Stephen Harper wants to put more people in jail, but Dalton McGuinty doesn't want to pay for it. Who's going to win?

By Patrick Metzger • Illustration by Matthew Daley

Dalton McGuinty yesterday joined Quebec Premier Jean Charest in warning the federal Conservative government that he won’t pony up for the huge new anti-crime bill that the government has introduced.

The omnibus crime bill that’s united our two solitudes deals not just with offences committed on omnibuses but looks to fix a panoply of crime issues, not all of them imaginary. Bill C-10 rolls up nine earlier “tough on crime” measures that could have sparked a confidence vote when PM Stephen Harper had a minority government, but which can now can be pushed through against a newly impotent opposition. Among the provisions in the bill are mandatory minimum sentences for some drug offences (including six months hard time for anyone growing five or more pot plants), a crackdown on some young offenders, and stricter rules around parole and probation.

Obviously if Stephen Harper and his newly majoritied Tories want to start super-prisoning every hippie with a heat lamp and a seed bag, it must be to combat the growing mayhem in the streets, right? Not exactly. Statscan tells us that in 2010, crime fell to its lowest level since 1973, with the severity of that crime declining as well. For that reason, critics of the bill say it’s motivated by ideology, not need, and that it mimics U.S. policies which have already proven failures.

Still, it’s not that (or not just that) the provincial Liberals are soft-on-crime wusses; the problem is cost. Canada’s Victorian political setup allows for shared responsibilities among different levels of government, meaning that the higher level of government can set agendas which then get paid for by the lower levels. In this case, the feds own the right to criminal law, but the provinces are responsible for a good chunk of prison costs, specifically for offenders sentenced to less than two years and those awaiting trial. And jails are expensive; it’s not cheap to take a fresh-faced kid caught with a couple of joints and turn him into a hulking, dead-eyed, super-criminal.

While the full price tag of this Yankee-style law-and-order-palooza hasn’t been worked out, a report from the Parliamentary Budget Officer in June 2010 speculated that the cost of the “Truth in Sentencing” piece alone (which would eliminate judges’ current ability to give convicted criminals two days credit for every one day served; we don’t get it either) could be as much as $5 billion over five years, with the majority of that being borne by the provinces. That PBO number is $3 billion more than the estimate by Justice Minister Vic Toews that had been offered earlier.

While Tim Hudak and the Progressive Conservatives have yet to make a pronouncement on C-10, their enthusiasm for picturesque Mississippi-style chain gangs implies that they’ll be jumping on the “jail-em-all” bandwagon. However, it’s pretty much a given that the Ontario NDP will support the minority Liberals in opposing the federal measure, even if they don’t like to agree with Dalton McGuinty publicly.

Support at Queen’s Park is really neither here nor there anyway, since it’s not clear what McGuinty and his provincial counterparts can do to stop the bill beyond noisy kvetching. The feds have the right to enact criminal law and the provinces have the right to pay for it, and that’s just how it works. But faced with the prospect of shelling out billions in a tough economy to pay for an unnecessary and impractical new set of laws, we should be glad somebody’s squawking about it.