Liberals repromise to change Conservative crime policies, years later

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At the moment Justice Minister David Lametti touted his new bill as a landmark move to turn the page on the Conservatives’ failed crime policies, one was tempted to check the calendar. Yep, the Liberal government is indeed entering its seventh year in power.

It turns out Bill C-5, the bill to repeal mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes and a series of firearms offences, is the same as Bill C-22, which was introduced in the last Parliament, where the Liberals sat on it till said Parliament was dissolved in August for an election.

Yet there was Mr. Lametti telling us on Tuesday about an important step to end miscarriages of justice that send young people to jail for a relatively harmless first offence, and a policy that fuels the overrepresentation of Black and Indigenous people in jails.

“This has to stop,” he said.

Stopping it was, in fact, what the Liberals said they were planning in 2016, when it would have been reasonable to talk about turning the page on Conservative crime policies. But now we are in the last, short days of 2021, when any Liberal presenting such a bill should be doing so with the sheepish look of a student asking for another extension.

It’s not that Mr. Lametti didn’t sound sincere when he talked about the ills that come from mandatory minimum penalties, which require judges to apply the minimum even when they don’t believe that circumstances warrant. It is that he is making a case about all the damage caused by something the Liberals have been promising to change for years, and haven’t.

“Facts are hard to argue with, and when it comes to Conservative justice policy, the facts speak loudly and clearly,” he said. “It simply did not work.”

One has to wonder how long a Liberal government has to keep in place a Conservative policy before it becomes a de facto Liberal policy. Four years? Five? We have passed six. Perhaps the bill will pass before the eighth begins. Maybe.

On Tuesday, Mr. Lametti argued a crime policy that focuses on imprisonment is “in good part” responsible for the overrepresentation of Black and Indigenous people in prison, and cited statistics, including noting that Indigenous adults make up 5 per cent of the population but 30 per cent of inmates. He didn’t mention that that’s up from 25 per cent when the Liberal government took office.

The substance of the issue is always going to be up for debate. So are the politics. The Conservatives, who adopted a number of mandatory minimums when former prime minister Stephen Harper was in power, accuse the Liberals of being soft on crime.

But the Liberals don’t seem to have changed their minds on the substance. They have kept talking about the faults of Conservative crime policy, while delaying changes.

Mr. Lametti’s predecessor, Jody Wilson-Raybould, talked about a “comprehensive review” of mandatory minimum penalties – though not for the most “serious” crimes – in 2017. But in her book published this year, Indian in the Cabinet, Ms. Wilson-Raybould said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s advisers shied away from moving ahead with a reform to mandatory minimum penalties in 2018, because it was too controversial and too close to the 2019 election campaign.

“The prevailing wisdom that I could discern at the time was [mandatory minimum penalties] were a political loser, and a winner for the Conservatives. It felt like the issue went round and round,” she wrote. “And just kept going in circles.”

Now the question is whether the Liberals have really screwed up their courage to move forward.

Senator Kim Pate, a long-time advocate for penal reform, argues it doesn’t go far enough. It only repeals 20 of the 72 mandatory minimum penalties on the books, and the government hasn’t provided evidence that this bill will really have a significant impact on the overrepresentation of racialized people in the prison system, she said.

She argues that mandatory minimums worsen crime, rather than reducing it, and the government should provide a way for judges to opt out of all mandatory minimum sentences, at least under some circumstances.

What does Mr. Lametti think? He called it “an important step moving forward,” but didn’t say if there would be more. He told reporters he is the first justice minister to roll back mandatory minimums. But check back on that: It hasn’t happened yet.

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