It's hard to know who is more to blame: The Conservatives for twisting the facts about crime in Canada to convince Canadians they are living in dangerous times. Or Canadians for going along with the Conservatives' imagined higher crime rates when the evidence right under their noses - from their everyday lives - shows that crime rates are falling.
The Harper government has made its "tough on crime" agenda a cornerstone of the electoral campaign it is constantly waging in case its minority government falls.
It might be wrong on the facts, but the Conservative government knows its constituency well: Getting tough on crime - whatever the actual need to do that - appeals to a steadfast core of supporters.
According to a recent poll, older, male voters with no post-secondary education strongly support the Conservatives' crime agenda, as do Albertans. In other words, voters most likely to vote for the Conservatives anyway are the strongest supporters of tougher sentencing and an expanded prison system.
But the same poll, done this month by Ipsos Reid Public Affairs, found that a large majority of Canadians want to know what the expansion will cost and think the government should be forced to release dollar figures. Here, at least, is evidence of common sense. Although given the Conservatives' resistance, it remains very unlikely that Canadians will be told the true cost of expanding Canada's prison network.
Figures veer from the Conservatives' estimate of $2 billion over five years, to parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page's estimate of $5 billion. Those figures reflect the expense of implementing a single piece of legislation, the Truth in Sentencing Act. (On the other hand, it may cost very little. An Ontario judge found a loophole in the act, allowing him to release a homeless man from jail rather than send him up for a long prison stay.)
But if the cost of expanding the prison system is still unknown terrain, the same cannot be said of the crime rate, whatever the Conservatives' pretensions. The rate of crime in Canada is going down, not up. In 1999, for all criminal violations, the rate per 100,000 population was 8,474. Ten years later, in 2009, it was 7,224. Over the same 10 years, the homicide rate was roughly stable. In 1999, it was 1.77; by 2009, it was 1.81.
One of the Conservatives' most bizarre theories is that the homicide rate hasn't increased because our emergency medical services have improved so much that a number of victims survived who otherwise would be part of the murder statistics. If that were true, the rate of attempted homicide should have jumped, but it, too, is stable.
The Harper government has turned to the theory of "unreported crimes" to support its plan to expand prisons, but unless Canada is prepared to throw out habeas corpus along with trials, crimes still have to be reported before they can be counted among any statistics.
Prisons are not a sign of a successful society. Building them when they're not even needed is a wasteful folly.