Dale Sabean is an unlikely rebel. The superintendent of the Western School Board in Prince Edward Island is flaunting a "zero-tolerance" law by allowing students to smoke cigarettes on school property.
Despite the threat of charges, Mr. Sabean designated an outside smoking zone at the high school in Elmsdale. Smoking is bad for kids, but the rigid new law is worse, he said, because last fall, after the province passed it, about 150 kids moved to a busy highway to smoke. "If we were to enforce the legislation, we would be saying to these youngsters, 'Go stand on the shoulder of the road,' " he said.
The tiny Maritimes school board has become part of a growing backlash against the concept of "zero tolerance," joining the Canadian and American Bar Associations, American and Canadian civil-liberties unions, the American Psychological Association, numerous academics and, lately, opposition politicians in Ottawa.
Anti-zero-tolerance websites are also springing up, among them beyondzerotolerance.org, which calls itself a "reality-based" approach to teens.
Why is the once-popular policy of zero tolerance to drugs, weapons and other social ills falling out of favour? "People do a lot of stupid things with zero-tolerance policies," said Cecil Reynolds, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Texas A&M University.
Dr. Reynolds chaired a task force for the American Psychological Association whose report cited U.S. cases such as a 10-year-old girl being kicked out of school for two months because her mother packed a small knife with her lunch so she could cut up an apple and a sick six-year-old who was suspended after coming to school with Tylenol.
People who initially approved of "zero tolerance" -- such as parents fearful for their children's safety -- have found it simply too rigid, Dr. Reynolds said.
"Even the Center for Safe Schools has said zero tolerance policies don't create safer schools," he said. "In fact, schools with zero-tolerance policies tend to be schools students find oppressive and don't do as well academically."
Criminologist Neil Boyd said such policies start with good intentions and quickly become abusive.
"A zero-tolerance point of view means seeing things in black and white, when the world is shades of grey," said the professor of criminology at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. "Often what this means is you get people who are zealots imposing their own view of reality."
It has been more than three decades since the catchy, malleable phrase arrived in North America's lexicon. Zero tolerance can be traced back to U.S. president Richard Nixon's "war on drugs" in 1969. By the early 1990s, zero-tolerance policies had become entrenched in educational institutions throughout the U.S. and, to a lesser degree, in Canada.
Schools and colleges removed disciplinary discretion from teachers and principals who caught kids cheating, drinking, smoking or bullying. They laid out minimum punishments that were often as harsh as suspension or expulsion.
Today, on the Internet, countless online businesses advertise zero tolerance of spam. In the labour sector, unions commonly declare zero tolerance of workplace bullying. In Britain, local governments have legislated zero tolerance of "litter louts" and shabby buildings. Canada's national parks have zero tolerance of berry pickers, while in sports, soccer's World Cup organizers swore to have zero tolerance of technical failures.
The term even resonates in the fashion world: Because of public alarm about eating disorders among models skinny enough to wear "size zero," a new lobby has humorously declared war on "size-zero tolerance."
When the jokes start, it's clear that a movement has lost its gravitas. In fact, zero tolerance has become almost meaningless.
When an RCMP internal analysis critical of Vancouver's supervised drug-injection site became public late last year, the federal police force's "zero tolerance" against illegal drugs was loudly criticized by scientists, doctors, police and politicians.
Thomas Kerr, lead researcher of several studies on injection-drug use and an assistant professor of medicine at the University of British Columbia, called zero tolerance "a well-documented failure." He said the RCMP's analysis was factually wrong: "If this is the source of information that informs government decisions, that's embarrassing and that's disturbing."
The law-and-order politics that gave birth to the phrase remain popular within some sectors of the population. This year, the federal Conservative regime is expected to try to introduce tougher mandatory minimum sentences for gun-related crimes, and revamp dangerous-offender laws to make it easier to jail indefinitely people with three serious convictions (a variation on U.S. "three strikes, you're out" crime policies).
