Poilievre banking on crime-weary votes for easy but ineffective quick fixes

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This article was published 25/07/2024 (461 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The good news is Manitoba’s crime severity index was largely unchanged in 2023. It even dipped a little, from 146.67 to 145.54, according to new Statistics Canada data released Thursday.

The bad news is the province’s violent-crime severity index continued to inch up and is, by far, the highest it’s been in decades.

The crime severity index measures all Criminal Code offences and assigns greater weight to more serious crimes. Although the numbers stabilized last year, they’re still the highest they’ve been in Manitoba since the early 2000s.

The violent-crime severity index is more specific: it measures all violent crimes and also gives greater weight to more serious offences, such as homicide and aggravated sexual assault. Manitoba’s numbers grew slightly to 215.51 last year from 211.85 in 2022. Those are the worst numbers since at least 2003.

The latest data probably doesn’t come as a great surprise to most Manitobans, many of whom read or hear regularly about the scourge of violent offences — such as murder, stabbings and robberies — in a province that has, historically, had among the worst crime rates in the country.

That didn’t change last year. Manitoba’s score on both indexes was far higher than the national average (80.45 and 99.45, respectively).

Still, the statistics confirm what many people already know, that crime is a serious problem in this province and it has worsened over the past two decades.

There are no quick-fix solutions to it, as much as politicians such as federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre would have the public believe. He continues to falsely claim that bail laws and harm-reduction policies — including safer drug supplies — are driving up crime rates.

There is no evidence to support those arguments. And shutting down supervised consumption sites, which Poilievre has pledged to do in some areas if he becomes prime minister, would not reduce crime. What it would do is increase overdose deaths.

No one can prove with evidence why crime rates go up or down. Crime fell in the years leading up to 2015 and started to rise again the following year. No one really knows why. There are plenty of theories, but none that can be proven.

There is general agreement, though, among criminologists and many policy-makers that factors such as poverty, addictions, mental health and homelessness contribute to higher rates of crime. Those are the key areas politicians should be focusing on when trying to figure out what is driving criminal behaviour and what can be done to alleviate it. But even that takes time.

Efforts today to tackle those issues wouldn’t likely bear fruit for years. And proving with evidence that they reduced crime somewhere down the road is virtually impossible. But policy-makers and the non-profit sector have to try. Even if reducing poverty and making improvements in areas such as addictions and mental health don’t reduce crime, they are always worthwhile endeavours on humanitarian grounds.

What won’t work for governments is trying to reduce crime by jailing more people. Poilievre and politicians like him continue to falsely claim that all governments and the courts have to do is put more people behind bars for longer periods of time and all will be well. It’s never worked in the past and there’s no reason to believe it would work in the future. Higher incarceration rates have not reduced crime.

It’s important that our justice system holds serious offenders accountable for their crimes. Sentencing must be proportionate to the gravity of the offence, and sentencing principles — such as denunciation — must be followed in order to maintain public confidence in the justice system. Chronic offenders who show no willingness to change their lives will, and should, remain behind bars for most of their lives, including those with dangerous-offender designation.

But that doesn’t mean jurisdictions such as Manitoba can prosecute their way out of high crime rates.

Policy-makers have to tackle the problem from a multitude of angles.

A delegation from Manitoba travelled to Houston this week to continue the province’s examination of the Texas city’s highly successful program to reduce homelessness, called “housing first.” That is the kind of nose-to-the-grindstone work that has to be done to address issues such as poverty and homelessness, which will hopefully have an impact on crime down the road.

Snake-oil platitudes peddled by Poilievre and others might help get them elected. But it will do nothing to reduce crime.

tom.brodbeck@freepress.mb.ca