Stupid on Crime, Part Umpty-Two

Here's the thing about crime stats. You can squeal and lie and dismiss all you want. One stat does NOT lie. The homicide rate.

Canada’s crime rate fell again last year and is now at its lowest level in almost 40 years.

Crimes reported to police dropped 5 per cent in 2010. The decline spanned a wide range of offences, including the homicide rate, which fell by 10 per cent to a level not seen since 1966.

“Homicide is one of the few types of violent crime that almost invariably comes to the attention of police and, as such, is generally recognized as a country’s barometer of violence,” Statistics Canada said in a report released Thursday.

In addition, an index measuring the severity of crimes fell 6 per cent from 2009, reaching its lowest point since it was introduced in 1998.

The national crime rate, which has been falling steadily for the past 20 years, is now at its lowest level since 1973, Statscan said.

Because, unlike sexual assault or theft under/over or other crimes, which may be differently defined or reported, a homicide pretty well entails a dead person and dead people are hard to ignore or redefine.

There is much more uniform reporting of murder stats across jurisdictions, which is why they're preferred for international comparisons.

Here's the StatsCan report. Just about every sort of crime -- including youth crime -- is down markedly.

So what did the Stooopid on Crime Cons have to say? Here's Justice spokesthingy:

"We don't use these statistics as an excuse not to get tough on criminals," said spokeswoman Pamela Stephens.

Hoooo-kay.

But this report is throwing a spaniard into ConCrime plans:

"From the government's perspective, crime going down is probably an embarrassment," said Anthony Doob, a criminologist at the University of Toronto. "For the rest of us, it's probably a nice thing to have less crime in our community."

Doob said crime rates and punishment policy are not linked.

"The one thing we know with any kind of certainty is that (a falling crime rate) doesn't have much to do with policies related to punishment," said Doob. "Sending more people to prison may reduce the likelihood that they're committing offences while they're in prison but, if anything, it increases the likelihood that they'll commit offences after they've been released."

Why can' we have nice, productive, progressive evidence-based policies? Why, when we know the facts, know what works and what doesn't, do we ignore all that and behave stupidly? Why do we let stupid people run things?

Of all the lying, fear-mongering, venality, and just plain meanness on the civic stage at the moment, what most distresses me is the WILLFUL IGNORANCE.

We need to make courage politically desirable. Not only tell the truth, but act on it.

Are the 'Speechies' Right, er, Correct?

Mark Fournier of Free Dominion is conducting on-line seminars on Bill C-51: Investigative Powers for the 21st Century Act.

Today's instalment (bold in original; one typo fixed): Canadian government plans to outlaw internet anonymity.

Yesterday we examined how the Canadian government is planning to effectively outlaw internet linking by making Canadians permanently legally responsible for the content of any webpage they link to using the Investigative Powers for the 21st Century Act. Today we will look at how the same Act will outlaw internet anonymity.

Clause 11: The existing provisions of the Code regarding the offences of sending a message in a false name and sending false information, indecent remarks or “harassing” messages (the French term “harassants” currently used in subsection 372(3) of the Code is replaced by “harcelants” in the bill) refer to certain communication technologies used to commit those offences, such as telegram, radio and telephone. Clause 11 of the bill amends those offences by removing the references to those specific communication technologies and, for some of those offences, substituting a reference to any means of telecommunication. As a result, it will be possible to lay charges in respect of those offences regardless of the transmission method or technology used.

This is an exact duplicate of the process that brought thought crimes legislation, Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, to the internet and enabled the Canadian Human Rights Commission to engage in acts that were finally ruled to be unconstitutional by the very Canadian Human Rights Tribunals that rubber stamped convictions in 100% of the cases brought before it. Only this time it is to be expanded upon and enshrined in the Criminal Code of Canada. If this Bill is passed the Canadian government can throw out the reviled Section 13 of the CHRA, they won't need it anymore because they will have something even worse to use against us.

Look very carefully at the wording of Clause 11 above. The key word is “and” which follows the words in bold text (text not bold in original document). It would be bad enough if the new law proposed making it an additional offense to use a false name (an internet alias) “while” “sending false information, indecent remarks or “harassing” messages”, like using a firearm in the commission of a robbery, but this wording makes “sending a message using a false name” a stand alone crime. Think long and hard about the implications and dangers of this part of this proposed bill.

