Canadian Style Jail
It is time to tell politicians to get crooks off the couch
by Tom Broderick
Tory MP Steven Fletcher had a pretty funny picture in a political flyer he sent out to homeowners this week.
It's not "ha, ha" funny. It's more, well, just funny.
It shows a scruffy guy with a playoff beard sitting on his bachelor couch sporting a muscle shirt with a beer in his hand.
He's got this kind of "yeah, what are you looking at?" expression on his face.
And the caption on the picture says "Jail?"
Yep. That's jail, Canadian style.
It's supposed to be a guy doing his "jail time" at home -- you know, one of those house-arrest deals.
This is how thousands of "inmates" a year now serve their jail time in Canada -- on their couch, with a beer in their hand watching Ultimate Fighting on their high-definition jumbo screens.
This guy could be the poster boy for Canada's so-called criminal justice system. Do the crime, sit on your couch. Drink beer. It's a party.
There are now more inmates serving conditional sentences -- or house arrest -- than there are convicts doing time behind bars.
You've got couch potatoes like this guy all over Canada doing their "time" in front of the TV.
Sometimes they're doing no time at all because they're out on probation or they were sent home early on statutory release.
That's the get-out-of-jail-free card they hand out automatically to rapists, killers and armed robbers after they serve two-thirds of their sentence.
The question now is -- since it looks like we're having a fall federal election -- will these issues be debated and addressed in a serious manner during the campaign?
They better be. Because average Canadians are pretty fed up with guys like this doing time on their couches.
The Tories laid out a very ambitious justice platform during the last election campaign.
But they failed to make good on a lot of it.
They did not, for example, table a bill to eliminate statutory release, as promised.
They also didn't table a bill that would have made it mandatory for all young offenders 14 and older to be sentenced automatically as adults for serious crimes, as they pledged to do.
In part, their efforts were thwarted by the opposition NDP, Liberals and Bloc Quebecois.
The NDP and the Liberals, for example, gutted a bill that would have made all offences punishable by 10 years or more ineligible for a conditional sentence.
The Tories tabled a bill to add the sentencing principle of deterrence into the Youth Criminal Justice Act but the NDP are opposing it.
Maybe you should ask your NDP candidate about it when they come asking for your vote at the door.
What we need to do during this election is ensure we know the positions of all parties and candidates on these issues so we know how to vote.
Remember when Liberal MP Ray Simard and NDP MP Pat Martin said they were in favour of the original Tory conditional sentence bill then flip-flopped and said they were opposed to it?
We should remember those things when it comes time to cast our ballots. It's easy to say you're tough on crime during election campaigns. But it's what you do between campaigns that matters.
It's time to get the criminals off the couch and into jails where they belong.
Enough is enough.
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