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There would be one, grudging exception. After 35 years, prisoners could apply, not for parole, but for “exceptional release,” and not to some do-gooding parole board, but directly to the Minister of Public Safety. This is intended to allay, as the background paper puts it, “legitimate constitutional concerns,” what might be called the Keeping The Supreme Court Off Our Backs provision. So life would not quite mean life. It would mean life or the readiness of an elected politician to personally authorize the release of one of Canada’s “most heinous criminals.”

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If there were any likelihood of that you may be sure the Conservatives would not have included it in the legislation. Indeed, one imagines party strategists rubbing their hands in anticipation of the fate that awaits the politician that opposes it. If the experience of the Anti-Terrorism Act is any guide, the Liberals will announce they will vote for it but change it after they have been elected, while the NDP, though voting against it, will promise to amend rather than repeal it.

According to the government, the measure is needed “to keep Canadian families and their communities safe” from “heinous” (that word again: has it ever been used except in front of “crimes” or “criminals”?) criminals, those “whose actions mean we cannot risk permitting them on the streets.” The suggestion is that Canada’s streets are menaced by a wave of elderly jailbirds, released on parole after a scant 25 years in the slammer.