Where are internet aliases most commonly used by Canadians today? They are almost universally used in internet forums, bloggers' comments sections, and comment sections of other websites. This law will make using an alias a crime. It is not likely they will try to prosecute everyone using an alias online but it will give the government the means to identify and criminalize anyone who writes anything the government disapproves of. Imagine an internet where Canadians were forbidden by law to speak anonymously.

Think it would never happen in Canada? Never forget what happened with the CHRC and never give those who enabled that disaster the means to do it again.

Yesterday, Fournier pointed out the dangers of linking contained in the same bill. He quotes Clause 5.

Clause 5 of the bill provides that the offences of public incitement of hatred and wilful promotion of hatred may be committed by any means of communication and include making hate material available, by creating a hyperlink that directs web surfers to a website where hate material is posted...

And goes on to explain.

Hyperlinks are at the very core of the internet, they are what enables every internet user to view any available page on the internet and direct others to view pages. This bill will put the control of all hyperlinks into the hands of government bureaucrats and put all Canadian internet users in legal jeopardy.

This clause essentially makes any Canadian posting a link on the internet legally responsible for the content of any web page linked to even though the person posting the link has no control over the content of that page. If the person who does control the page you've linked to changes the pages content you are still legally responsible because you posted a link.

This will make it unsafe for any Canadian to post a link to any page on the internet that he does not control.

This bill will also make it impossible for any Canadian to operate a forum or a blog that allows for public comments. Even if a blogger vets every posted link on his blog with a bevy of lawyers at his side he still will be held legally liable if the content of the outside web pages changes. The only way to safely operate a blog will be to disallow links to other sites and pages.

Beyond the dangers of this bill as it is supposed to function lies the massive potential for abuse by government agents and private individuals. A person who dislikes you for political, competitive or personal reasons could easily set you up with legal problems. Using readily available proxy servers and disposable emails anyone could set up a simple webpage outside of Canada with a theme of “I hate [enter favoured group here] and then post a link to it on your forum or blog. A screen shot of both the created page and the hyperlink on your page is all the evidence needed to show the new law has been violated.

I am no kinda expert on human rights tribunals/commissions (paging Dr. Dawg), but I do know that the speechies loathe them. (And today, we find out that Ontario Top Con Man, Tim Hudak, has backed off from his promise to axe the tribunal here. Building a 'big tent' party ain't so easy, is it, Timmie?)

But if Fournier's reading is correct -- if a little paranoid -- then blogs like DJ! are in beeeg trouble. Not to mention Facebook pages, Tweets, and whatever new fangled toys the Intertoobz geniuses come up with.

Given that we are facing four or five years of authoritarian, liberal-loathing Harperism, shouldn't we progressives be a tad worried?

And, for that matter, shouldn't the telcos and ISPs be howling at the expense of such monitoring?

It seems to me that this could be a great issue for the Fucking Useless Opposition® and a way to make some new and old Con MPs veeeery uncomfortable under a deluge of outraged letters, emails, tweets, and phone calls.

But, as Fournier points out, we'd better act quickly. SHithead vows to pass his omnibus Stoopid on Crime bill within 100 days.

Oh-oh. Brian Lilley is on it. I like his last paragraph.

The Harper Conservatives won a majority Monday, they can pass this bill without relying on any other party for support. But they still need your support and your donations and the Canadian public should tell them they will get neither if they put forward bills like this that attack liberty.

UPDATE: HOLY CRAP! Link to Michael Geist from reader Mark Francis.

. . . more important than process is the substance of the proposals that have the potential to fundamentally reshape the Internet in Canada. The bills contain a three-pronged approach focused on information disclosure, mandated surveillance technologies, and new police powers.

"I was treated like a 'common' criminal..."

If MP Julian Fantino intended to elicit sympathy from the 'common' folks by whining thus, now there's a MASSIVE fail right there.

"I got the business on a number of issues ... on seniors not having adequate pensions (while) the minister for seniors has multiple pensions,” he says. “What does that have to do with anything?” Fantino asks. “I didn’t rob any banks. I didn’t steal anything.” [...]

“The other thing that grabs me is the immunity from accountability in the House,” he continues. “I’ve been called a few things and they’ve got protection. I’ve always found that kind of strange. It seems people in there can decimate your integrity, trample your good name, call you every awful name, accuse you of the most heinous things — and they do it with a straight face.”

Dey got no respeck for Duh Fantino ...

Really quite amusing, particularly as he's describing the tactics that HarperCons have honed and refined, using them repeatedly against Opposition MPs.

