C-10, the omnibus crime bill now being bulldozed through the House of Commons, offers valuable insight into the dim recesses of the Conservative psyche. It’s heavy on penalties, of course, even for relatively trivial offences: the bill is replete with all sorts of neat ways of throwing folks in jail, and mandatory minimum sentences that even Texans think are a bad idea.
C-10 is, in a nutshell, a rag-bag of Conservative gut reactions and prejudices, motivated almost solely by the will to punish—not, heaven forfend, by anything resembling a solid basis of evidence.
But the Bill also seems to at least in some respects, a case of Conservative projection. Take bestiality, for instance.
It’s not a crime that’s exactly sweeping the nation, but it seems to be some kind of preoccupation with this government. Inciting children to have sex with animals—one of the rarer offences in Canada, I would imagine—calls for lots of new legal language and a plethora of penalties, including, naturally, mandatory minimums.
Think of the children! Toss ‘em into max for passing a joint to a friend in the neighbourhood of a school instead. That will almost ensure sex with animals, but it’ll all be perfectly legal.
Hence my hed, which has the original meaning of wasting time on the job, and its other meaning, fouling things up royally. It would be advisable from now on to ensure that the word “don’t” or “stop” is clearly heard if you insist on using such expressions in the vicinity of young’uns. In any case, the government is doing both, stupendously, magnificently, and people are going to suffer. But that’s the whole point, isn’t it?