The Guesstimated Cost of Justice

How much will the Conservatives' tough on crime agenda cost? Let's start the bidding at $2 billion and see where it goes.

The Toronto Star editorial board is frustrated by the Conservatives' “wildly out of line” estimates of what their “tough on crime” legislation will cost, the most alarming of which is Public Safety Minister Vic Toews’s projection that locking up young offenders will cost $2 billion, a figure grossly at odds with Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page’s prediction of between $10 and $18 billion. The Star speculates that the reason for all the apparent low-balling and secrecy is that the Tories plan to download the cost of crime bills to the provinces but are presumably waiting until after the next election to unwrap that little surprise.

In the National Post, former (and possibly future) prison inmate Conrad Black slams the Tory crime agenda yet again, declaring there is no rationale behind harsher sentences other than “to appeal to knuckle-dragging deadbeats of the jail ’em, flog ’em, hang ’em school … The government is in hot pursuit, without a warrant, of higher costs, more crime, more misery, and deeper roots among the most reactionary and uninformed voters.”

In the Globe and Mail Edward Greenspan and Anthony Doob dismantle a recent study by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute that seemed to support the Conservatives’ assertion that, contrary to Statscan figures, violent crime is increasing. Perhaps the most ludicrous of the study’s claims is that “homicides are arguably decreasing because of the increased quality of medical care.” But if that were true there would be an increase in attempted murders over the same period, and Greenspan and Doob show there was not. The Macdonald-Laurier study also tracked the number of crimes, not the crime rate, failing to correct for population increase. The pair concludes, “crime rates have nothing to do with tougher laws or harsher sentencing.” This is all well and good, but the inverse is also true. In other words, in the Newsroom’s opinion the Conservatives’ tougher laws have nothing to with controlling crime rates, rather they are designed to placate Canadians who feel that criminals aren’t punished enough under current laws. Why they won’t just come out and say so is another matter.