Federal cabinet minister Julian Fantino, a former chief of the Toronto police and the Ontario Provincial Police, said on Sunday the fatal Toronto Eaton Centre shooting underlines that there is a criminal element willing to fire guns in public without concern for who might be caught in the crossfire.The Conservatives have now had a majority for one full year. So I'm not even going to Google to check - I think we can assume whatever they wanted to bring in on crime has been brought in. If not, then great - by their own twisted logic this is their fault. But since it's been a year - then Fantino's quotes come to you directly from Crazy Town. Let's follow the logic, shall we?
Mr. Fantino, now the associate minister of defence, said the federal government is trying to address gun and drug crimes with stiffer sentences.
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“Some of these people obviously need to be taught a lesson,” Mr. Fantino said. “We haven’t been able to effectively get their attention. That’s why some of some of these sentences, severe sentences and mandatory sentences are absolutely critical.”
If there's a shooting then we need to stop judges from having discretion.
That works super great, except that we already have tougher laws, so it's not only not something that works (since no one who commits a murder is thinking "and I bet that soft, librul judge will only give me 15 years in prison"), it's just ridiculous.
It's also a situation where the right, just like on taxes, has set itself up in a (false) win-win situation. Crime goes up? Need tougher laws. Crime goes down (which it is, by the way)? Tougher laws succeeded, need tougher laws.
If there is no circumstance that could prove your totally ridiculous assertion wrong, there's a problem.
But all that is about logic, reason, and fact - not exactly the CPC wheelhouse. So let's take this another way.
Why have the Harper Cons failed to prevent crime? They haven't shut up about it for 6 years of government, and more years of slimy opposition. They don't have a plan to prevent crime - they have a plan to try to look tough and try to get elected. We need something that might actually stop these things, and threats of jail time that potential criminals won't even know about won't do it.
This is something liberals need to talk about - a lot. Which also requires us to lay out what we'd do differently, by the way...
Well put. What we need to do is improve mental health problem identification and treatment, so that we stop using prisons as mental hospitals. We need also to end discrimination against aboriginal people among law enforcement officials - the percentage of aboriginal people in prison is shocking. We need better social services - improved support for low income people and other vulnerable people can prevent them from turning to crime at a tiny fraction of the cost of housing them in jail for a year. Most of all we need to end the perception among too many people that such things are "coddling criminals". It is a rational response that actually gets results, as opposed to the tired "eye for an eye" shibboleth.
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