Jail, not bail and the politics of fear
So, the Conservative Party of Canada’s fundraising emails are fascinating. They offer an introduction to the tools of propaganda. Disingenuous framing, dog whistles, fear mongering, lying with statistics, etc.
Today, we will examine a CPC fundraising email that my conservative online alter ego received on September 18, 2025, from Arpan Khanna, the Conservative member from Oxford, Ontario. The National Post ranked him among the 12 Canadian conservatives to watch in 2023. Whatever that might mean. The email address is the same as every email I receive from the CPC, so it is hard to know how much input he had in its content.
The central claim of the email is that Liberal bail policy has caused a rise in crime, especially violent crime, with an implication that violent repeat offenders released under the aegis of Liberal bail reform are the cause for the rise in crime. This email uses the assertion of a connection between bail reform and a rise in crime to lead its audience to a conclusion that they likely already feel is correct. Liberals are making the streets unsafe, and crime is at an unprecedented height, despite the downward trend of crime rates over the last 30 years. They offer no evidence of this connection other than implication. They use statistics for specific crimes to reinforce the correlation between Liberal governance and crime rates. The email then positions the Conservatives as the solution to this problem.
The statistics provided are technically correct, but they are taken out of their original context. If someone accused the CPC of lying in this missive, they could point to the statistics and say the numbers are accurate. This is a deflection to the inferred impartiality of statistics and away from the disingenuous context provided by the CPC. And just because you use accurate statistics doesn’t mean you’re not lying.
What is the Liberal bail policy?
Well, it can mean a lot of things, but this email is alluding to Bills C-5 and C-75. In brief, these repeal mandatory minimum laws, increase the availability of conditional releases, prioritize diversion over punishment, enact a “principle of restraint” that prioritizes release as soon as possible, and enact measures to streamline the court process. I won't delve into whether these policies have been effective or the reasoning behind the measures enacted. That is a much longer article, likely by someone who understands that policy better than I do. I am concentrating on the tactics of manipulation inherent in this piece of conservative propaganda.
The email links to a petition outlining what the CPC would do to reform the justice system. There are four separate ways to click through to their petition, including one that features a little clicking GIF; very 90s internet vibes. The petition calls for the restriction of those who can be released on bail, focusing on denying bail to repeat violent offenders and reinstating mandatory minimums. Separately, the CPC is putting forth a bill to instate a three-strikes rule. Basically, if someone is convicted three times of a particular class of crime, they are subject to a mandatory 10-year sentence. There is no empirical evidence that these types of laws work to reduce crime or recidivism and have been disproportionately enforced on racialized communities. But it sure is satisfying to put the bad guys in jail for a long time. It’s the same type of thinking that says if your kid misbehaves, you beat them to get them back in line. This does not work. Like prison, you just end up with traumatized people who are better at getting away with bad behaviour.
Lying with Statistics
As stated above, the numbers provided are technically correct. When I first opened the email, I was surprised by how large the numbers were, but I assumed they were the raw number of incidents rather than a rate per capita. And everyone should pat me on the back because I was right. The raw number of incidents of these crimes has increased, but so has the population, which can make the numbers appear larger than they are.
EXAMPLE!: Let’s say you have a population of a thousand people and there are five homicides in one year, and you compare that to a year when the population has grown to two thousand and there are six homicides. The number of homicides has gone up by 20%, but the rate of homicides has actually fallen from 1/200 people to 1/334 people; a change of 60%. The numbers in the email exaggerate the severity of crime to instill fear and raise funds.
I was going to provide a point-by-point analysis of each statistic, as I spent hours combing through the data and like hell was I not going to share all that, but this started to get too lengthy. So instead, I’m going to look in detail at the sexual assault statistics. I matched all the statistics to data gathered and published by StatsCan. They are all accessible through the Incident-based crime statistics, which I will reference as we march through the claims.
The email does not specify a specific time period over which these stats were collected. I assumed that it was while the Liberals have been in power and using that yielded matching results. Now, let us listen to the whispers of the statistics and see what stories can be woven.
