 billion expenditure, add the $1 billion bill for security at the G20 summit and the $16 billion purchase of F-35s in an untendered contract.

 

Stack such expenses against Stephen Harper’s commitment to halve the $54 billion debt in five years, and wonder what he plans to slash and burn to get there.

 

Think also of his decisions to weaken the national census and kill Statistics Canada surveys that measured the impact of government policies on Canadians, especially the poor and the vulnerable. Read more »

By JOSEPH QUESNEL, For the Winnipeg Sun

 

The federal government needs to look beyond just law enforcement as a means to combat gangs that plague Manitoba and increasingly many First Nation reserves.

 

Ottawa has announced it will be giving police and prosecutors enhanced powers to tackle activities such as prostitution, illegal gambling, and drug trafficking. The changes will expand the list of what is considered a serious crime in the Criminal Code. Keeping a common bawdy house (for hookers), keeping a gaming or betting house and exporting, importing and producing illegal drugs will all be added to the list of serious crimes.

 

Manitobans and Winnipeggers are familiar with the reality of growing organized criminal organizations. Indian Posse. Mad Kowz. All of these organizations are being fuelled by illicit activities. Throughout the 1990s, Winnipeg was known as the gang capital of Canada, on a per capita basis. Read more »

By. Toronto Star

 

When Prime Minister Stephen Harper shut down Parliament for three months to prepare this year’s budget, he told Canadians he was “recalibrating the government’s agenda.” It was time to switch from stimulus to restraint, he said.

 

In his March budget, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty did lay out a rigorous plan to eliminate Ottawa’s $56 billion deficit in five years. “Canada has returned to economic growth following the deepest global economic recession since the 1930s,” he said. “In this budget we will take action to ensure the government lives within its means.”

 

But since then the Conservatives have running up some eye-popping bills.

 

They spent $1.2 billion to host world leaders for a weekend in June. The original price tag was $179 million.

 

Public Safety Minister Vic Toews told taxpayers it would cost $2 billion to build new prison facilities to crack down on young offenders. Parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page calculated the government would have to spend $9.5 billion to implement its plan. Read more »

By ROB TRIPP, QMI Agency

 

KINGSTON, Ont. - The federal prison service plans to build new cells at 35 penitentiaries across the country to make room for an exploding inmate population.

 

A total of 60% of the country’s 58 federal prisons will see expansion, according to internal Corrections Canada information obtained by QMI Agency.

 

A list compiled by senior officials shows that new units will be built at six federal prisons in Ontario, including four in the immediate Kingston, Ont., area — Collins Bay, Frontenac, Pittsburgh and Bath institutions. Read more »

By. Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy

 

The 'Regulations Prescribing Certain Offences to be Serious Offences' came into effect July 13, 2010, and was publically enacted by the Federal Government early in August 2010. Regulations, unlike legislation, do not need to be approved by Parliament. Regulations are the specifics of legislation; in this case it is what particular offences are included as a 'serious offence'. The Criminal Code sets out that the federal government has the power to include activities into the defintion of 'serious offences' without Parliamentary debate. These regulation changes were made to the Criminal Code and Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. Read more »

By. The Daily News

 

The time has come for the minority Conservative government to speak or forever hold its peace; i.e. come up with concrete evidence to back their dubious claims as they struggle to justify changes to the census.

 

As of Aug. 3 the Tories, badly fumbling this issue, had five days to come up with all the documents they say justify eliminating the long form census. Nothing had appeared by Thursday.

 

The refusal to come up with the required documents speaks to the problem that has created this problem, and it is summed up in one word -- arrogance. There are a host of problems emerging, the least of which is that the Tories risk alienating Canadians even further.

 

This is a time when Canadians need leadership, not power politics. We have a party that is ruling without a mandate of the people and an ineffective opposition.

 

And given that this situation is likely to continue for some time, since it's obvious that Canadians will not give Stephen Harper and his party a majority, it's time for Harper and his party to begin behaving in a more responsible manner. Read more »

by Martin Patriquin, Macleans

 

Canada is a safer country now than in 1999. According to a Statistics Canada report released this week, it is exactly 17 percent safer now than in those comparatively barbaric pre-millennial days of Brian Tobin and Blink 182. And what crime does occur is, on average, less serious now than two years ago–four percent less serious, to be exact, according to the Crime Severity Index (CSI), which analyses police-reported crime. Not to suggest its all peaches and cream, but we should pat ourselves on our collective back. We live in a place that is safer and less violent than it used to be. Bravo.

 

Or not. “Someone, somewhere, is manipulating the numbers.” This pithy bit of paranoia didn’t come from a crank or some the-truth-is-out-there freak in his pajamas and tinfoil hat. It’s courtesy of recently appointed Conservative Senator Pierre-Hugues Boisvenu, who by all accounts is a fine and upstanding fellow. The trouble is that these numbers don’t quite square with Sen. Boisvenu’s agenda, or that of the Conservatives in general, and he’s mad as hell about it. Read more »

By. Neil Boyd, Vancouver Sun

 

In these days of public sector restraint, there is one realm of waste that is often neglected -the planned and pointless expenditure of billions of tax dollars on new provincial and federal prisons, the consequence of a series of Conservative crime bills.

 

Never mind that Canada already is a global leader in rates of incarceration, far ahead of almost all of the nation states of Western Europe -and, perhaps paradoxically, Canada typically has higher rates of crime.

 

The more interesting and relevant finding from recent research is that rates of imprisonment and rates of crime are not related in any systematic way, from one nation state to the next.

 

What is significant, however, is the relationship between confidence in the political and justice systems of a country and rates of imprisonment. Polls consistently demonstrate that nation states with the lowest rates of imprisonment also have citizens who have the highest levels of confidence in their political systems and their justice systems.

 

As one contemplates the lack of science in virtually every crime bill dutifully trotted out in Parliament by the Harper Conservatives, one is tempted to either laugh or cry. Read more »