Will Justice Be Served?

Supreme Court appointments, new crime legislation, and more prisons will be a big part of the Tory legacy.

Stephen Harper's majority allows him to pass a crime bill that is the basis for spending as much as $5 billion on new prisons. Brian Lilley of the Sun chain questions the wisdom behind the bill's provision that makes it illegal to link to any website with hate speech on it. “Will websites promoting Israeli Apartheid Week, now a staple on university campuses across Canada, land someone in jail?” asks Lilley. “What about web postings on the Armenian genocide which the Armenians blame the Turks for but which the Turks dispute?” Sentences for such offences can garner up to two years in jail, which Lilley calls “a ridiculous proposal that has no place in a country that claims to cherish freedom of expression.”

A commentator on the opposite side of the political spectrum, Ian Mulgrew, comes to a similar conclusion about the bill in the Vancouver Sun. Pointing to public opinion polls in favour of the tough-on-crime legislation, Mulgrew wonders why “no matter the evidence of a decade of declining crime rates, the nation feels less safe and the Tories say that requires broad changes and a legal cultural shakeup.” Justice was the one of very few areas in which the Tories vastly differed from their rivals, says Mulgrew, an aberration of questionable spending in an otherwise restrained platform. It's the same mentality behind justice policies in Arizona, Mulgrew points out, where the population in prison grew tenfold over the past 30 years, while the total population only doubled.

The Tories could alter Canada's justice system permanently through the Supreme Court. The Ottawa Citizen's Dan Gardner examines what Harper might do with the four new judges he'll appoint to the country's highest bench. “Quite conceivably, Stephen Harper will determine the character of the judiciary for a generation,” writes Gardner. Harper's two previous selections, Marshall Rothstein and Thomas Cromwell, are universally considered excellent choices. But with an emboldened majority, and worrying comments from Immigration Minister Jason Kenney condemning the courts for not following the Conservatives' political agenda, Gardner says jurists are rightly concerned over whether “the reasonable moderate or the partisan zealot” will be the one making those appointments.