Ottawa

Children everywhere amuse themselves by inventing imaginary friends. Conservatives here are discovering the political advantages of creating invisible enemies.

Expanding prisons to accommodate boogeyman criminals is the best forecast yet of what life will be like in a future Canada where only the federal government knows what it knows. Without a credible census, the ruling party of the day — and it won’t always be Conservative — will be free to shape, explain and defend public policy, unfettered by facts.

Squaring circles in that perfect political universe will be so much easier. In an information-free zone there won’t be nearly so many awkward questions about why a deep-in-deficit administration would pump $9.5 billion into prisons while a decade-long trend line tracks tumbling crime rates.

In that partisan utopia no politician would have to do what Stockwell Day did this week. In trying to justify spending so much in such hard times, the minister responsible for cinching Ottawa’s belt made a peculiar case. Apparently more cell space is needed to incarcerate those guilty of unreported evils.

How that wrong-doing will be winkled out of the woodwork is as great a mystery as how ephemeral criminals will be brought to justice. But there’s no secret in this government’s strategy.

What Day is really saying is what a lot of Conservatives firmly believe. They know that statistics are a bunch of damned lies just as certainly as they know that honest folks are no longer safe in their homes.

One of the reasons they are so sure is that Stephen Harper told them so. Reinforcing his party’s the law-and-order campaign plank a few years ago, the Prime Minister encouraged True Blue loyalists to trust their gut, not evidence or experts.

That’s a strange pitch from any leader guiding a country in an information age. It’s simply bizarre coming from one schooled as an economist, arguably the craft that relies most heavily on facts and figures to shine a little light into darkness.

Concealed by that contradiction is a defining difference between Conservatives and their predecessors. Liberals and Tories freely spent taxpayer dollars finding political advantage in opinion polls that sometimes seeped into the public domain. Conservatives mostly pay their own research bills, a twist that both cuts communal costs and allows the party to keep private what it learns.

Useful now, that information becomes politically priceless after the census is gutted. When no one else knows anything, reality becomes putty in the hands of those who know something.

As a political dynamic, that has particular Conservative appeal. It opens the unopposed way to shaping into policy the core beliefs smuggled from the Reform movement’s raw beginnings into national office. As an added bonus, it presents the Prime Minister as a libertarian defender of personal privacy even as he strips the information necessary for voters to assess the wisdom of his ways.

It’s been said, perhaps by Yasser Arafat, that fighting a war over religion is like arguing about who has the best invisible friend. Still, as so many kids know, having a special pal no one else can see is always comforting and often useful.

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Conservatives are now dragging that bit of childhood into the very adult world of federal politics. Illusory enemies are helping the Harper government sell a costly and suspect program to Canadians who soon will lose much of their capacity to separate fact from fiction.

With imaginary enemies like that, who needs real friends?

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