The public’s first line of defense against crime are the men and women in uniform that, despite their pleasant demeanor when walking the beat, pack a 9mm and undergo training that most of us wouldn’t be able to endure.
The RCMP, in particular, our guardian angels nationally, will face steep cuts in this year’s budget. The Conservative federal government has already announced that approximately 1,106 jobs will be cut from the national police force.
You can read a Parliamentary Budget Office diagram of the cuts here.
So for those students that graduated recently from College and managed within the span of a year or so to get hired as a cop, too bad.
Or some of the cops retiring within the next five years, sorry, you’ll have to put your plans on hold.
Doesn’t firing cops run contrary to the Conservative “tough on crime” mantra? And why is it necessary for the PC to drag Canada into a law enforcement situation similar to the one in the United States, where they’re tough on crime with say the death penalty, but have some of the highest crime rates amongst O.E.C.D. and developed countries in the world.
Conservatives seem to have not learned the lessons of history: Stricter punishments do not fix the problem and in fact do not deter criminals from committing crime.
Their “tough on crime” legislation is actually weak on crime, it won’t solve anything and it will exacerbate the problem.
So one must again beg the question, why lay off over 1,000 cops in Canada? Why build new jails when there’s less police officers to help fill them up?
Also, there has been a steady decrease in the crime rate in Canada over the past decade. It wouldn’t be completely remote to consider that lighter punishment and lighter criminal laws contributed to that decrease.
Again, why is the Conservative government looking to reverse progress on this decrease? Is it looking forward to more crime in Canada? Well, if that’s not the case then the Conservative Party should not forward policy that looks as if its preparing for more crime.
In addition, it was only Vic Toews, the public safety minister, that mentioned anything about the inadequacy of the soon to be implemented budget to deal with the increasing number of mentally ill people in prisons.
The National Post quotes him as saying:
Mr. Toews estimates 29% of all women in the federal system and 13% of men have been identified on admission as having mental health issues, though he recognizes this is a “baseline” and the problem is likely much worse. He attributes the rise to the de-institutionalization of mental health care in the 1960s and ’70s — one result of which is that only one in three people living with mental illness in Canada access services and support.
“We have to re-examine whether that policy is working. These people were brought into the community to be taken care of there, but provincial governments underestimated the amount of resources dedicated to dealing with those individuals. And when you don’t deal with them on a 24-hour-a-day basis, essentially you’re leaving them vulnerable and they become victims of drug-dealers and other criminals and hpimps. Then you’re faced with a problem of people who are mentally ill and on the wrong side of the law,” he said.
If what Mr. Toews is saying is true, then what is the Conservative government going to do about it?
There seems to be almost no mention of tackling the problem of having too many mentally ill in prisons and not in hospitals in the recently released Conservative Budget and in their “tough on crime” legislation.
What I really wonder though is whether the Conservatives are up to the task of handling this issue? For everything they do, they do with brute force and no reason.
