What Bill C-10 and the Summit Series Have in Common

Today, the Canadian left and their handmaidens in the consensus media are apoplectic over the passage of Bill C-10.

Now you can expect that those determined to fight the changes to Canada's criminal code will be gnashing their teeth and searching for any number of end-runs around the political process. Maybe they'll even write the Queen again!

Or not.

Perhaps nobody has captured the hysteria of the left as succinctly as Vancouver East MP Libby Davies:

That's been the standard response of the opposition to Bill C-10. At every turn, they've marched out any number of reports from the consensus academia, and the consensus media, basically insisting that Canada's approach to criminal justice had perfected the art, and that it could never be any better.

Those who have been paying attention know better. That Canada's continually-declining official crime rate has been offset by an also continually-increasing rate of unreported crime -- as detected by self-report surveys -- merely obfuscates the detail that Canada's criminal justice institutions have become moribund institutions.

We've seen this kind of media- and officialdom-fuelled complacency before.

In 1972, Canada's professional hockey players were expected to absolutely crush the Soviet Union's national team in an eight game series. In fact, they were expected to sweep them in eight straight games.

It didn't happen. Canadian hockey players were still the most passionate hockey players to be found anywhere, but the Soviet Union had shown the world a new vision for what hockey could be, and within twenty years North American hockey would look an awful lot more like the hockey played by the Soviet nationals than the hockey played by the NHL of the day.

In other words, the hockey world compared two distinct styles of play, and by combining the best elements of the two, was able to create something new, and something better.

This almost didn't happen. When it finally did, it only happened because of people who were brave enough to challenge those who still insisted that hockey just couldn't be played any better than the NHL was playing it.

Today, the issue isn't hockey, but crime. But all the same, there are a deafening number of voices who are insisting that change to the criminal justice system cannot be tolerated, because it just can't be done any better.

They've seized on almost any point they can to try to make this point. They point to the number of individuals imprisoned in the United States, and to Republican politicians who say that mandatory minimum sentencing is a failure, but they never bother to mention that a great deal of this is because of three-strikes legislation on simple possession of recreational drugs -- particularly marijuana -- and that this is something that is not on the table in Canada.

In the end, they'll wind up eating the same crow that was eaten in 1972. And they won't like it one bit more.