- Have no fear, members of the far right: of course the Harper Cons don't mean it when they sign an environmental protection agreement. Or pretend to disagree with foreign dictators. Or claim they didn't pressure the civil service to rebrand the country with their leader's name.
- And with that Con track record of dishonesty, no wonder Canada's non-profit sector is running far, far away from any association with Harper and company.
- Meanwhile, how can anybody doubt that it's perfectly normal for government ministers to conduct official business under an alias to avoid detection? Just ask that titan of modern governance, Hugh Jass.
- Finally, Carol Goar highlights the plague of prisons the Cons are so eager to inflict on the country:
What makes Drucker’s book compelling is not the statistics he presents; most of them are well known. It is the way he traces the explosion of America’s prison population back to one politician’s gut-driven policies and the way he uses his skills as a clinical psychologist to track the consequences on the streets of Harlem and the South Bronx.
Drucker wrote his analysis as a wake-up call to his fellow Americans, not as a warning to Canada. But it offers readers on this side of the border a foretaste of what lies ahead if Harper ignores the advice of everyone from health-care professionals to toppled media magnate Conrad Black, who has seen the American justice system from the inside.
Assuming the Prime Minister goes ahead, here is what Canadians can expect:
• An exponential growth in prisons. The Conservatives have refused to provide taxpayers with a credible estimate of how much they plan to spend on penitentiaries. It won’t be as costly as the American crackdown, which threatens to bankrupt several states, but the bills will keep mounting long after Harper’s departure.
• A deterioration of the social structures that communities need to prevent crime.
• A disproportionate increase in the number of poor, non-white people behind bars.
• A belated recognition that there was never any evidence tougher sentences improve public safety.
• And over time, a made-in-Ottawa “plague of prisons.”
Is this the legacy we want for our children? Is it the future we want for Canada?
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