Harper’s bulging crime bill, it would seem, has more ugly wrinkles than a prune.

It’s a bill so bizarrely retrograde that even conservative Texans think it’s over the top. Homicide has plummeted to its lowest level since 1966, and, overall, crime is at its lowest since 1973 according to Statistics Canada.

But experts—and there are legions of them in agreement that this bill will make Canada more, not less, dangerous—are flapping their hands to no purpose.

Bill C-10 isn’t about crime. It’s about punishment.

The Conservatives are gleefully rushing it through, getting tough on youth, tough on dope-smokers (a mandatory minimum sentence of six months for growing half-a-dozen marijuana plants), tough on inmates, tough on ex-cons—and then gilding the stinkweed by charging the provinces a fortune to pay for their sado-political excesses.

Anyone opposed to them, claim the Con yokels on the Committee examining the bill, must be pro-crime. Public Safety Minister Vic Toews thinks this label should extend to lawyers for the accused as well. Innocent until proven guilty seems a foreign concept to him. That just gets in the way of punishing people.

It’s good that two major provinces are pushing back against this ideological orgy. It’s not enough: for now, the sadists have won. And we’re all in their hairy hands until 2015. What new delights await in the Spring?

[Beeg h/t to Leadnow.ca, which has lots more links: sign the petition]