Promises broken

It isn't much of a secret that the Cons' actions on criminal justice legislation have been radically different from their words, as the Harper government has gone out of its way to avoid passing legislation while blaming the opposition, the Senate, and anybody else who happens to wander by. But they've managed to reach a new low in responding to questions about parts of their 2006 platform which were never introduced in Parliament.

Let's start by noting that the Cons were provided with a ready-made excuse for what they haven't done:

The federal Conservatives have scaled back their tough-on-crime agenda by abandoning at least one dozen of the key promises that helped vault them to power in 2006, including abolishing prisoner voting and eliminating "artistic merit" as a defence for child pornography...

Ed Ratushny, a constitutional law expert at University of Ottawa, suggested the Conservatives may have given some sober second thought to some of their earlier promises.

"Sometimes when governments get in power, they get advice (from bureaucrats)that says some of their simplistic approaches are unconstitutional or that the battle has already been fought," he said.

Mr. Ratushny cited a law that permits accused child pornographers to claim that their work has artistic merit -- a defence that the Conservatives proposed to eliminate in their 2004 and 2006 election platforms.

The Supreme Court of Canada, however, has given generous leeway for artistic merit as a defence...

A longtime pledge to end prisoner voting has also vanished. The right for inmates to cast ballots was granted by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2002 under a charter section that guarantees all Canadians age 18 and over the right to vote.

The section is immune from the notwithstanding clause that gives Parliament power to override an established right. Therefore, it could only be changed by amending the constitution, which history has shown is doomed to fail.

But far be it from the Cons to allow for the possibility that they might have applied some sober second thought, moved past their simplistic mindset, or given some consideration to the idea that changing the constitution solely to strip prisoners of the vote might not be worthwhile. Instead, it's time for another round of reality-free finger-pointing:

Justice Minister Rob Nicholson's press secretary, Darren Eke, said that the Conservatives government has a busy justice agenda heading into the next Parliament, in which Mr. Nicholson intends to resurrect several initiatives promised in 2006 that failed to pass in the House of Commons.

Mr. Eke blamed the opposition parties for the government's backed-up justice agenda, saying in an e-mail that it would be "irresponsible to introduce legislation that simply would have sat and stagnated."

Again, it's worth noting that even with the bills that the Con introduced, the hold-up was primarily a combination of the Cons declining to deal with their own bills, and proroguing in order to try to tie highly suspect legislation to a number of measures which had already passed the House of Commons.

But for the Cons, there's apparently no challenge in trying to cast blame elsewhere for their going out of their way to avoid getting bills passed. Now, they've ratcheted up the degree of difficulty by actually blaming the opposition for a failure to pass promises which they never even bothered to introduce.

It may not be surprising that the Cons are testing just how much further they can escape from the boundaries of plausibility after managing to get away with a couple of years of Potemkin government. But it seems probable that there's still some limit to what they can get away with - and the more the Cons keep pushing the envelope as they did today, the more likely they'll be to reach the point where their every pronouncement receives the contempt it deserves.