G&M: Harper's aim strays

[tuvor]

Stephen Harper is right that pedophile Peter Whitmore fell inexcusably through the cracks of this country's dangerous-offender law. But the Prime Minister has not explained how his proposed toughening of that law, to be introduced in Parliament next week, would have pre-empted Mr. Whitmore's career as a predator.

It wouldn't have. Mr. Harper, speaking to a police union audience in Toronto yesterday, reaffirmed his government's promise to bring in a three-strikes law for repeat offenders. But there's a catch. Those are three federal strikes, meaning crimes that are punished by two years or more in a penitentiary. Applied to Mr. Whitmore, that would have allowed the predator the very freedom the current system permitted, to such harmful effect. (His latest escapade ended in a standoff with police at a Saskatchewan farmhouse this summer, where he was found with two boys. He was charged with abduction and major sex offences.)

Mr. Harper might seem to be adopting a remorseless sentencing model from the United States. In fact, he is very much in the milder Canadian tradition. Canada has had habitual-offender laws in various forms since 1948. While allowing for indefinite sentences for repeat offenders, those laws have also provided for parole hearings; the door never quite closes, even on rapists, as it does on thieves of pizza slices or chocolate-chip cookies in California. (Those crimes are consideredfelonies for repeat offenders in that state.) Canadian law requires parole hearings after seven years, and every two years thereafter. Seventeen of 345 declared dangerous offenders have been set free.

Under the Conservative government's proposal, anyone who committed three major violent or sexual offences would have to show why he should not belocked away indefinitely. There is no threshold now to guide Crown attorneys, judges and defendants. The law is simply reserved for the "worst of the worst" -- those whose brutality horrifies, and who are deemed by psychiatrists to be incurably violent.

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