Irony has always been wasted on Fantino. The only thing slicker & thicker than he is - a BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Grand merci to Montreal Simon for the Fantino pic.

More about the Cons' Affirmative Action

Just when you thought a significant systemic shift occured in Canada in the last century, along comes Stevie Spiteful and his grim cabal of HarperCon bullies.

By way of @kady O'Malley, we hear that a Harper Government official is scheduled to make an announcement related to crime prevention in the lobby of the YMCA tomorrow. That's in Montreal, so it's not likely to be related to the crime promotion tirade for which Justice Dewar became recently notorious.

Though when you consider how the HarperCon notion of *justice* is situation -specific, it follows that Minister Nicholson would replace a progressive female judge with a male lawyer whose expertise lies in corporate/commercial litigation - one who donated to the CPC in 2008.

When you read the numerous accounts of Dewar's pontification, in which he morally exonerated convicted rapist Kenneth Rhodes by dubbing him "a clumsy Don Juan", one gets a sense of how the criminal prosecution system is being retro-fitted by the Cons into their own image.

That scheme will be policed by G20-type goons, staffed by ReformaTory appointments, and it will enable convicted cast in the good ol' boys mold to get away with, well ... probably murder too if it comes to that. And who do you think sex offender Rhodes will vote for, in the next federal election?

Plus ça change, plus les Cons se ressemblent.

h∕t k'in.

Harper's Cons say they're 'Tough on Crime™' but ...

they're soft - limp even - when it comes to the malfeasance displayed by one of their caucus illegally representing himself as a member of the Canadian military forces.

Go read: The Galloping Beaver: Dear General Natynczyk now.

Vienna Declaration in Toronto

And now for something completely different. Good and hopeful news.

Toronto has become the first city in the world – and the first government in North America – to formally endorse a declaration that advocates harm reduction over the war on drugs.

The Vienna Declaration, which slams the criminalization of illicit drugs as a major factor fuelling HIV infection rates, came to the fore during this year's AIDS conference. Its authors called on policy-makers around the world to refocus their approaches to illegal drugs and HIV-AIDS prevention – especially in light of new statistics that show HIV infection rates have climbed back to 1982 levels, largely thanks to infection in injection-drug users.

So, how will that sort with the ReformaTories' Stupid on Crime crusade?
Oooo, big surprise.

Federal Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq has said the Canadian government has no intention of endorsing the declaration, which takes aim at the Conservatives’ tough stand on drug use.

The motion passed council by a vote of 33 to 7. Guess who was among the seven troglodytes?

Toronto already has a successful Toronto Drug Treatment Court. Looky this from the Public Safety website:

Conclusion
The reduction in substance abuse and criminal activity among drug dependent offenders of the Toronto Drug Treatment Court can be characterized as promising, given the limitations of the evaluation, such as the small number of graduates, different response rates among groups, and the decrease in program's participation over time.
The evaluation of the TDTC adds to the growing body of research on specialized courts, and in particular, on collaborative justice and community responses to substance abuse by offenders in the criminal justice system.

Sounds pretty progressive. Does Vic Toews know about this?

Stoopid on Governance

Remember this? It was yesterday.

"We don't govern on the basis of statistics," Nicholson said. "We govern on the basis of what we hear from the public and what law enforcement agencies tell us. That has not changed in the four and a half years we've been in government."

This is today.

A newly released government poll suggests most Canadians don't see crime as a big issue -- even as the Conservatives press on with their get-tough agenda.

When asked in January which issue the government should focus on most, only one per cent of people answered crime.

So that's the public heard from.

As for listening to law enforcement agencies, have a look at this website devoted to supporting the long-gun registry that the ReformaTories are so hot to kill.

Here are the first three organizations listed:

The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police
The Canadian Police Association
The Canadian Association of Police Boards

Not paying any attention to the people, the experts, or the facts. That's our Conservativacy of Dunces.

(Psst, sister and fellow bloggers: You think the Opposition War Rooms are keeping tabs on us? They bloody well should be, we're doing all their research for them.)

More Sheep Looking Up

Continuing to work on my scheme of getting getting left and faaaar right working together to rid us of King Stevie. . .

At least one Blogging Tory has the sense and grace to be embarrassed by Doris's performance yesterday.

The blogger takes Doris's various idiocies apart, then goes on:

But I'm not done.. no, not by a long shot. Because at the end of the day, one of the major complaints that we, as conservatives have regarding previous Liberal governments is that they embark on questionable social programs, costing the tax payers billions of dollars, for purely political reasons - because it helps capture votes from their base.

