I wonder if the higher crime rates out West don’t have a lot to do with different attitudes towards this particular issue.
Are they higher across the board out West? I’ve seen the stats showing crime, including violent crime, is down and has been trending downward for the last 5 years at least. I haven’t seen them broken down by province.
Generally speaking, crime rates out West have been higher for pretty much my lifetime, whether the national rate’s trending up or down.
From Statistics Canada -
Crime rate per 100 000 population - All violations, 2009:
Canada: 7723.80
Quebec - 5845.73
Ontario- 5269.65
NL - 7340.18
PEI - 7057.49
NS - 7730.90
NB - 6394.27
Man - 10517.82
Sask - 14345.00
Alta. - 9514.62
BC - 10207.02
YT - 25322.07
NWT - 45848.20
Nvt - 39887.52
(transcribed simply in order that I clicked on links, any typos are my fault). Rather fascinating tables, but I’m way too exhausted right now to really comprehend it all and come to any conclusions, though on first glance RickJay’s hypothesis might be valid. I wasn’t paying enough attention to look for or find any trends, but there’s all kinds of stuff on these sites if you have the patience to look through it!
In Ottawa, when I was a single apartment-dwelling carefree bachelor, my car was broken into more times than I can remember. It might have been 5 times; it might have been 8 times. All I know is that I seriously wanted to break the fucking legs of whoever kept doing it.
I’m all for minimum sentences for crime. This isn’t about “US Style Prisons” whatever that means. It’s about finally realizing that victims have more rights than the convicted. Elimination of “two for one” and the faint hope clause is a start.
As a law-abiding, tax paying citizen I have nothing to worry about when it comes to mandatory sentences. Fuck the criminals.
This would be my guess. In the newspapers out here, once a week, there is a list of all crimes committed that week, broken down by neighbourhood (for example, “Sunnyside” or “Forest Lawn”). Most of them are small stuff: graffiti, “car prowlings,” a garage broken into, and so on. Even the campus newspaper at the U of Alberta lists crimes that took place on the campus over the past week.
Compare that to when I lived in Toronto, and nothing like this was ever in the paper. Of course, the dailies reported major crimes: shootings, drug busts, home invasions ending in murder, and so on; and there might be the occasional “filler” column reporting lesser crimes (for example, stolen cars) in a paragraph. But there was nothing like out here: minor, petty stuff broken down by neighbourhood and simply listed.
It is easy to see how Albertans believe that they are surrounded by crime; because they get a weekly report of what happened in their neighbourhoods. Similarly, it is easy to see how Torontonians believe that they live in a safe city, because they don’t get these kind of reports. Even though the same petty things happen in Toronto.
I do think I live in a safe city; I’m just tired as hell of all the thefts and damage.
ETA: And wow, I guess there isn’t much else to do in the north other than doing crimes!
“Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country”
— Mayor Marion Barry, Washington , DC
The West’s problem is all them Eastern bums, who can’t find work or the pogey has run out on, coming west and stealing our stuff and wimen’ folk.
The local biweekly paper in Guelph has those reports (or at least they did ten years ago). As well, the local paper in Wellington County keeps tabs on it.
And when I lived in Calgary, I lived in some sketchy neighbourhoods (Kingsland by the Chinook Centre, and then an apartment overlooking the 7-11 on 17th and 5th). But I was never the victim of a crime, nor did I know anyone who was. And one week I parked my car at my cousin’s house (NE Calgary) so she could watch it while I was out of town. She left the door unlocked the whole week and there was still money in the dash when I returned.
I don’t think it’s as cut-and-dried as ‘more newspaper reporting’. There has to be some other factor, or more likely a variety of factors, leading people to push for harsher criminal penalties.
Well, if longer/minimum sentences didn’t actually improve crime statistics but merely increased Justice spending and the percentage of our citizens in jail, would you still be all for it? Because that’s kind of what the US experiment in this area has shown.
I guess it depends on which criminals you lock up. Victimless criminals filling prisons don’t benefit anyone and I don’t care how many times they repeat their ‘offenses’. Empty the prisons of those people and fill them will the ones where there is an actual victim. Logically victim related crime should fall as most people who are caught for such crimes don’t just do it once.
Well, that’s the thing, Uzi. This isn’t a logic problem, it’s a human one. While the “War on Drugs” is the worst contributor to the US’s skyrocketing prison population, getting tough on victim related crimes hasn’t helped much that I have seen in that area either.
It should also be noted that the proposed Conservative legislation included tougher sentences for drug crimes, so they are not planning to empty the prisons of victimless criminals.
I would be more interested in the perpetrators being forced to pay for the damage or theft or insurance deductible that I have to pay because of them than have them in jail. You want to break my car window and steal my $100 stereo? Fine, now pay me back for it - none of that was free for me, and now it’s not free for you, either.
A judicial recount in Montmagny-L’Islet-Kamouraska-Rivière-du-Loup bumped the NDPs up by one seat (François Lapointe) - taking it away from a Tory (Bernard Généreux) who had initially been given the win. The final vote count differential was 9 votes. This gives the NDP 59 seats in Québec, 103 nationally and brings the Conservatives down to 5 in Québec, 166 nationally.
There are three other recounts happening:
Not power-shifting results or anything, but I felt they were worth mentioning.
Now that the election is over, I started a new thread over in MPSIMS - The great, ongoing Canadian current events and politics thread - just because I have enjoyed our conversations here for the last couple of months, and I’m hoping we can continue once all the election results are in.
And mnemosyne - I think it’s incredible that four seats hang on a total of less than 100 votes.