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What ties these activities together is the widely-noted peculiarity of a desire to reform the criminal justice system – or at least talk about reforming it – at a time when crime is in a longstanding state of decline. Total crime in Canada peaked in the early 1990s and declined thereafter. Homicide rates peaked in 1977 at three per 100,000 residents. In 2014, the rate was 1.46 homicide victims per 100,000 residents. These patterns fit a larger story of peak and decline that has occurred in the United States and many other industrialized democracies. For well over a decade, Canada has been enjoying the same drop in crime as similarly situated nations. The causes of the drop in crime are not well understood. What is known for certain, however, is that the drop in crime in Canada has little to do with criminal justice punishment policies. Indeed, Canada’s imprisonment rate was remarkably consistent in the decades before crime fell.

On these facts it would be unreasonable to hypothesize that moderation in criminal justice policy – or the Conservative punitive criminal justice policies – have much to do with crime rates. Conservative party members have taken curious positions on the crime decline. At times, they attempt to take credit for the crime drop – in 2014 Harper said that “on our watch, the crime rate is finally moving in the right direction; the crime rate is finally moving down in this country.” At other times, they try to emphasize that crime persists – that “only reported crime is down.” The reduction in crime is, however, real, with overall rates declining since the 1990s, and it clearly flows from factors that predate Conservative rule.