Remember the Gun Registry?

So - as we let that sink in for a moment, it becomes abundantly apparent that our current Government, under Stephen Harper, is embarking upon a program to reach into my wallet and spend my hard-earned tax dollars, without any statistical or verifiable evidence that this new social engineering is necessary, or that it will have any impact on addressing the issue of crime in any event.

No - they are doing the same damn thing we complained the Liberals did with the Gun Registry.. and that makes us worse.

Because it's one thing to be stupid.

It's worse to be a stupid hypocrite.

Over on the Dark Side, on the same topic of building prisons for perpetrators of unreported crime, my Facebook friend (she is! we friended each other!) Connie said:

This government is giving me the creeps.

Another poster named LAR said:

The logic escaped me as well. I'm sure there's a lot of unreported crime but spending billions for more prisons isn't going to do anything about it.

Let's celebrate the solidifying union of lefties and righties, who agree -- for vastly different reasons of course -- that these ReformaTories are poison.

And let's celebrate it LOUDLY.

(Doncha love the smell of piss-soaked Conservative undies in the morning?)

MORE: Another Blogging Tory who thinks Doris is wrong on crime.

The problem is that it is very unclear why exactly crime is going unreported. Does it represent a lost faith in the police or the criminal justice system in general? Is it due to an immigrant population that have a natural mistrust of authority? Is it due to increased gang activity and the fear of reprisal? It would take a number of very comprehensive studies to discern the true cause of the decrease in crime reporting.

So if we don’t know the cause then how the hell do we know the solution?

Does increasing the prison population help to prevent crime that is not going reported? I can’t imagine any theoretical argument or empirical evidence that would support a claim that it would. If the Conservative government is really concerned about crime in Canada they should look into the causes and solutions to unreported criminal activity.

Imagine that. Another fan of facts among the BTs.

Pssst. Click the linkies, so the bloggers can feel the love from the left.

Can Left and Right Work Together?

Well, I dunno if this will amount to anything, but it's fun. I'm hoping to prove JJ wrong when she says she despairs of the human condition because we can't seem to work together.

I was visiting the Dark Side earlier today and saw this thread about the protest supporting the prison farms that Stevie Peevie wants to axe. It included this link.

Hundreds of farmers, local residents and prison-rights advocates who want the Conservative government to keep Canada's prison farms open set up a blockade to the regional headquarters of the Correctional Services of Canada in Kingston, Ont., on Friday morning.

About 250 people showed up for the three-hour protest, which started at around 6 a.m. along the busy street. Campaigners said they want the government to reconsider its decision to close the farms, which are being phased out by the end of this fiscal year.

"We see the farm as an effective rehabilitation and job-training program that also provides food for the prison system," said Dianne Dowling, a member of the Save Our Prison Farms committee and local representative from the National Farmers Union.

The prison service currently operates six farms — each located in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, New Brunswick, and two in Ontario.

About 300 prisoners work at the farms, operating machinery, taking care of animals and growing food for prisons.

The farms, which the prison service has operated since the 1880s, cost about $4 million annually. The government has said the money will be used to provide more relevant employment skills to rehabilitate prisoners in contemporary trades.

Several of the commenters at the Dark Side support the prison farms. For the wrong reasons of course, but nonetheless. . .

So I sent a message to my close personal Facebook friend, Connie Fournier, owner of the Dark Side, to tell her that there was another issue we could maybe work together on. In addition to the G20 insanity. I included a link to a Facebook group supporting the prison farms.

She sent a message back saying she found it creepy that we were agreeing on so much. She also said that she'd joined the group and posted the info at FD. And indeed, she did.

Anyway, I joined a facebook group to save the prison farms. It looks like Stephen Harper has managed to find yet another issue that I can agree with the lefties about. He's a uniter, for sure!

If we can't divide the Right, maybe we can work with them.

Lock Up the Tenants!

When I saw this at The Disaffected Lib, I didn't believe it. Mound of Sound is messing with us, I thought.

But it's true.

Tenants caught growing as few as six marijuana plants in their dwellings could face automatic jail terms of at least nine months, under a federal drug-sentencing bill revived Wednesday that imposes harsher penalties on home renters than on owners.

DJ! readers may recall my recent and vivid experience of the lowly legal status of citizens who rent their homes -- and, yes, I'm still planning on blogging about the whole ordeal -- but I'm gob-smacked.

