Ottawa

The Conservatives and the crime rate

Vic Toews acknowledges that the crime rate is going down, this time in a speech on increasing policing costs.

“I’ll be blunt,” Mr. Toews said. “Police services face two options: They can do nothing and eventually be forced to cut drastically, as we have seen in some countries. Or they can be proactive, get ahead of the curve and have greater flexibility in designing and implementing both incremental and meaningful structural reforms.”

The crime rate has required the Conservatives to perform an awkward dance over the years: from dismissing the relevancy of such statistics to dismissing less rigorous forms of analysis to pointing to statistics as proof that their policies are working. As of last July, Mr. Toews had fashioned a new position: the drop in the crime rate demonstrated the success of the Conservatives approach, but the fact that the crime rate was lower in 1962 meant that more had to be done. Conservative MP Guy Lauzon expanded on that idea a week later.

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