Opinion: Poilievre’s crime policies revive failed strategies

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The Conservatives’ proposals on crime will likely increase the severity of crime. They don’t make sense.

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Mr. Poilievre proposes three-strike/mandatory minimum sentencing. The USA tried these experiments. The evidence shows they did not reduce crime, and seem to have increased the murder rate.

The resulting increase in prisons was expensive, taking financing away from education, health care, housing and more effective responses that reduce crimes. The California experiment resulted in one-third of the people serving enhanced sentences, having a median age of 56.

Imagine in Canada maybe a thousand geriatric prisoners walking aimlessly in our prisons subsidized at over $100,000 each annually when they are unlikely to be of danger.

These proposals aren’t conservative, they’re reactive. Conservative thinking, as opposed to political campaigning, could be helpful.

Decades ago, two Reform Party interns, Pierre Poilievre and Benjamin Perrin, talked about making these strategies the law. Perrin became a lawyer and part of former prime minister Harper’s team that enacted mandatory minimum sentences.

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Perrin, now a law professor, says they are wrong-headed, cruel “snake oil.” He regrets that Poilievre has failed to see that.

Perrin praised Saskatoon’s STR8 Up program founded by Father Andre Poilievre. The STR8 Up program, Canada’s best gang exit program, helped hundreds of gang members leave and never go back. It is a Saskatoon example of a stronger culture of community safety.

The conservative crime proposals are expensive, useless, cruel. And there is another problem.

This newspaper was once owned by Conrad Black. He also went to jail and realized a core problem with prisons was that too many people were in them, not too few.

Most should be serving sentences in the community. Only those few who are likely to hurt others should be imprisoned. But who should decide between community and jails?

Black invoked another conservative principal in a 2011 column in the National Post — that those experts in the craft, judges, after carefully considering all the evidence, are better qualified than politicians “shooting arbitrarily from the hip before the fact.”

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That describes Poilievre’s crime reaction. Black says prisons should be “repair shops, not garbage dumps.” The entire criminal justice system should embrace that conservative principle.

Poilievre claims that violent crime has increased by 50 per cent under the past government. Statistics Canada numbers disagree; the actual increase was 29 per cent. That increase was likely related to the pandemic and should fall. The exaggerated claim of a 50 per cent increase only distracts from clearer thinking.

For example, in Saskatoon, the first three months of this year as compared to last year shows there were 6.7 per cent fewer violent crimes even as the city has grown by thousands.

In the 1990s, Saskatoon was charging about 2,600 youth per year with criminal offences. We were putting far too many youth in jail. Working together, we dramatically reduced the numbers of those going to custody. Crime fell, too. We repaired, we didn’t junkyard. The latest number of youth charged in a much bigger city: 874 in 2023.

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Perhaps Poilievre hopes that his proposals will deter people, ignoring the contrary evidence.

Over 30 years as a lawyer with legal aid in Saskatoon, I can report, after tens of thousands of conversations with clients about possible sentences, very few thought they would be caught, had not considered the penalties, and that, by far, the majority had a very poor understanding of what their sentence could be.

As many police chiefs say, you can’t arrest your way out of crime.

Canada is one of the safest countries in the world. It takes a non-partisan effort to do much better, including not importing failed American policies. We are in a good place as the 11th safest country in the world according to the Global Peace Index; the USA is the 132nd safest country.

Kearney Healy worked as a lawyer with legal aid in Saskatoon for 33 years, has lectured at the College of Law at the University of Saskatchewan, cowrote a book on crime and youth and served as vice-chair on the Saskatoon board of police commissioners for three years.

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