What on earth could be the justification for hitting tenants harder than homeowners?

I read on:

The Harper government's proposed legislation imposes stiffer punishment on renters than it does on homeowners, because involving a third party is one of several aggravating factors.

Huh? Third party? Who? The landlord?

This just adds a whole new layer of idiocy to the Tory 'Stupid on Crime' program.

Let's go over the pressing reasons King Steve the First had to stack the Senate to pass this steaming pile of doo-doo.

The crime rate has been trending lower for decades.

Mandatory sentencing does not work to deter crime.

Mandatory sentencing works very nicely at filling up jails though -- to the point that many Merkin states are going broke over it.

And low-life tenants deserve harsher sentencing than homeowners. . . well, just because the ReformaTories are authoritarians with a hard-on for hurting vulnerable people.

Oh. No. Wait. I just remembered. According to the Minister of Farm Hair, it's for the wimmins:

“Our government has done more than any other government in the history of this country to keep women safe,” says Public Works Minister Rona Ambrose, who is also in charge of the status of women in the Harper government.

“We have introduced new laws to make sure that we keep rapists and murderers off the street and to make sure that we protect children from sexual predators. That is what women want.”

Rona knows better than Sigmund Freud. But Bill Cosby really knows:

“Sigmund Freud once said, "What do women want?" The only thing I have learned in fifty-two years is that women want men to stop asking dumb questions like that.”

Yo! Opposition! Oppose This!

When I was a teenager, my stepfather used to ask waggishly every weekend: 'What are you protesting this week?'

One of the things I protested -- successfully -- was the Spadina Expressway. Anybody with a functioning neuron could see plain as day what such expressways had done to Merkin cities.

Notable among the opposition was urban theorist Jane Jacobs, who moved to the Annex in 1969, fresh from a battle to stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway in New York City. Marshall McLuhan, too, was opposed to the expressway and said: "Toronto will commit suicide if it plunges the Spadina Expressway into its heart... our planners are 19th century men with a naive faith in an obsolete technology. In an age of software Metro planners treat people like hardware — they haven't the faintest interest in the values of neighbourhoods or community. Their failure to learn from the mistakes of American cities will be ours too."

(As a aside, dig this quote from CONSERVATIVE Premier Bill Davies: 'If we are building a transportation system to serve the automobile, the Spadina Expressway would be a good place to start. But if we are building a transportation system to serve people, the Spadina Expressway is a good place to stop.')

We stopped the idiocy that was Spadina but the ReformaTories are still pursuing FAILED Merkin ideologies.

Ottawa will spend more money on federal prisons in coming years – a rare exception to government-wide restraint and a sharp contrast to efforts by cash-strapped American states to save money through lower inmate populations.

New figures released this week show the budget for Corrections Canada is projected to rise 27 per cent from the 2010-2011 fiscal year to 2012-13, when it will reach $3.1-billion. More than 4,000 new positions will be created at correctional institutions and parole offices across the country, with estimates of a 25-per-cent increase in employees during the same period.

The spike in spending is clearly linked in a government report to the Conservatives’ suite of law-and-order crime bills, which legislate longer prison sentences for a range of offences and limit the opportunities for parole.

Yeah, the Stupid on Crime program.

Crime rates are falling. And mandatory minimum sentences do not deter crime.

Canada's overall crime rate declined by 15 per cent between 1998 and 2007, and the Crime Severity Index, which tracks the relative severity of a crime in comparison with other crimes, declined by 21 per cent. Experts appearing before both the House of Commons and Senate Justice committees testified that mandatory minimum sentences do not deter crime, and in the U.S. have led to skyrocketing incarceration rates. A 2001 report by the federal Justice Department reached the same conclusion.

Ah, but don't bother those ReformaTories with that facty-researchy stuff. Let's just go down that Merkin-style tough-on-crime path and then in a few decades, we'll get to follow them down that undo-the-tough-on-crime path.

In contrast, in the United States – where incarceration rates have risen by a startling 705 per cent over the last four decades – several states are now undoing measures that restrict access to parole and require longer incarceration periods, partly due to budget pressures created by the economic downturn.

As a result, the number of state prisoners in the U.S. dropped last year for the first time in nearly 40 years, according to a survey of detention data released this month by the Pew Center on the States. California has reduced the number of convicts returning to incarceration by changing parole violation rules, while Michigan has reduced its inmate population by 6,000 by waiving some measures requiring convicts to serve 100 per cent of their sentence in prison.

