If you listen to the NDP, hiking minimum wage and burdening businesses with greater operating costs is a good thing because companies can afford it. But increasing the cost of applying for criminal pardons is “a commercial transaction” of the justice system, even if keeping the costs at $150 for 17 years is straining that system.
Well, what’s wrong with increasing the fees for a pardon request? These people committed a crime against society, and now they’re asking to have that transgression permanently removed from their record:
NDP public safety critic Don Davies is now calling for a committee hearing into the issue, arguing there was no warning and no good reason given for the increase. He is also warning that it’s dangerous to bring in the concept of user pay to the justice system and that new pardon cost will be prohibitive to some Canadians.
That’s right. To criminal Canadians.
Here’s the thing. Even if you only apply the 2011 rate of inflation of 2.3 per cent, $150 in 1994 is now worth $221. But the rate of inflation is historically low. The rate has actually averaged 3.26 per cent over the past 90 years, which would set the value of $150 in 1994 dollars as being $259.
The Conservatives are setting the new fee at $631, which is really only an 8.82 per cent annual increase compounded to the value of $150 in 1994 dollars. It doesn’t sound like a giant leap or much of a financial risk, considering as many as 75 per cent of pardon requests are granted.
Adrian – I can comment here and also see previous comments, but I cannot do either if I log in directly to your blog site. What gives?
The number of comments is now posted at the top left of the blog entry on the main blog url unambig.com. But if you’re inside a blog entry you can see the comments. Does that make sense? They no longer appear at the bottom of the post on the main page.
Really like the new look – it’s clean and very easy to read. Also notice a number of blogs going to this number thingie for the comments instead of listing them at the bottom. And I do like being able to reply to a specific comment, otherwise responses sometimes get lost in other people’s issues.
Glad it’s working. The other design felt kind of out-of-date.
With respect, your numbers are wrong.
The fee in 1994 was $50, not $150. The fees were recently increased (in December) by the Conservatives from the long-standing $50 to $150 – and now they are following up on that tripling of fees with the proposed increase to $631.
So, while the media has been throwing around the phrase ‘pardon fees to quadruple’, the reality is that the Conservatives are trying to increase the fee by a factor of 12 (actually, 12.6) relative to what they were in the fall of 2010.
To re-calculate your math with the accurate base figure, a fee of $50 in 1994 would be inflation adjusted to only $86.26 in 2011 dollars, based on your rate of 3.26%.
Rather than an 8.82 average annual increase, the fee hike from $50 to $631 actually represents a putative inflationary increase of about 16.1% – nearly five times that actual average inflation rate.
All of which is largely irrelevant, because we all know that criminal justice and correctional policy should not be judged on arbitrary and simplistic formulae, but on whether or not they enhance public safety.
On that measure, skyrocketing pardon fees are unquestionably a dumb move by this government.
Pardons are an integral part of our corrections system, along with prisons, parole, rehab programs and the other tools in the toolbox that are more familiar to the public.
Pardons provide not only an incentive for ex-offenders to keep on the straight and narrow (they are only available to those who have lived crime free for between 3 and 10 years, depending on the severity of the crime they committed), but also an essential means for those people to re-integrate into society once they have fully turned their lives around.
Keeping people trapped in poverty and denying them meaningful employment or adequate housing is a potent recipe for causing crime – decades of criminological research has proven that. Knowing that many of those who break the law are of low socio-economic standing, the $631 fee (which doesn’t even include the other necessary costs of a pardon, including hundreds of dollars for court records, criminal record checks, fingerprints and application preparation fees with a pardon company) will put a pardon out of reach for many.
Instead of getting a pardon, even after living crime-free for years they will keep their criminal record for perpetuity – denying them access to housing and most decent jobs. And keeping them poor and poorly housed means many of them will turn back to crime.
And, as the government has so recently been trumpeting, crime costs our economy hundreds of billions each year, not to mention the immeasurable personal costs to victims.
So, for the benefit of appearing tough on criminals and wresting an extra $481 from each pardon applicant, the government is enacting a policy which will surely cause more crime, create more victims, and cost taxpayers more in police, court and prison costs to boot.
Put like that, ‘dumb’ doesn’t even begin to describe it…
You’re right, I misread that figure as being $150 in 1994 changing from $50.
It’s called research, Adrian. Or, if you prefer, fact checking. You might give it a go sometime….
I misread the number. It doesn’t change my position. $631 isn’t much to pay to change your life.
It isn’t just $631. That’s one of many fees charged for this. And it sti doesn’t change the fact that it’s an outrageous increase that can only be justified if you believe that those dirty rotten criminals deserve to suffer for life for one mistake.
Gotta love that conservative lack of empathy.
We all sleep in the bed we make.