Canada

Crime laws will cost billions: minister

The Harper government's prison-sentencing laws will cost Canadians billions of dollars, including an estimated $2-billion for one piece of legislation alone, Public Safety Minister Vic Toews acknowledged yesterday.

Mr. Toews said the government has a good idea of the overall cost of its aggressive law-and-order agenda, but does not want to publicly release the numbers. "I'd rather not share my idea on that," Mr. Toews told reporters on Parliament Hill. "It will come out in due course."

Mr. Toews met with media yesterday as a pre-emptive strike against Canada's independent Parliamentary Budget Officer, Kevin Page, who is set to release a report next week that is expected to peg the cost of one new law -- ending two-for-one sentencing credits for time already served in custody-- in the billions.

The estimate released by Mr. Toews ballooned almost overnight -- the government has previously said it set aside $89-million for the first year of the new legislation, which took effect in February.

"I can tell you one thing," Mr. Toews said, "our government is prepared to pay the cost to keep dangerous offenders in prison."

Ending two-for-one credits is one of several Harper government law-and-order initiatives designed to put more people in prison and keep them there longer.

Mr. Toews reiterated yesterday that the government has no immediate plans to build new prisons, but said that it will renovate existing ones and rely more on double-bunking prisoners.

Craig Jones, executive director of the John Howard Society, said the Conservatives are going down the same road as the United States, where tough-sentencing initiatives have failed to reduce crime.

"In the United States, the cost of so-called crime agendas are staggeringly large and disproportionate to the amount of crime reduction they actually purchase," he said. "It seems like the government has cast its crime agenda on the American model and there is no reason to think they are going to be any more successful at reducing crime."

Mr. Jones also questioned how Canadians will ever know if they are getting value for their money, given that crime rates have been declining since the early 1990s.

Other Tory promises include imposing mandatory incarceration for drug-related crimes, curtailing the use of conditional sentences, and ending automatic statutory release after serving two-thirds of a sentence.

Liberal public safety critic Mark Holland had asked Mr. Page to look at the costs of the government's sentencing bills, and his office intends to release a series of reports, starting with the one on two-for-one credit.

Federal bureaucrats, who compiled an analysis in 2004 of the Conservative election platform that year, pegged the cost of law and order promises at as much as $11.5-billion over five years.

(Published by National Post - April 29, 2010)