Seeing Red

You know, I wouldn't be so dead-set against conservative ideology...if it worked.

Oh, let's be honest. I'm pretty much against any ideology as government policy. Governing unrelentingly from the left or the right is a recipe for disaster; doing so in ignorance of reality is, quite simply, insane.

This editorial from today's Globe and Mail has me seeing red. Liberal red, to be precise: oh, Iggy, if only you placed the interests of the country ahead of your party's, I'd be prepared to vote for you tomorrow.

Stephen Harper is increasing our prisons budget by 36 percent. Corrections Canada is hiring 5300 new workers. All this while our economy is still fragile--and while the crime rate has been falling for years.

The part that really unnerved me:

Ottawa has never said how many extra prisoners it expects the federal prisons to hold as a result of its changes. A cabinet confidence, the government says, bizarrely.

Bizarre is one word for it. Scary might be another. Because they won't say what they're up to in response to polite questioning, we're left to look at what they're doing on other fronts...

We already know the government intends to jail anyone caught with so much as one marijuana plant. This despite abundant evidence that mandatory minimums don't work.

In fact, Conservative MP Ed Fast is quoted in the above article as saying

“I don’t base my support for the legislation on the deterrent effect. I base it on the prophylactic effect of the legislation. Prophylactic means taking repeat, violent offenders out of our communities for longer periods of time.”

N.B. I am not a pothead. In fact, I have never even tried the stuff. But of cigarettes, alcohol and marijuana, I can't help but think the latter is considerably less harmful to society. The other two products are 100% legal.

I would think that any sane person--even a Conservative sane person--would have to acknowledge that possession of one--or even four!--marijuana plants does not a 'violent offender' make. Actually, the very idea of a violent stoner is a contradiction in terms. Unless you're a Twinkie. Then, look out.

If you really want to get the violence out of the pot trade, the thing to do is to legalize it. Doing so properly would drive the black market completely out of business. But our government refuses to even consider this common-sensical approach.

What else is this government dead-set against? File sharing comes to mind. Does the Harper government mean to jail people who have uploaded so much as one file? If so, at some point this Breadbin will be coming to you from the Sin Bin. Yeah, I admit it: I've got (some) pirated content on my iPod. My first instinct is always to get something legally...but that's not always easy, or indeed possible. And what's more, I'm unrepentant: if an artist goes out of his way to make it difficult for me to buy his work--say, by not making it available on iTunes, which is the largest purveyor of music in the world--I'm going to conclude he'd rather not have my money.

If the government intends to jail everyone who has one illegal file or one pot plant, there may not be all that many Canadians left outside the bars...