Undo pardon policy

So often when a government seeks to solve an imaginary problem, it creates a real one in the process. The Harper government’s crackdown on crime, even as crime continued its steady, decades-long decline, is a good example.

During the Harper years, Ottawa drove up the cost of the criminal justice system by billions and increased the federal prison population by 25 per cent. The initial challenge may have been largely invented, but the steep financial and human costs of the so-called solutions remain all too real.

Take the Conservatives’ overhaul of pardon policy, which the Liberal government is now rightly reviewing. During the Harper years, the cost of applying for a criminal pardon went from $150 to $631. This may seem like a minor adjustment, but it carries cruel consequences.

Many employers won’t hire a convict who has not been pardoned. But for the most vulnerable offenders — those without savings or support — $631is a lot of money to scrounge together without a job. Sure, the fee increase may seem to put a few extra bucks in government coffers, but as with so many Harper crime policies it creates an unjust cycle of disadvantage in the process.

The government consulted more than 1,000 Canadians before implementing its new policy in 2011. Upward of 98 per cent opposed it, but the Tories went ahead anyway. The rationale? “Ordinary Canadians shouldn’t have to be footing the bill for a criminal asking for a pardon,” explained then-public safety minister Vic Toews. Never mind that the cost of providing social assistance for someone who is all but precluded from rejoining the workforce would easily eclipse the sum saved.

The Conservative reforms went further, imposing an absolute ban on pardons for some offenders. This needlessly tied the hands of the parole board, just as the Tories’ mandatory minimum sentence laws dangerously handcuffed the courts. The Conservatives even replaced the word “pardon” — with its connotations of forgiveness — with “record suspension.”

The purpose of pardons is to liberate people from the yoke of past mistakes for which they have already paid. These rehabilitated offenders earn their right to re-enter society, and we all benefit when they do. If given the chance, almost all will succeed. Ninetyseven per cent of pardoned Canadians never reoffend, according to the parole board. They are less likely to commit a crime than the average citizen.

That is the absurdity of the Harper government’s pardon policy. It is a solution in search of a problem — one that creates its own set of injustices and policy challenges. That is typical of the previous government’s punitive approach to crime. The Liberals are right to review this misguided policy. Then they should look beyond. A decade of inventing problems has left a daunting array of real ones for this government to solve.