Obstructing justice

PMS is apparently tries to shore up his "lock-'em-up first, don't ask questions later" base by claiming that the opposition parties are preventing any action on the Cons' criminal justice bills. But CBC sets the record straight as to who's holding up any progress for political gain:

Liberals and New Democrats say the government is playing political games by overloading the justice committee so it appears opposition parties are delaying justice reforms.

Opposition MPs deny they are responsible for stalling the government's planned justice reforms, one of the five pillars of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's election strategy.

Harper has repeatedly accused opposition parties of obstructing the passage of several bills that would change the Criminal Code, including raising the age of sexual consent, setting minimum penalties for gun crimes and making changes to the DNA databank.

With nine justice reform bills currently before Parliament, Harper on Wednesday said they should have been law by now.

"The public supports this. Police and public officials, including people as philosophically distant from us such as the premier of Ontario and the mayor of Toronto, also back these reforms, yet these bills are still stuck at Parliament, bogged down by opposition obstruction," said Harper.

But the Liberals and New Democrats said the government has deliberately overloaded the justice committee as part of a strategy to portray them as soft on crime...

"Mr. Harper and his government have created this environment where they wanted this logjam, and now they're trying to blame somebody else," said NDP House leader Libby Davies.

Previous governments would have proposed judicial reforms in a single omnibus bill instead of introducing many separate pieces of legislation, said Davies.

The Conservative government, she said, has manufactured the scenario to unfairly blame the opposition for holding up its proposed legislation...

Liberal Justice critic Marlene Jennings said her party supports most of the bills and even offered to fast-track them.

"The DNA identification bill was one of the bills that we said we support, and we would be prepared to get that through the House of Commons quickly," said Jennings. "Well it's only now coming to committee, a year later."

Indeed, there's no good reason why a government with the ability to set the agenda in Parliament would have refused to allow a supposedly high-priority set of bills to make their way through Parliament. And even if the Cons thought their legislation would fail, surely it would benefit them more to secure recorded votes against their plans rather than refusing to get anything done.

Instead, the Cons' greatest fear on criminal law reform (much like the Libs' greatest fear on the environment) seems to be that something will actually get done, thereby eliminating the issue for future campaigning purposes. But with the Cons already seen as "unfair" in their treatment of the opposition, they may be running a serious risk of having that term define their government going into a new election. And if so, then no amount of scaremongering about streets being ruled by gangs and guns will be able to save the Cons' government.