Bail And The Damage Done

On Carney’s Reforms

There’s been some left wing anger at Mark Carney in recent days, especially with the suite of bail reforms announced on Thursday. It’s not necessarily wrong - reversing the onus for bail for more crimes is a slippery slope to undoing the central tenet of innocent until proven guilty, and it’s likely unconstitutional to boot - but it feels entirely impossible to care, for a simple reason. It’s the price of winning seats, and stopping Pierre Poilievre.

Is that, unto itself, a great defence of bad policy? I don’t know. There’s no right answer to how much virtue signalling and hypocrisy we should tolerate building into our politics, and there’s no clear way of setting an objective standard. But I do think at a time when we often call moderation and populism cynical and bad, someone needs to make the case for meeting the public where they are, even if it won’t work.

There are hundreds of problems in the court system, especially in Ontario, right now. The idea that Trudeau’s bail policies are the cause of the increased levels of crime isn’t supported, at least not as a silver bullet. The fact that hundreds of thousands of cases against drivers are being withdrawn due to lack of capacity in Ontario courts is a bad thing, as is the fact that lack of judges are enabling people who would otherwise be found guilty to walk on violations of speedy trial statutes. Those are Doug Ford’s faults, and if an effective opposition wanted to point any of this out our national politics would be better off for it.

(In news completely unrelated to my driveby shooting of the Ontario opposition, I notice my friends at the New Leaf Liberals have finally gotten an official Twitter account. Follow them, why don’t you, so that we get an opposition party in Ontario that gives a shit about our province.)

Will these tweaks to bail law move the needle? Not in any real sense, no - the problems of overcrowding in jails, a lack of judges to get through cases, and chronic underfunding of legal aid will continue. But the public wants tougher bail laws, so this is what they’re getting. Do they only want that because the Toronto Sun has convinced them that the only people who commit crimes in this country had previously gotten bail 67 times? Maybe, but it’s not on the Liberals to anoint themselves above the public.

Is it likely these efforts will get tossed at the Supreme Court? Sure, but that’s a feature, not a bug. Carney gets the press value of announcing the law and passing the law, while the courts can gut the dangerous and unconstitutional parts of it while we quietly are thrilled we’re off the hook on both ends. We tried, so moderates give us credit for trying, and it didn’t actually hurt anybody, so progressives don’t get apocalyptic. It’s a good day at the office for the Liberals on a tough topic.

In the meantime, the Liberals need to start focusing on what Ford needs to do too. There needs to be public pressure to fix the problems Ford can fix, offers of Federal funding to shame Ford, and a recognition from Cabinet Ministers that these legislative changes will not change things without changes from the provinces. That campaign, and the act of passing the bill, will ensure that Conservatives cannot continue to blame every crime on Liberals being soft on crime. It can flip a bad issue for us into a good one.

But more importantly, we need to understand that the choice is not between some magical perfect progressive crime policy or this airquotes “capitulation”, but between a Liberal government that is willing to feign to give a shit what the public wants but will defer to the (obviously incoming) Court rulings stopping them or a Conservative government quite literally committed to dismantling the Charter whenever they want for whatever reasons. It’s a binary choice, because the status quo nearly cost us the election, and might cost us the next. We need to understand that we won’t have the same Trump fervour to save us next time, so we need to find a way to replicate those results in the aggregate, and find at least three more seats. So that means sucking it up.

With the greatest amount of respect to many people I love, politics is not a place for self-indulgence or perfection. It is a brutal game designed around holding power and stopping bad people from it. Pierre Poilievre, while nowhere close to a Trumpian threat to our very democracy, views the Charter as a luxury to be listened to when he agrees with judges and thinks in 3 word slogans. He has no capacity to be better than he claims to be because what he claims to be is him - a vacuous, unserious leader unbecoming of this country. But the thing is, populism works because it’s popular, so we have to fucking eat it.

It’s also incumbent on those attacking the government for capitulating here to name somewhere else where they can pivot right. Fiscal discipline is pissing people the fuck off, a crime and border pivot is annoying the left, and we already moved on the environment (effectively, I might add). You want Carney to moderate on the school lunch program? You want Carney to not have used a decent chunk of political capital on recognizing a Palestinian state and saying we’d obey the ICC warrant for Netanyahu? You want moderation on guns? We have a 25 seat buffer on the Conservatives - which therefore could be overcome with simply 13 LPC to CPC flips - and did so at the peak of the Carney honeymoon. The idea we don’t have to move right on shit from Trudeau is absurd. So tell me what, because a pointless gesture from the government on crime that will get knocked back by the Courts sounds great to me.

Stopping Pierre Poilievre cannot be something we only think about when the next election rolls around. We have to be seen to be responsive now, or we’ll be fucked when the time comes. And this is a small price to pay, and one everybody should be happy to pay.