Not A Time To Be Scaling Back On Law And Order

Tories scale back crime agenda

Government abandons plans to abolish vote for prisoners, child porn defence

Janice Tibbetts, Canwest News Service

Published: Monday, October 27, 2008

The federal Conservatives have scaled back their tough-on-crime agenda by abandoning at least a dozen of the key promises that helped vault them to power in 2006, including abolishing prisoner voting and eliminating "artistic merit" as a defence for child pornography.

The party's 2008 election platform contains only 12 law-and-order promises, a dramatic drop from the extensive blueprint released almost three years ago in an election campaign in which crime and punishment became a major issue.

Many of the earlier initiatives already have passed into law, but others were dropped in the updated plan without ever reaching the House of Commons, omissions attributed to an already busy justice agenda, lower public interest, or a perception that some of the items would not survive legal challenges.

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