Stephen Harper has allocated $13 million (a figure which varies a little according to who is talking) to build new jails and enlarge and improve old ones across the country. The crime rate in Canada is on the decline but, according to Stockwell Day, Harper’s Minister of Public Safety, the need for the increase in jail cells is because of the “unreported crimes”.

Constance Scrafield- Danby Whatever the excuse, the new jails are being built to accommodate the future prisoners captured by the Harper vision of being “tough on crime”.

In the middle of July, when the G20 were being hosted here, Toronto saw a weekend of “tough on crime” gone mad. There were a great many reports of people who were arrested, while committing no crime, by being “corralled” by overzealous police responding to secret new, albeit temporary but still overzealous, rules, thrown together by the provincial government behind closed doors and in the middle of the night.

In that careless, panic-driven weekend, Toronto became a police state in every sense of the name and the freedoms of law abiding people were suspended. There were warnings later of how easily those freedoms were taken away and, although there was protest a-plenty after the fact, how ready are the provincial and federal governments of Canada to do it all again?

Where is the line between tough on crime and instituting a reduction of personal freedom?

In the USA, the largest number of people per capita in the world is in jail, an astonishing 748 per 100,000 souls.

That’s more than Russia (with 600 incarcerated per 100,000); even more than either China or Iran, according to the International Centre for Prison Studies.

And its still many more than Canada, with a current prison population of about 130 per 100,000, more or less equal with China, so don’t take our relative population numbers into account.

The extraordinary number of people in American prisons is partly due to a large variety of strange, vague and archaic laws which average people could not know and which overzealous prosecutors can and do employ.

What does the Harper government really mean by “crime” on which it plans to become so tough?

How will the “unreported” crimes become known?

Will it become a crime in itself not to report assault or less violent misdemeanours?

Will harsh criticism of the government become a crime?

We have heard that there are plans to imprison young offenders for adult level terms. We have heard that the lengths of terms of imprisonment are to be hardened and extended.

We have heard that programs dealing with troubled youth and poverty in this country have been cut. Funding for education is always the first to feel the axe as though education were not one of the most important jobs of government. Women’s programs and the care of women have felt the pinch of misguided frugality.

In spite of this nation’s historic deficit, Mr. Harper seems to have plenty of money to spend in any wrong direction he pleases. Rather than dealing with the causes of crime which are, essentially, poor education and poverty, Mr. Harper plans to build more and better prisons while the embarrassments that are our children’s poverty rate and the Third World conditions in which our first nations people live continue from decade to decade.

Mr. Harper has $9 billion to spend in the USA on new airplanes for the military, without considering tenders for the equipment, as he works on expanding Canada’s presence in the world as a military power.

Mr. Harper is going to open the Arctic to exploration for oil and gas – he intends to make Canada a “super power for energy export” without due consideration to the consequences. But he has no money for environmental initiatives.

It is not that Mr. Harper does not have access to information about the dangers of the oil sands, the risk of developing off-shore drilling in the Arctic, the ill effects on society by depriving large portions of it of basic human rights, like good education and housing; he knows all that.

He does not care. He will never look down but will always keep his eyes focussed on the wealthy of this country to represent it. He will always support the banks, the oil companies, the armament manufacturers.

He will expect the people at the grassroots level to care for themselves; the green industry to find other funding; the community housing to look for benefactors; the arts to stage their own fund-raisers.

In the meanwhile, he will build more jails, with the satisfied conviction that future new legislation will fill them.