I like Tory crime bill, Canada’s top cop says

Canada’s top police officer says he supports the new omnibus crime bill introduced in Parliament Sept. 20 by the Conservative government.

Dale McFee, the new president of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, said the new bill, which is made up of nine previous crime bills the Tories couldn’t pass when they formed a minority government, “focuses on victims.”

“At the 30,000-foot level we certainly support it,” McFee told reporters in Iqaluit Sept. 21.

McFee, also the police chief for Prince Albert, Sask., visited Iqaluit for a meeting of police officers from across the North, including Alaska and Greenland, to talk about ways to prevent crime.

Arctic police forces are increasingly looking for ways to work with social service providers to prevent domestic violence and other alcohol-fuelled problems by intervening with people before they turn to crime.

The Safe Streets and Communities Act include measures to protect children from sexual offenders by setting mandatory minimum penalties, will target organized drug crime and crack down on young offenders, said Rob Nicholson, the federal justice minister, Sept. 20.

The bill also seeks to reduce the use of house arrest and restorative justice in sentencing.

Some in Nunavut worry the new legislation, combined with earlier Conservative legislation that eliminated the two-for-one credit for time served in remand will swamp Nunavut’s already-overloaded justice system.

NDP justice critic Joe Comartin said that the bill focuses on incarceration rather than crime prevention.

The bill would also heap additional costs on provinces and territories, he said, as provincial institutions house more prisoners for minor drug crimes.

Comartin said that he was happy to see provisions in the youth crime bill that give the courts greater ability to keep violent offenders behind bars in pretrial custody.

Peter German, the RCMP’s deputy commissioner for Western Canada, declined to comment directly on the new legislation but said tougher sentences don’t necessarily undermine crime prevention efforts.

“We’re not talking here about crime and crime control so much as we are talking about individuals and preventing them going down the route of crime,” German said.

McFee agreed.

“Although the omnibus bill does look at minimum sentences and it does look at some of the things that impact victims that are important on the back end of the system, what our focus has been on here is the front end of the system,” he said.

With files from Postmedia News