Crime is a social construct, and our approach to it is primarily geared around protecting assets rather than people or society as a whole. Stealing $100 from your employer will get you imprisoned at no cost to them, but your employer stealing $100 from your wages is a civil matter up to you to hire a lawyer to deal with — at much greater cost than $100. What if we turned the criminal code against our problems instead of our people?
The federal government does not have direct jurisdiction over numerous aspects of the country. A key one is minimum wage which, while it has been steadily rising across Canada while being frozen for the past 17 years in the US, is still at a level insufficient for most people to pay rent in most of the country. Canada Housing’s table of what income levels have what housing budgets seen next to Statistics Canada’s table of average rents across the country shows this disconnect.
Canada’s federal minimum wage applies to a minuscule fraction of the workforce. For the vast majority of minimum wage workers, provincial minimum wages apply. Anyone who works any job should make enough to live — very few people take work for the sheer joy of working rather than for the income it provides. But it means the federal government has extremely limited tools to ensure all of our citizens can expect to be paid a living wage. There is, however, one tool we have not used that we might consider: the criminal code. The drafting instructions for such a legislative change might read something like the following. Amend the criminal code of Canada to:
Make it an offence to knowingly pay an employee an amount insufficient to provide a reasonable standard of living including the real cost of commuting within a reasonable distance of the place of work without requiring outside income, subsidies, grants, or other government programs, when measured on a pro-rata basis against a 37.5 hour work week, punishable by an administrative monetary penalty equivalent to twice the minimum difference, restitution and, for repeat offenders, penalties up to and including the revocation of the corporate charter and possible jail time for the individual or individuals responsible for the the application of the illegal monetary remuneration policy.
The same principle can be applied to many problems around, for example, corporate responsibility, corruption, climate change, wealth disparity, waste, or malicious public policy.
The disposable culture we have invented over the past century is in many ways a crime against humanity. We laugh about banning plastic straws in what is an obviously completely symbolic gesture. We should be taking it further. Recycling is not a game, something we do at home but forget about at work or on vacation. Selling or distributing products without a realistic lifecycle plan is to externalise a significant portion of the costs associated with its production, distribution, sale, and use.
We can chastise consumers for throwing out recyclables and compostables, or we can go to the root of the problem that makes it difficult to dispose of properly in the first place. It is perfectly reasonable to require every aspect of a fast food or take out meal, for example, to be sold entirely in compostable packaging, all of which must be taken by back the vendor. There are even bioplastics — including straws — that will break down in industrial compost facilities. It is possible to have our consumerist comforts and some modicum of environmental responsibility coexist.
Planned obsolescence is the idea that we build products and technology knowing that when we sell it, a certain period of time from now it will no longer be useful and have to be disposed of. There is no requirement for the manufacturer to take it back and deal with it. There is a strong financial incentive to do this. Who still uses the indestructible Nokia phones of 25 years ago? Or iPhones from just five years ago? How about that fridge from 1970 that won’t die? What hardware can’t do, software takes care of, if we take a moment to recall Apple’s settlement over deliberately slowing down older phones using software updates.
Products intended for consumption that vent directly to the atmosphere don’t even have the appearance of a plan. Fossil fuels are designed to combine with airborne oxygen and be expelled into the ether, but even electric cars also shed things like tire particulate. None of these have anything resembling a lifecycle plan — they are entirely left to society at large to deal with.
Deliberate action that contributes to climate change is another moral crime that is rewarded through capitalist dogma rather than dealt with through justice.
All of this, if manufacturers and distributors are not willing to address the problem, can be addressed as a criminal matter.
Alaska has a specific crime called “wanton waste” which addresses the failure to consume hunted meat and carries a year in jail. Such perspective must not be limited to the casual hunter.
To continue our drafting instructions, we might suggest:
Any person (including a corporation) who, through the manufacture, distribution, or sale of any product that, if not recycled through a practical and provided method, is known or suspected to cause impact to climate or the environment is guilty of the offence of wanton disregard for the planet.
Punishment should be tangible. Rather than nuisance-level financial penalties that the biggest offenders would not even notice, they should rise to the revocation of corporate charters and the liquidation or seizure of all related assets. Administrative monetary penalties should, by design, exceed the cost of good behaviour. By having it be a criminal matter with real consequence applied equally across the entire economy, no corporation would feel compelled to disregard their moral and environmental responsibility in the interest of staying competitive — their competitors will face the same requirements and consequences.
We treat drug addiction, homelessness, and poverty as problems of crime, but we do not recognise that the people we charge with those crimes are the victims, not the perpetrators, of those crimes, which are generally born of public policy choices.
Public policy itself should be a matter of criminal law. If politicians make policy that deliberately impoverishes, segregates, imperils, or otherwise endangers people or populations, why is there no criminal liability for that? Honest attempts to make better policy that do not work out are one thing and what politics is supposed to be about, but knowingly bringing forward public policy designed to worsen class divides or drive worse outcomes for specific segments of the population, and selling out our future health and viability for short term gain shows, by its nature, criminal intent.
It may be possible to hold employers criminally liable for underpaying their employees or corporations responsible for destroying the environment — but it must also be possible to hold policymakers criminally liable for the continued existence of homelessness or the continued runaway catatrasophe of climate change which are also, fundamentally, policy choices.
If we want to fully fund law enforcement, we ought to point them at the real problems.
Sad but true, our moral code needs the backing of our criminal code. We have all known – experienced – people and corporations for whom morality is a disposable luxury, only useful if it can be demonstrated to be good for the balance sheet. Where does that take us?
Thanks for helping us remember why we do things and how we could do them.