From the Pew link:

“The decline is happening for several reasons, but an important contributor is that states began to realize there are research-based ways they can cut their prison populations while continuing to protect public safety,” said Gelb. “In the past few years, several states have enacted reforms designed to get taxpayers a better return on their public safety dollars.”

Here's Vic Taews covering his ears and going 'lalalalala':

Mr. Toews told The Globe and Mail on Friday that he was not aware of developments in the United States, but defended the planned Correctional Service Canada budget increase.

“Security is obviously an important issue for this government and we’re moving on that file,” he said. “I’m not familiar with the American system. I know what is necessary in order to ensure that the Canadian public is safe and that prisoners are well treated.”

So, how are they going to pay for all this prison building?

They also hint that controversial cuts lie on the horizon. For instance, the documents project a 25-per-cent reduction of the overall budget at Environment Canada. That includes slicing the department’s budget for “climate change and clean air” from $242-million in 2010-2011 to $76-million in 2012-13.

(snip)

A similar caution is included in the report from Agriculture Canada, which is projected to lose 42 per cent of its budget. The department’s report projects spending on “food safety and biosecurity” will drop from $154-million in 2010-2011 to $90-million in 2012-13.

And here's Stevie Peevie doing the ear-covering from that YouTube embarrassment:

“Since research has shown that mandatory minimum sentencing does not deter future crime, what makes you as the Prime Minister believe this is still an effective way of persecuting criminals?”

RT. HON. STEPHEN HARPER: Well, I think the view of the population of Canada on this issue is actually pretty clear, that when serious crimes are committed, people expect the penalties to match these crimes. And obviously, you know, for 40 years our criminal justice system was going in a very different direction. We were…you know, there are these arguments that told people somehow if you don’t punish criminals, that crime will go away. I never quite understood the philosophy, but I think people understand that that approach has not been effective. So we have been, since we’ve come into office, trying to make sure, trying to toughen up our laws and make sure that the crimes are appropriate. You know, for example we think that if people commit serious crimes, violent crimes, we don’t think it’s appropriate that they would serve their sentence at home, what’s called conditional sentences, effectively house arrest. We don’t think it’s…and we don’t think it’s appropriate that very serious or repeat crimes would not be subject to at least some kind of minimum penalty, minimum prison time. I mean, surely if a crime is serious enough, a murder charge, for example, there should be some prison time for a murder charge. So these are the kinds of changes we’ve been making over time. They’ve been very well supported by the Canadian public. I don’t want to say crime is out of control in this country, but we do know that there have been some very worrying growth areas, particularly if you look at the areas of guns, gangs and drugs, and this is a growth area, not just in Canada, but around the world. It’s an international phenomenon. But we do think it’s very important that the criminal justice system send a strong message that such behaviour is not acceptable, and that it be appropriately punished, and that those who engage in such behaviour understand what the likelihood of punishment actually is. Because what we do know about deterrence is it doesn’t work unless people are actually certain they’re going to get punished. But if you create a system where there’s always a loophole, and you can always get out of the punishment, or the punishment can always be downgraded or forgotten, then it’s clear, that kind of a system does not deter people.

PATRICK PICHETTE: Is not credible.

RT. HON. STEPHEN HARPER: Is not credible. It’s not credible. I think…I’m not an expert in this area, but I think the evidence suggests it isn’t the length of the punishment that matters; it’s the certainty of the punishment. And if there’s no certainty you’ll be punished, then no possible penalty will matter. So that’s why we think it’s important to actually have a minimum penalty for serious crimes.

Shorter: I'm not an expert but I'm going to ignore experts because the polls tell me my stupid fellow citizens want it. And I want a majority.

So here's the challenge to the Opposition. OPPOSE THIS.

I'll help. Here is former justice minister, Martin Cauchon, who served under Jean Chrétien:

Mr. Cauchon said it's often more difficult to explain good justice policy to voters, but said it's possible, it just takes some hard work. He pointed out that when he first started arguing in favour of same-sex marriage around the Cabinet table more than 60 per cent of Canadians were opposed.

"When you have a vision and you believe in this as I did you roll up your sleeves, you travel, you communicate to people," he said. "You work with your caucus and at the end of the day you succeed. And look at same sex marriage that was enacted about five years ago and today we don't even talk about it. Canadians society is on side; they have accepted it and they know today it's exactly where we had to go as a society."

The research is already done. So, roll up your sleeves, Dippers and Libs. Communicate this to the public.


h/t