bob tarantino

oh, it's hardly "implied" criticism

Retired Quebec judge John Gomery says the Harper government's plan to create mandatory minimum jail terms for drug crimes is a "slap in the face" to judges and suggests the Conservatives don't trust them to craft appropriate sentences for individual cases. [emphasis added]

Yeah, can't imagine where they would have gotten that crazy idea.

The interview with Gomery (assuming that Gomery's description of the reaction of his fellow judges is accurate) is fascinating for revealing one of the political dynamics which rarely rears its head in Canada: the judiciary is jealous of its power, and looks askance at any effort to modify it, no matter how minimal or how obviously needed such efforts may be.

"appeared to limit the application"

It's nice to see that the full-throated freakout over the scheduled execution of an admitted multiple murderer is continuing.  It would be even nicer if, in the process, the media could manage to get basic facts correct.  Joan Bryden writing for the Canadian Press:

Cotler said the new policy flies in the face of Canadian law and the Supreme Court of Canada, which has ruled – in a multiple murder case, no less – that the death penalty constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.

(The "no less" is a nice touch in a straight news piece, by the way.)  Either Irwin Cotler or Joan Bryden should engage in some basic research.  You don't even need to wander into a law library - a quick Google search will do.  Had they bothered to take that step, they would learn that, to the extent the Supreme Court of Canada has talked about the issue at all, they have ruled the precise opposite of the proposition advanced by Cotler and/or Bryden.

This article provides a helpful overview of the matter.  But to summarize: in 1976, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the death penalty did not constitute "cruel and unusual punishment" for purposes of the Canadian Bill of Rights.  It should be noted, however, that that ruling took place before the legislative abolition of the death penalty, and prior to the introduction of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, so there's at least a vague argument that it represents outdated law.  Fine.  What has the Supreme Court of Canada had to say about the death penalty in the Charter era?  Helpfully, in the Kindler case, they decided to tell us.  Here's the answer: extraditing a convicted multiple murderer to face the death penalty in the United States does not violate the Charter.  The only pronouncement that "the death penalty constitutes cruel and unusual punishment" under Canadian law came from the dissent in that case - in other words, the written decision which a majority of the court disagreed with and which does not represent the law in Canada.  Not that the Canadian Press will let that stand in their way...

UPDATE: Well, this is embarrassing.  Who's the dumbass?  Bob's the dumbass - because I completely missed a Supreme Court case, and thereby failed to present a full analysis.  As helpfully pointed out in the comments, the Supreme Court of Canada, in 2001, in U.S. v Burns, ruled that extraditing an accused to face a trial for murder, without seeking assurances that the death penalty would not be sought by the prosecution, did violate the Charter (specifically, section 7), in those particular circumstances.  As the Court stated:

We agree that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms does not lay down a constitutional prohibition in all cases against extradition unless assurances are given that the death penalty will not be imposed.  The Minister is required (as he did here) to balance on a case-by-case basis those factors that favour extradition with assurances against competing factors that favour extradition without assurances.  We hold, however, for the reasons which follow, that such assurances are constitutionally required in all but exceptional cases.

In other words, in all but the most exceptional circumstances (the criteria of which are not set out by the Court), Canada can only extradite someone if Canada seeks assurances that the death penalty will not be imposed.  (I should point out that Burns did not "overrule" Miller or Kindler - Miller is hardly addressed (and it couldn't be in any meaningful way, since Miller was decided under an entirely different statute, namely the Canadian Bill of Rights) and Kindler is expressly confirmed to constitute good law at para. 67 ("we affirm that the “balancing process” set out in Kindler and Ng is the correct approach).)

All that being said, the Canadian Press article is still incorrect: the Supreme Court of Canada has still not declared that the death penalty constitutes "cruel and unusual punishment".  From para. 78 of Burns:

We are not called upon in this appeal to determine whether capital punishment would, if authorized by the Canadian Parliament, violate s. 12 of the Charter (“cruel and unusual treatment or punishment”), and if so in what circumstances.  It is, however, incontestable that capital punishment, whether or not it violates s. 12 of the Charter, and whether or not it could be upheld under s. 1, engages the underlying values of the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

So, the most we can say about Canadian law at this point is that we have one Supreme Court decision (Miller) which holds that the death penalty does not constitute "cruel and unusual punishment" for purposes of the Canadian Bill of Rights, and two Supreme Court of Canada decision (Kindler and Burns) which expressly declined to address the matter, one of which (Burns) states that the death penalty "engages" the underlying values of the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.  Given the tenor of the decision in Burns, it's difficult to imagine that the current Court (even though its composition has changed in the years following Burns) wouldn't hold the death penalty to constitute "cruel and unusual punishment", but when a news report describes the law, it should aim to describe it as it is, and not as it might one day be (or, to put it more finely, as the reporter may really, really want it to be).

