Harper and his Omni-crime Bill

The Stephen Harper Conservatives are about to add to the cost of government.  Justice will soon cost us much more than it does now.  We all have heard about the cost to build new prisons and housing the new influx of prisoners due to minimum sentences contained in Bill C-10, the omni-crime bill.  Most the burden will be on the provincial side of spending.

The costs don't stop there.  We will need more courtrooms, more judges and staff, more legal aid and of course more prosecutors whom like everyone else in the legal system is overworked.  Again, most of these costs are borne by the provinces.

So while the Federal Conservative government delivers tough on crime laws for its base, they also plan to cut the cost of federal prosecutors by ten percent.

It’s rare for a judge to criticize the judicial system, but a clearly frustrated Justice Peter Tetley of the Ontario Court of Justice told a hearing in Newmarket in September that even without the extra load from new federal legislation, the situation is critical.
After being told by a Crown prosecutor that the first available date for a one and a half day trial was January 2013, Tetley accepted that the delay was unconstitutional and apologized to the defendant.
“If you don’t have enough people to try the cases and enough support staff to process them and you continue to hire police officers to arrest people, this is what happens,” he said. “So consequently, we’re in a predicament where we’re setting dates, that unless they can be brought forward, these charges are not going to be viable."

Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Judicial+system+crisis+Crown+prosecutors+warn/5735714/story.html#ixzz1eJEby5be

Its all going to cost more, more people in jail, longer waits to go to trial and the likelihood we will see charges dismissed due to waits of two years or more.

Of course Harper is spreading the cost with little or no input from those he expects to pay.  So far Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia have made it clear they are not happy with this.  Lets see how the provinces deal with this while attempting to reign in their own budgets.