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February 6th, 2015

NDP REALITY CHECK: Cost of the Conservatives Crime Agenda

Today Peter McKay was at the Economic Club of Canada boasting about his Government’s “tough on crime” agenda. But can Conservatives really claim credit for reducing crime?

“…the numbers tell us that the overall police-reported crime rate in Canada has been falling for more than 20 years.”
  • Statistics Canada, 2015

Where Conservative policies really have made an impact is in terms for costs to taxpayers:

“As a percentage of GDP, total criminal justice system expenditures trended downwards from 2002 to 2006 (1.032% to 0.968%) and since 2006 they have steadily increased to 1.115% in 2012.” “Per capita expenditures on criminal justice have also increased steadily. Since 2002, per capita spending, in real terms, has increased 23%. During the same period, Canada’s crime rate has declined 23%”
  • Report by the Parliamentary Budget Officer, 2013

What’s driving this increase in costs? Conservative policies. When the Conservatives changed conditional sentencing, they said it would have no additional cost. However, when the Parliamentary Budget Officer looked into it they found,

“The federal government would bear additional costs of about $8 million…The provincial and territorial governments would bear additional costs totalling about $137 million”
  • Report by the Parliamentary Budget Officer, 2012

And thanks to Conservative policies, the number of Canadians in prison will keep rising every year, although the crime rate continues to fall. The Auditor General found that by 2019-2020, 16,727 Canadians will be in federal prison. As a result, Correctional Services Canada (CSC) is spending millions expanding prisons and building new cells. Problem solved, right? Or not:

“However, we found that CSC’s updated population projection shows that it will again be at or over capacity within a few years of completing construction”
  • Report by the Auditor General of Canada, 2014

Considering that the average cost to taxpayers of incarcerating a Canadian is $117,788 per year, by 2020 the federal government will be spending almost $2 billion on incarceration costs alone. All this at a time when countries all over the world – even the United States – are moving away from these policies because they simply don’t work.

That’s the reality of Conservative crime policies, and Canadians deserve better.