Total Sexual assaults are up 76%
This one was slightly hard to figure out because there are multiple different kinds of sexual assault under the criminal code. Thankfully, whoever compiled the list was lazy and just picked the first one. I used fancy math skills (re: grade school division) to ascertain that this was referencing Class 1 sexual assault. The number of incidents has increased by approximately 76%, with the rate per 100,000 rising by 52% from 2015 to 2024 (the last year for which data was collected). The irony(?) is that several of the other types of sexual assault have worse numbers. Incidents of Sexual Assault level 2 are up 107% with a rise in the rate being 79%. Incidents of aggravated sexual assault have risen 20%, with the rate only increasing 3%. Total incidents of sexual violations against children are up 149%, while the rate rose 116%. Now, the numbers used by the authors are deceptive, but merely “enhance” the emotional impact of what seems like a notable trend: a consistent rise in cases of sexual assaults. Not to give punch up to conservative campaign marketeers, but if they’d scrolled down a bit, they could have gotten the far more emotionally gutting statistics about child sexual abuse.
Want me to throw some complexity at these heart-wrenching sexual assault statistics? Tough, I’m doing it anyway. Just because the incidents of sexual assault reported to police have gone up doesn’t mean that the actual amount of sexual assaults has. The Liberal government changed how police report whether a crime is founded or unfounded in 2018. The reporting standard switched to a more victim-centred standard. Now, an incident was assumed to have happened if there was no evidence to refute its occurrence. Compared to what it was before, for a crime to be considered founded, it required explicit evidence that the incident occurred. This has led to an increase in reports of sexual assault, including the sexual abuse of minors. This is just my speculation, but it also coincided with the #MeToo movement gaining traction, which may have contributed to an increase in reporting. None of this is meant to minimize the shocking prevalence of sexual assault in our society; only 6% of sexual assaults are reported to police, and around one quarter of all women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime. Our society has a sex crime problem. Men and boys perpetrated 96% of sexual assaults reported to police. This is a problem caused by men, and the weight of its solutions should be borne by men.
Is this really so bad?
Yes.
If the number presented by the CPC is technically accurate and highlights a legitimate problem, then why does this all matter? From a purely personal perspective, it's dishonest and disingenuous, and that makes me mad. The more important reason is that the CPC has no interest in ending sexual assault. This statistic is being used to stoke fear in the party base, who will support harsher imprisonment across the board. The CPC is unwilling to grapple with the systemic and cultural forces that encourage men's bad behaviour and shield them from the consequences. This is generations-old tough-on-crime politics that has no place in a 21st-century political campaign. They are using the legitimizing veneer provided by statistics to push a policy that is entirely based on emotions rather than data. These are simple solutions to complex problems, which is the rhetorical tool of empty-headed populism. Canadians deserve better than policies based on fear and that require cruelty. This is not justice, or rehabilitation; it is vengeance. And vengeance is far more satisfying than poverty reduction, prison abolition, and even perhaps redemption.
More lies and a conclusion
With all this talk of lying with statistics and subtle framing, I almost forgot that the opening of the email is just a straight-up lie.
“Liberal bail laws have let the MOST violent repeat criminals back onto our streets.”
What does most even mean here? Is “most” an intensifier of violent? Like, they have let the worst of the worst back on the streets? Or is it “most” in the sense of numerical? In the history of Canada? The World? This is a fear-baiting bullshit sentence. They could be just as fear-mongering without this nonsense sentence (say that three times fast). And because I can’t help but do a punch-up for propaganda, why not try something like:
“The Liberal’s broken bail system is letting violent criminals back into YOUR community.”
This is technically correct; violent criminals are released from custody under the Liberal bail system. Because all bail systems allow this to a certain extent. It implies a direct physical threat to the reader and is vague enough for the reader to fill in whatever details they want.
I can’t abide sloppy propaganda.
The big takeaway from my analysis is the importance of context. I will never shut up about context. Statistics used out of their context can be made to say whatever you want them to, given skillful enough framing. It is easy to point at these stats and say “Number go up. Big number bad” but things are rarely that simple—especially anything at a societal level. Crime is a complex subject that involves a myriad of factors that must be accounted for to understand it and build effective policy. But if all you care about is using fear to raise funds and increase your poll numbers, then “the liberals are sending criminals to rape your daughter” is a far more potent message.
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