If Stephen Harper Won't Listen to Us Maybe He'll Listen to His Fellow Republicans

Despite opposition from experts, the Conservatives are determined to build more prisons for unreported crime. Apparently the budget of between 10 and 13 billion includes $67,000 for crystal balls, because we have no idea how to incarcerate imaginary prisoners.

But since they refuse to listen to Canadians who tell them this is a recipe for disaster, maybe they should listen to their fellow Republicans. Newt Gingrich has already come out and said that too much incarceration is unsustainable.

But there is also this story to consider: Republican lawmakers paying for tough crime laws:

When Harry Coates campaigned for the Oklahoma state Senate in 2002, he had one approach to crime: "Lock 'em up and throw away the key." Now, Coates is looking for that key. He and other tough-on-crime lawmakers across the country, faced with steep budget shortfalls, are searching anxiously for ways to let inmates out of prison faster and keep more offenders on the street.

Oklahoma's preferred answer for crime has collided head-on with a budget deficit estimated at $600 million, and prison costs that have increased more than 30 percent in the last decade. For years, lawmakers have pushed each other to lengthen prison sentences and increase the number of criminals behind bars. Not now: This week, new Republican Speaker of the House Kris Steele is expected to unveil a package of proposals that would divert thousands of nonviolent lawbreakers from the prison system and ramp up paroles.

Suggesting that prison expansion will create jobs is nonsense. It's going to break us.

The Conservative Party Owes Taxpayers 45 Million Dollars

When the Harper government was designing their own website to promote the Canada Action Plan, they claimed that they got the go ahead from senior bureaucrats.

Turns out they were lying. Lying through their teeth.

The Harper government claims a senior bureaucrat gave it the go-ahead to avoid rules governing the look and feel of its Economic Action Plan website.

But the Conservatives are declining to provide documentary evidence of the exemption, which does not appear among hundreds of pages of memos,drafts and emails obtained by The Canadian Press under an Access to Information Act request that took more than a year to process. Instead, the public-service paper trail leads to Oct. 1, 2009, when the Treasury Board team leader in charge of policing the government’s own "Common Look and Feel" standards wrote that the exemption request for the action plan website should be denied.

They were told to buy their own ads, but instead stole 45 million dollars from the public purse so we could be treated to more than 30 photos of Herr Harper and a rendition of his piano playing, linked from every single government website.

And along with that cheque, we must also demand the resignations of Vic Toews and Stockwell Day, since they perpetrated this FRAUD.

The party MUST and I mean MUST, pay us back. This has gone too far.

Vic Toews is Showing That the Conservatives Clearly Have Nothing Left

The Conservatives have been increasingly lowering the level of debate in the House, throwing out "zingers" when they are unable to answer questions, which is most of the time.

Vic Toews really outdid himself though.

The debate was over a serious issue. Further security integration with the United States.

And when the Liberal leader asked about this the brilliant, out of ideas Toews, shot back with "I can only speak to the facts, and that is that all Canadians win from increased co-operation, national safety and protection with the Leader of the Opposition's homeland."

"Homeland"? Ignatieff spent five years in the U.S. teaching at Harvard.

We have soldiers who have served in Afghanistan longer than that. Does that make Afghanistan their new homeland?

If Toews can't answer the question, pass it on. This nonsense is getting on every one's nerves.