In one of their later ads, balloon, the Conservatives claimed that in 1995 Martin said crime would be down and Canada would be safer, but, they add, homicides are up and so is drug crime. So is violent crime up since 1995? Of course not. In 2003, the murder rate reached a 36 year low and violent crime is way down since the Liberals took office. The homicide rate did go up in 2004, but one year hardly a trend makes.

These are the facts:

The crime % change 1994 to 2004
Homicide -5.3
Attempted murder -29.4
Serious sexual assaults -32.6
Robbery -14
Total violent crime -9.7

The same broad decline can be found for property crime, down 24 per cent in the past decade, car theft (-3.5 %) and break-and-enters (-36 %)” http://www.cbc.ca/canadavotes/realityche ck/violent_crime.html" title="http://www.cbc.ca/canadavotes/realityche ck/violent_crime.html" target="_blank"http://www.cbc.ca/canadavotes...

 

I am not inclined to give the Liberals much credit for the drop. If there is one thing criminologists agree on it is that the demographic makeup of a society plays a big role. The CBC does a good job of explaining this:

“Violent crime in this country rose steadily during the 1960s, '70s and '80s – the latter being the decade when the Brian Mulroney Conservatives were in power. It peaked in 1992, just before the Chrétien Liberals were returned to office, and for the most part has been dropping steadily ever since. Campaigning Liberals might like to take credit for this achievement, but that, too, would be to play loose with the facts.
The underlying reality is that crime rates are largely a function of demographics. Simply put, violent crime is carried out for the most part by young men between their late teens and late 30s; and probably has been since time immemorial. The decades-long rise that culminated in 1992 coincided with the miscreant faction among the baby boomers and the so-called echo generation that followed close on their heels. When that contingent hit middle age, the rates for murder and violent crime fell – and, perhaps not coincidentally, counterfeiting shot up.”
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The Conservatives are right about one thing though; drug crime is up way up. It is up 52% over the past 10 years. Marijuana possession charges account for most of increase. Interesting enough, drug crime dropped 8% from 2003 to 2004. So the Conservatives are using 1995 as a bench mark for one claim and 2003 as a bench mark for the other.

Anyway, will drug crime go down when the Conservatives launch their War on Drugs? Not if the US is any guide. According to the US Bureau of Justice, Marijuana arrests have more than doubled in the US since 1991. There will be both an opportunity cost and real cost to the tax papers to cracking down on marijuana and failing to follow through on plans for decriminalization. Indeed, the state of California, for example, saved nearly a $ 1 Billion by decriminalizing the personal possession of mere one once of marijuana. M. Aldrich and T. Mikuriya. 1988. Savings in California marijuana law enforcement costs attributable to the Moscone Act of 1976. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 20: 75-81.  Add to this the cost to productivity of of needlessly saddling hundreds of thousands of Canadians with a criminal record.

Of course the aformentioned ad is not the only instance in which the Conservatives have lied by omission. The following really takes the cake though. The Conservatives have made a big to do about the Conference board of Canada saying their platform is fully costed. To put this into perspective this is akin to the NDP holding up the fact the CCPA says their platform is fully costed. That is not the problem though. The Conference board of Canada economist who did the analysis is now saying that the platform he examined is not the same platform the Conservatives released. In other words, the Conservatives were trying to pass off the new platform off as the one given the ok by Conference board of Canada. Global and Mail: “Economist washes hands of new Tory agenda”

“Paul Darby, deputy chief economist of the Conference Board of Canada, originally concluded that Stephen Harper's Conservative platform “is affordable in each fiscal year from 2005-2006 through 2010-2011.”
The Conservative party promoted that conclusion last week as evidence its election platform had been “independently verified” by the Conference Board, an Ottawa-based think-tank.
But Mr. Darby says the version of the platform he was given to vet didn't include a Conservative health-care guarantee which states patients will be transported to another jurisdiction if they can't get timely care at home.
It also omitted a Tory platform promise to redress the so-called “fiscal imbalance” between Ottawa and the provinces.
Mr. Darby wouldn't comment on whether the timely health-care guarantee would bear a significant cost.
“Talk to Harper,” he said. “It is not in the platform I received from them.”
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060115.weconn0115/BNStory/specia lDecision2006/" title="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060115.weconn0115/BNStory/specia lDecision2006/" target="_blank"http://www.theglobeandmail.co...

 

Finally I would be remiss if I did not mention the Gerwal tapping incident example.

