OTTAWA — It may be hard to remember now, but just a year ago all three national parties were campaigning for office on law-and-order platforms.

The devil, as usual, turned out to be in the details once the Conservatives won a minority government and started trying to enact their particular recipe for cracking down on crime. Justice Minister Vic Toews has produced a bevy of bills since last spring, but has run into adamant objections to most of them from the Liberals and NDP - not to mention the Bloc Quebecois, which had never signed onto the electoral agenda in the first place.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in the midst of the fall parliamentary session, finally resorted to the time-honoured tactic of branding his opponents as obstructionist -- and threatening to make them pay at the polls.

"We'll keep trying to bring forward some tough-on-crime legislation," Harper declared. "But at some point, if the opposition won't pass it, they'll have to answer to the Canadian people."

Critics retort that the Harper-Toews effort to impose law and order is simplistic and wrong-headed.

"Put more guys behind bars," is how Derek Lee, the Liberal vice-chairman of the Commons justice committee, sums up the Tory approach.

Lee says the committee is so backlogged with bills there's no chance they'll all pass before the next election. And he suspects the Tories don't mind, because they'd rather use the issue as fodder for one more campaign than put workable laws on the books.

"The objective is to construct an image of the Conservatives as singularly focused on crime. They know it will gum up the works (in committee) but they will be able to say the opposition are blocking or stalling."

Aside from a housekeeping bill on judges' salaries, the only two measures proposed by Toews that passed the Commons before its Christmas adjournment were:

-A bill to impose tougher penalties for street-racing, which managed to win all-party support.

-A bill curbing the ability of judges to use house arrest as an alternative to jail sentences for violent offences, such as sexual assault and serious physical assault. But that one got through only after the Liberals, NDP and Bloc had drastically rewritten it to keep non-jail sentences as an option for property crimes such as housebreaking.

Both measures still must clear the Liberal-dominated Senate to become law.

Toews admitted, as the session drew to a close, that he was frustrated with the track record, but like Harper laid the blame on the opposition.

"I can only say that we're pushing forward with our agenda," said the minister. "I'm disappointed that the other parties haven't kept their election promises."

Nine criminal justice bills remain before the House, some of them relatively innocuous measures to fine-tune existing laws.

More significant are bills to raise the age of sexual consent to 16 from the current 14, and to crack down on drug-impaired drivers.

But Toews says his top priority in the new year will be a bill imposing tougher mandatory minimum sentences for gun-related crimes, up to 10 years in the most serious cases.

He also wants action on legislation making it easier to classify people as dangerous offenders after three serious convictions. That could lead to locking them up indefinitely.

Opponents say those bills illustrate what's wrong with the Tory approach -- the assumption that stiffer sentences, in themselves, will prevent crime.

The gun-crime bill was largely a response to a wave of gang-related shootings that plagued Toronto last year. But critics argue that problem has already been addressed by better enforcement of current statutes, without Parliament doing a thing.

The gun-related homicide rate in the country's biggest city is down 40 per cent this year, says Lee, largely thanks to a concerted campaign against street gangs.

"The credit goes to the police, not the laws. It's got nothing to do with MPs."

Joe Comartin, the NDP justice critic, says the Tories have only themselves to blame for the slow pace of their crime-fighting legislation.

"It's generally stalled because it's so ideologically driven that they aren't getting any co-operation from the other parties," he says. "The strategy that they've used has obviously been to hit hot-button items."

Tony Doob, a University of Toronto criminologist, says longer sentences may satisfy a visceral urge to punish law-breakers, but they do little to deter people from committing crimes in the first place.

Putting more people behind bars is also a costly solution for taxpayers.

Toews and Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day have estimated the total Tory crime-fighting package could require more than $200 million to build new prisons - and that doesn't count the continuing cost of $80,000 a year to house each and every prisoner.

Doob says if society is going to spend that kind of money it may as well go toward something that actually has a chance of reducing the crime rate.

One choice could be more funding for front-line policing, says Doob. "We all are agreed that bad guys should be apprehended. Nobody has any problem with that."

Another option could be to boost funding for social programs that aim to keep disadvantaged kids in school or offer them job training, thus keeping them from turning to crime.

Hard-liners doubt the utility of that approach, but Doob says we already know incarceration doesn't wipe out crime. "When you start from something which is known to be ineffective, anything looks good."

Tory strategists are convinced, nevertheless, that they've found a wedge issue to pry votes loose from other parties in the next election.

There is some polling data to suggest the Conservative stance on law and order is increasingly popular among key demographic groups, including women and urban dwellers, that Harper needs to attract to win a majority government.

But Henry Jacek, a political scientist at McMaster University, says that doesn't mean there's such an overwhelming fear of crime that people will vote Tory based on that alone.

"The chance of making this an important ballot issue - the primary issue for people who didn't support them last time around - is very unlikely," says Jacek.

"But they've got to try it, because they don't have a lot of other things going for them."