Nina Grewal says, “I believe crime remains a number-one priority” for the people of Fleetwood-Port Kells. Presumably, by this she means “fighting crime” or maybe even “preventing crime” is a number-one priority.
At any rate, if the Conservatives are so worried about crime, why have they been so selective about supporting the legal system?
Sure, it’s politically sexy to bring in mandatory sentencing laws and build more prisons.
But the far less-expensive and far more immediate need is more funding to hire and retain more prosecutors and judges – at both the federal and provincial levels.
This is not just a provincial responsibility, as the Conservatives would have you believe.
B.C.’s current justice system mess (which The Leader highlighted recently) could be relieved if the provinces received better funding from Ottawa – either better funding overall, or funding targeted at strengthening the justice system.
And there is another, longer-term solution for much of the crime problem: Preventing it in the first place by building a more equal society. The correlation between equality and low crime is backed up by lots of recent empirical research.
But Grewal will never be accused of making a more equal society “a number-one priority.”
Jason Welch, Surrey
