EndProhibition

By: Tonda MacCharles, The Star

OTTAWA—The federal Conservative government is shifting the way lawmaking is done. Private member’s bills — which get less legislative analysis or parliamentary debate than government bills — are the new black.

Since Sunday, four private member’s bills that make changes to criminal and corrections law have been publicly backed by the government as good additions to its tough-on-crime agenda.

Here’s what the latest batch would do: create a new criminal offence for recruiting young people into gangs, levy $5,000 fines or jail terms up to 10 years for wearing a mask or face paint at a riot (five years if it’s an “unlawful assembly”), give federal prison officials more authority to dismiss inmate grievances by deeming them “vexatious” or “frivolous,” and set up a forced debt recovery scheme for inmates who win money from lawsuits against the Crown to require payment of outstanding child support, restitution orders or victim surcharges.

Another private member’s bill on Wednesday moved toward the final stage of Commons approval, to loud applause from Conservative benches. Bill C-304 would repeal Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act and prevent rights claims based on hate speech from being brought before human rights commissions.

The bills may all be fine in principle, but opposition critics see them as the new political tool of a government bent on appealing to its base while side-stepping public accountability. Read more »

CBC News

A Nova Scotia man says the federal government's "tough on crime" law is making it impossible for him to restart his life.

Chris Conrad was 19 when he was busted for selling marijuana. He was sentenced to six months of house arrest and a year of probation. It was his first and only offence.

"I just didn't know what I wanted to do with my life at the time. So I guess you could say I took the easy road — what I already knew how to do to make money," he said.

Now 25, he has done his time. He went to university and planned to apply for a pardon so that when he graduated, he could enter the workforce without a criminal record. Until March, offenders had to wait five years to apply.

Conservatives change the rules Read more »

By Lindsey Cole/The Oshawa Express

Beth Whalen sees many walks of life come through the doors of the John Howard Society of Durham Region.

Each person has their own story to tell. Lately, the tales she’s heard are showing more people are turning to heroin and fentanyl use in part because the popular painkiller OxyContin is going off the market, being replaced with a more difficult drug to tamper with in OxyNEO.

As the harm reduction coordinator, Whalen is actively involved in Project X-Change, which is a program that provides access to sterile needles, syringes, condoms, cookers, safe needle disposal bins and other paraphernalia in order to promote safer injection drug use and safer methods for at-risk activities. The idea behind the program is to reduce the spread of blood borne diseases. Read more »

Peter McKenna, The Star

Having just returned from Colombia — once known as the cocaine capital of the world — it’s not hard to see why impoverished Colombians turn to the cultivation and production of coca leaf and opium poppies.

The climate is most receptive, the scarcity of money is palpable, and there are few substitutes for such lucrative crops. The so-called “balloon effect” also makes any crackdown on production ineffective, since crop cultivation, drug laboratories and transportation routes squeezed in one area will inevitably pop up somewhere else. Read more »