OTTAWA — This time they mean it: Stephen Harper’s majority Conservative government is poised to pass its omnibus crime bill and make good on an election promise with a couple of days to spare.
A vote in the House of Commons this evening will send the massive bill, which includes nine separate pieces of previous legislation, back to the Conservative-dominated Senate, where it could get its final rubber-stamp and royal assent as early as Tuesday.
This coming weekend marks the deadline Harper set last April when he promised the Conservative criminal justice agenda would be enacted within 100 sitting days of a new parliament.
New Democrats used procedural tactics last week to momentarily delay the final vote, spoiling a Conservative communications exercise in Woodbridge, Ont., where several top Tories had flown at taxpayer expense to tout the legislation’s expected passage.
The bill increases sentences for drug and sex offences, reduces the use of conditional sentences such as house arrest, provides harsher penalties on young offenders, makes it more difficult to get a pardon and allows victims of terrorism to sue.
It initially cleared the House of Commons in December, but in the government’s haste to pass the bill it overlooked some needed fixes that had been proposed by Liberal MP Irwin Cotler, a former justice minister.