Rhetoric and outdated policy won’t solve crime issue

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 24/04/2025 (192 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The movie Don’t Look Up was a troubling satire on what happens when people don’t listen to experts.

In that film, climate-science deniers avoided the evidence of researchers and it ended in the destruction of the world.

Bypassing scientific evidence has gained traction among politicians south of the border. With elbows up, I thought we were immune here — until I heard the campaign promises around crime. Crime is an easy target among politicians. No one wants to be a victim of crime. And as someone who has studied crime and advocated for crime policy for over 30 years, I’ve seen politicians prey on the topic of crime to scare people into voting for them. For the party that recently lost a significant lead in this year’s federal election, it has meant taking a targeted aim at crime.

Generally, the three main parties don’t differ very much on their approach to crime. All want an increase in penalties, more accountability, and to protect the vulnerable. But the recent rhetoric by Pierre Poilievre has ramped up the discussion in a way that is twisting the reality of crime, to his supposed benefit.

His extra-tough-on-crime stance, a familiar topic for Conservatives, is painting a skewed picture of crime. And just as it did with former prime minister Stephen Harper, it avoids expert knowledge, even for the most basic of criminal justice statistics.

Poilievre is campaigning on the fact that crime has increased over the time the Liberals were in office.

Some crimes have increased, but not the ones he’s talking about. He is talking about multiple murderers, crime while on bail, unsafe streets, and oddly, victims not having access to the Charter of Rights.

As an expert on crime, my bipartisan head is spinning. Could there be any more context missing? Crime peaked in the mid-‘90s, under the reign of the 1984-1993 Conservatives. At the tail end of that Conservative era, crime declined consistently between 1993 and 2005, when the Liberals were in office. The decline continued between 2006 and 2015, when Stephen Harper was prime minister. Then, the Conservatives adopted a tough on crime stance, which many say was not necessary as crime was already on the decline.

Since the recent Liberal decade that Poilievre constantly reminds us of, crime has had an odd pattern, somewhat related to COVID, which had a significant impact on crime globally.

There are slight increases in violent crime, a decrease in some property crime, a decrease in highway traffic act violations, but an increase in administrative and other offences. Violent crime increased by two per cent, but it is 24 per cent lower than it was 15 years ago.

In fact, homicide rates declined in 2023, with only 778 cases across Canada, 104 fewer than the previous year, and there has been a 14 per cent decrease in homicides, not the 112 per cent increase that Poilievre references.

Generally, property crime is more impactful on the lives of people than violent crime, but politicians conveniently dismiss the idea that wages and good jobs can decrease property crime. Poilievre is correct in saying fraud and extortion have increased. It has and it requires intervention.

Also increasing have been online crimes and intimate partner violence, topics that few parties want to discuss because all stripes of government have failed to adequately address these complex issues. Policy briefs and calls to declare IPV a national epidemic have not been addressed by Poilievre as an MP. Nor has another complex crime that has increased by 72 per cent — hate crimes.

These statistics should be our starting point for any policy discussions about crime.

What to do. The Conservative platform that getting extra-tough on crime, reinstating consecutive sentences for multiple murderers, modifying the Charter, and adopting a three-strikes-and-you’re-out policy is an outdated set of policy reforms that will not meaningfully address the crimes that Canadians face.

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Messing around with the Charter is especially concerning. Three-strikes-and-you’re-out is a discredited crime policy that was popular in the 1990s and has been largely condemned by criminal justice scholars and practitioners.

Not only do these polices not work to decrease crime, research has shown they increase homicide rates and create grossly disproportionate sentences. These are not solutions to protect people and create a safer sociey. These have been denigrated by those in the U.S., both in Texas and California, who implemented these polices and repealed them because they have failed.

Not only do these suggested policies run counter to all the evidence of criminal justice research, they represent a waste of taxpayer dollars. This is something we can’t afford to waste in these trying economic times.

It’s simply fiscally irresponsible. Evidence on how to reduce crime exists. We know how to prevent and decrease crime. But that knowledge doesn’t make for a good soundbite. It doesn’t instill fear in people who will then vote for a party who uses crime as a rhetorical strategy. As one character in Don’t Look Up said, “the truth is way more depressing.”

Dr. Kelly Gorkoff is associate professor and department chair of Criminal Justice at the University of Winnipeg.