This Robocall business is really starting to worry me. Alleged attempts to tamper with democratic processes are bad enough. But the scandalous response of MPs is becoming a crisis. Click here to read the rest.
A lot of crime takes place in the dark for obvious reasons. That's no reason to conduct the public debate about it under similar conditions. Yet while informed discussion is the cornerstone of self-government, on this central question of the state's duty to protect citizens from crime and public disorder, Canadians are not as well served as they should be.
The problem is not just that we don't have some numbers we ought to have. It's that we have a high-profile, apparently excellent source of data on crime that is unsuitable in important ways. Once a year Statistics Canada releases a comprehensive review of police-reported crime statistics (the "Juristat report"), generally suggesting that crime rates are low, and falling, and generally leading commentators to suggest that anyone who thinks crime is a serious problem in Canada is an ignorant fear monger and probably a hayseed to boot. But in a new study from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, where I am managing editor, former Crown prosecutor Scott Newark makes clear in detail that there are a number of serious flaws in the way the Juristat numbers are collected, presented, and interpreted. The result is to deprive Canadian policy-makers, opinion-makers, and citizens information on which to make difficult decisions about the complex social phenomenon known as crime.
For instance, the annual cycle of news stories on the Juristat report should give far more attention than it does to the fact that the report covers crimes reported to police rather than overall crime. This distinction matters, especially in public debate, because as StatsCan itself regularly reports in another publication (its General Society Survey of crime victimization undertaken every five years), a growing volume of relatively minor and sometimes not so minor crime is not reported to the police. When citizens increasingly do not bother to report crimes or, worse, are afraid to do so, it gives a falsely reassuring picture of the state of law and order in Canada. It is also troubling evidence of an erosion of citizens' faith in the competence and compassion of their government when it comes to the criminal justice system. When misinterpreted as proof that citizens are loud ignoramuses, this statistical distortion further contributes to that erosion.
By itself this shortcoming might only call for commentators to be a great deal more alert when using statistics. Unfortunately, the Juristat report suffers from a significant number of other genuine flaws in the way it collects and reports data and in how it explains its work. Some of those flaws have been getting worse rather than better over time in ways that are as puzzling as they are regrettable. The Juristat report thus further contributes to the misleading impression that crime is not a major problem in Canada, and conspicuously fails to meet StatsCan's usual high standards.
Thus in addition to glossing over the problem of unreported crime, the Juristat report only counts the single most serious offence in a criminal incident, so that if someone attempts to commit murder driving a stolen car drunk while on bail, it only shows up as one crime, namely attempted murder. This approach doesn't just undercount crime, it undermines accountability. If things like bail violations, parole violations, or breaches of deportation orders are widespread, it tells us the justice system is doing a poor job of dealing effectively with offenders it has already identified and convicted. Yet they are almost never the most egregious aspect of a serious crime and the Juristat report does not collect and address them separately.
Once again Canadians are deprived of essential information about how they are governed on a highly controversial topic. The report should do a better job of collecting, presenting and explaining data, instead of kicking off with a series of tendentious highlights that get largely uncritical attention despite the shaky assumptions and difficulties with data that underpin them. In short, the Juristat report unhelpfully and unnecessarily creates obscurity on this important topic. Canadians deserve better light and Statistics Canada can certainly provide it.
John Robson is managing editor of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Ottawa, which has just published Why Canadian Crime Statistics Don't Add Up: Not the Whole Truth ( macdonaldlaurier.ca).
[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]
"B.C. rocked by 12th shooting in 16 days" says the Ottawa Citizen headline. Remind me again how gun control works.
Dutch politician Geert Wilders faces criminal charges for being rude about a religion. As for what he said, well, you don't need to hear it, do you? The government says he's a bad man and should go away and not be heard. And that's good enough, isn't it? I mean, who could disagree with the state over something like that? Especially when it can put you in jail for saying stuff it doesn't like.