The Tories hired audio expect Randy Dash last June.  Dash concluded that the audio “clips” he was given by the Conservatives were not altered. “Mr. Dash’s analysis of the recordings shows that they are clean and unaltered,” Conservative Jason MP Kenney said in a news release sent out on June 9th. The press release did what it was attended to do. It made it appear to anyone, but the most observant, that what you had here was a battle of audio experts. Some experts held that the tapes were not altered and others that they were. This is what NY Times reporter Clifford Kraus concluded in a June 19th article. However, there never was any disagreement. The Tapes spoken about in June 9th were different then the tapes released on May 31 by agent Grewal and the Conservatives. The Conservatives were amazingly brazen about trying to pass one off as another. Indeed, Randy Dash has been hired by Canwest news services to examine the May 31 tapes and concluded that they had probably been altered (e.g., The Star Phoenix (Saskatoon) Friday, June 3, 2005, Page: A1: News Byline: Grant Robertson, Anne Dawson and Allan Woods) “In reviewing some two hours of discussions between B.C. Conservative Gurmant Grewal and top Liberal officials, Randy Dash, a professor and sound engineer at Ottawa's Algonquin College, said: "it appears that on one of the recordings, an edit could have been done." By the time June 6 rolled around the experts were not mincing their words anymore.
The following from Campbell Clark June 6th article in the Globe and Mail:

Yesterday, Jack Mitchell, a U.S. forensic audio expert who conducted a preliminary review of portions of the originally released recordings, said they had been altered. He said he did not believe the changes occurred in the digital-copying process.
"These tapes have been edited. This is not a maybe. This is not something that's unexplained. This is not, 'Oh, this is odd.' This is a definitive statement. The tapes have been edited," Mr. Mitchell said.
He said he could not say with certainty how the alterations occurred, or conclude definitely that it was done intentionally.
However, Mr. Mitchell said that he not only found instances of possible edits, including sections where it appeared that phrases had been added to the recordings, but also a telltale repeat of a brief snippet of conversation that was repeated exactly.
"The entire thing repeats exactly. It's not the speaker repeating his phrase. This repeats exactly in the same way, with the same rhythm, with the same timing, with the same noise signatures. This is impossible," he said.
Mr. Mitchell said that he is not aware of such a glitch ever being produced in a digital transfer.
"I don't know how it could. I really don't," he said.
Errors in digital transfer can produce crashes that end the recording, or "dropouts" where brief gaps lasting a fraction of a second to a few seconds are created.
"But as far as it actually taking the digital file and sort of combining them and doing its own editing and changing things, I think that's nonsense. I've never seen it, I've never heard of a report of it."
The same repeat -- where Prime Minister Paul Martin's chief of staff, Tim Murphy, says "cup of tea" -- was found last week by Glen Marshall, a former RCMP engineer hired by the Liberal Party to examine the recordings.
Mr. Harper's communications director, Geoff Norquay, and his press secretary, Carolyn Stewart-Olsen, could not be reached yesterday.
Mr. Mitchell operates a forensic audio firm called Computer Audio Engineering in Albuquerque, N.M., which has done work used in court cases for U.S. federal prosecutors, several U.S. police forces, and prosecutors and defence attorneys.
He said he has not seen any reports of any other examination of the recordings, except a written statement issued by Mr. Dosanjh's office that alleges at least six sections of the tape were altered, which was sent to him by The Globe.
Mr. Mitchell reviewed two portions of the recordings where Mr. Dosanjh claimed to have found changes, totalling about eight minutes, to determine if there was evidence they had been altered.
The repeated "cup of tea" section is not on a new version of the recordings issued by the Conservatives last Thursday. Those new versions contain 14 minutes of new audio material -- pieces of conversations that are interspersed throughout the recording in a variety of places, which were missing from the first version that was released to the public.
Mr. Mitchell said he thought it was unlikely that such interspersed material was accidentally cut when it was copied to compact disc, as the Conservatives maintain.
"I've never heard of it. Is this something new taking place out there that I haven't heard of? Well, you know, that's always possible, but I don't think so. It would be all over the place if this happened. There are people out there making audio CDs all the time, and nobody has mentioned anything like this ever happening."
In addition, a section of another conversation reviewed by Mr. Mitchell, in which Mr. Dosanjh asserts that any arrangement made with Mr. Grewal "requires a certain degree of deniability" appears to have been edited in from another conversation, as Mr. Dosanjh had alleged. But Mr. Mitchell said it would take further analysis to determine that with certainty.
"The phrase is suddenly -- the amplitude is higher, the frequency content is different, meaning that essentially there are more bottom frequencies in it. The noise signature is different, and on either side of that phrase, they're the same."

For a full run down of the Grewal incident see Buckets of Grewal.

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