I felt a little sorry for Stockwell Day recently as I watched him on the television news, trying to explain to a group of journalists why it would be necessary to spend $2 billion to build new prison facilities to hold the burgeoning number of criminals. One of the journalists couldn’t understand why that should be necessary when statistics show that the crime rate, including violent crime, is dropping across the country and has been for at least a decade. Poor Day tried his best to explain that it wasn’t the reported crime that mattered. It’s the increasing amount of unreported crime. He repeated himself several times, but the journalist still didn’t seem to get it. Perhaps it would have helped if Day had been able to explain how he knew the crimes had occurred if they were never reported.
It reminded me of the attempt by Donald Rumsfeld (George Bush’s one-time secretary of defense) to explain what he had said about the state of affairs in Iraq. Perhaps more gifted in the use of bafflegab than Day, Rumsfeld gave a press conference at NATO headquarters in 2002 with this famous clarification: The message here is that there are known ‘knowns.’ There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don’t know. So when we do the best we can and we pull all this information together and we then say well that’s basically what we see as the situation, that is really only the known “knowns” and the known “unknowns.” And each year, we discover a few more of those unknown “unknowns.” We have to wonder, would it be the “known unknowns” or the “unknown unknowns” that are fuelling Day’s passion for new prisons?
“Getting tough on crime” seems to be one of the Harper government’s great claims to fame, so it’s absolutely vital to the Harper agenda that we all believe that crime is our biggest problem. It’s important therefore to keep us frightened and alarmed about a mythical skyrocketing crime rate — so important that Day is prepared, based on no credible evidence, to spend two billion of our tax dollars to build new prisons. Or perhaps it will be more like $9.5 billion, if we believe Kevin Page, the parliamentary budget officer.
Day is also prepared to boost the serious crime figures by reclassifying a number of offences. According to a Canadian Press report carried in the Aug. 5 Advocate, these include gambling (cheating while playing a game or in holding the stakes for a game or inbetting), prostitution (keeping a common bawdy house) and some offences related to drug trafficking. These will now be identified as officially “serious” thus opening the way to stiffer sentences and more jail time for more people. Gotta justify those new jail cells somehow.
It seems that Stockwell Day and his caucus colleagues won’t be happy until we are able to keep up with our American neighbours in locking people up. Canada’s incarceration rate is only 110 people per 100,000 of population, about the same as the European average. That looks pretty anaemic when compared with the more robust U.S. rate of 750 per 100,000. Europe is no more “criminal” and no more violent than Canada.
Maybe it’s time we looked more to Europe as our model rather than always looking south.
Maybe we could save ourselves a few billion dollars in the process.
Don Hepburn
Red Deer