Out in B.C. they've finally summoned up the courage to lay polygamy charges against breakaway Mormons. Now let's see if all the right-thinking leftists who insisted that courts should not let elected legislators show disrespect to the romantic and sexual choices of consenting adults when it came to gay marriage will rally to the cause of polygamists and, if not, whether they'll honour us with the reasoning behind their apparently contradictory positions.
No one ever said life would be easy. So if you haven't been horribly murdered on a bus I say you should feel lucky. Of course such incidents, narrowly defined, are extremely uncommon. And so far we haven't had any annoying lectures about the human tendency to overestimate rare risks, although I wonder how many people have slept on buses in the past week.
We've also had relatively little annoyingly off-key political whining. One MP called it a "wake-up call" about mass transit security while another rejected armed guards on buses but called, in a most unfortunate phrase, for security experts "to put their heads together." But buses are actually surprisingly safe, and if you really want to improve security further you could simply arm the drivers.
Probably nothing could have saved Tim McLean, who seems to have been immediately mortally wounded. But the attacker was only kept at bay by the driver, a passenger and a passing truck driver waving a hammer and a crowbar, after the driver managed to disable the bus from outside to prevent it being stolen and used for worse mayhem. Whereas in Israel, where normal law-abiding folks are frequently armed, anyone who starts to run amok is promptly shot. That's my public policy lesson here.
My broader lesson is that nothing can fundamentally change the fragility of life. Bus beheadings may be rare, even unprecedented, but malevolence, illness or simple bad luck can strike any of us at any time. This spring an Ottawa grandmother was crushed in a bus shelter when an elderly driver lost control of her vehicle. Politicians might call it a wake-up call for sturdier bus shelters, and I might suggest greater willingness to revoke the licences of unfit drivers. But the key point is that when the American newspaperman Damon Runyon said all life is six to five against he was wildly optimistic.
What amazes me about psychopathic violence, like suicide terrorism, is not how common but how rare it is. We trust our fellows implicitly not suddenly to stab us or run us over as we walk down the street pondering where to eat lunch, and almost invariably they don't. Even the strangest-looking ones, or those with the weirdest internal monologues going on, do not so much as punch us in the nose. Yet they might, and what really can you do to prepare yourself?
Many years ago, hitchhiking across Canada with one dollar in my pocket, I got a lift from a very unpleasant B.C. truck driver who at one point genially observed that I seemed small and cute to be travelling alone. I genially showed him the metal bar I carried for protection and shortly afterward he genially let me out. Was he Clifford Olson? I don't know. I don't remember what he looked like.
I'll never know how lucky I was that night. But I've certainly slept on buses, and if you wake up with a knife jammed through your windpipe it's hard to rebound -- as it is if you die of malaria at three weeks old, get raped and massacred by marauding Huns, are eaten by crocodiles or suffer any number of other horrible fates that have overtaken huge numbers of people and, despite vapid political rhetoric, will undoubtedly afflict many more.
Like being sent to a concentration camp. I happened to be rereading One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich last week, shortly before Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, having survived war with the Nazis, Stalinist labour camps and persecution by Stalin's successors, expired peacefully at 89. And it filled me with gratitude at all the horrible things that never happened to me. It reminded me of Ben Stein's account of floating in his heated Hollywood pool looking up at the same stars visible from Auschwitz and wondering "Why me?"
The question cannot be answered directly. But it also cannot be evaded because you, and I, were incredibly lucky. Yes, you. Even if you are now mortally ill, suffer lingering trauma, or get murdered tomorrow, if you have lived long enough to read this article, and can read it, you are ahead of a great number of people. Would you switch places with that seven-year-old Toronto girl brutally beaten to death by, allegedly, her government-sanctioned caregiver?
Exactly. So the real question is not "Why me?" but "What am I going to do with my luck?" Shall I, who was never once randomly slaughtered on a bus in my youth, go about complaining that my back hurts from digging fence post holes? Or shall I attempt to conduct myself in such a way that people do not generally curse immediately after speaking with me on the telephone? Shall I take some of my luck and share it, or hoard it and whine that there should have been more?
We are all on the bus. If you were lucky enough not to get death as a seatmate yet, try to make something worthwhile of the trip.
[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]