Thank you for joining us professor Boyd

As I mentioned earlier, the disinformation campaign about crime in Canada is in full swing.  Today, the Globe and Mail solicited the thoughts of SFU criminology professor Neil Boyd on crime rates and the government response to them, in a Q&A session with Globe readers.  Boyd wasn't even able to make it through his first response without... well, see for yourself:

Neil Boyd: Demographic shifts do explain a good deal of the variation in homicide rates, and the rates of other kinds of serious violent crime. In the mid 1970s, young men (those between the ages of 18 and 29) represented 10 per cent of the Canadian population; today they represent about 5 per cent of our population. This demographic category is responsible for close to 70 per cent of all violent crime, and so it follows that when their numbers shrink, the crime rate drops. Canadians are no more or less violent today than they were 30 years ago, but the character of the violence has probably changed.

That's ... hilarious.  Let's see what a quick trip through the actual statistics reveals about whether Canadians "are no more or less violent today than they were 30 years ago".  Let's try, f'rinstance, page 16 of this Statistics Canada report, which helpfully contains a chart listing crime rates from 1962 through 2005.  Look at the column titled "Violent Crime - Rate".  Note that in 1977 the violent crime rate was 572 per 100,000 - and, whoopsie! in 2005 the violent crime rate was 943 per 100,000, meaning that Canadian society is about, what, nearly twice as violent today as it was thirty years ago?  Never let that get in the way, however - we gots us some criminals to let out on the streets!

Great Moments in Canadian Sentencing 11.20.07

Our judiciary keeps doing us proud:

He was convicted in June 2006 of aggravated assault, assault with a weapon and eight other charges of confinement and uttering threats for an attack on Misty Franklin, then 24.  Franklin's spinal cord was severed, leaving her paralyzed from the neck down.

Well, that doesn't sound good.  The attack took place in 2003 and - ta da! - he's about to get out of prison.  But there's a couple of twists here, which, knowing what you know about the Canadian criminal justice system, I'm willing to bet you just won't see coming.

The attack came three months after Fontaine was released from a Prince George halfway house, after serving four years for sexual assault and attempted murder in 1999.

That's twist the first.

He had earlier been convicted of twice assaulting another woman, beating her with a frying pan and stabbing her with kitchen knives.

And there's twist the second. 

So now he's the subject of a dangerous offender hearing.

That, took, let's see, one assault with a frying pan coupled with stabbing avec kitchen knives, one sexual assault coupled with attempted murder, and one aggravated assault which rendered the victim (a single mother of two) paralyzed from the neck down.  Tally that all up, and now, finally, maybe, he'll actually be put away for meaningful time.  But only if a judge agrees with the application (of course, don't worry, every seven years Dangerous Offenders get to argue that they should be paroled).  Seeing how the judiciary has acted in the past in regards to this offender, would you be willing to bet the house on a successful DO application? 

Whenever I read stories like the one noted above, I recall the immortal words of Ottawa Citizen columnist Dan Gardner, one of the commentariat's more frequent pronouncers on the Canadian criminal justice system: "In most cases today, serious criminals are seriously punished."  I recall those words, and I laugh and I laugh and I laugh.

"cast of lowlifes"

And here I thought the book would have no relevance to anyone.  As I explain in Chapter Five of Under Arrest - Canadian Laws You Won't Believe, it remains a crime in Canada to publish blasphemous material.  That provision of our Criminal Code, as with so many, is derived from English law - where it appears that free speech is due to get a bit of a workout:

The leader of a small evangelical group went to Britain's High Court on Tuesday in a bid to sue the producers of ``Jerry Springer: The Opera" for blasphemy.

... Earlier this year, a lower court rejected a request to issue summonses against "Springer" producer John Thoday and Mark Thompson, director-general of the British Broadcasting Corp., which televised the show in 2005.  Green's lawyers are asking three High Court judges to allow private prosecution for blasphemous libel.

Evidently the English anti-blasphemy law has been successfully used as recently as 1977.

Stuff You Should Totally Read 11.20.07

The Red Hot Chili Peppers are suing US cable station Showtime over Showtime's use of the word "Californication" as the title of a show, "claiming the title is 'inherently distinctive, famous ... and immediately associated in the mind of the consumer' with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Singer Anthony Kiedis said in a statement, ' "Californication" is the signature CD, video and song of the band's career, and for some TV show to come along and steal our identity is not right.'".  Coming from any band, that's sad - coming from the band that released the classics Mother's Milk and Bloodsugarsexmagik, that is just so frickin' lame.

The Lupercale seems to have been discovered in Rome.

If you aren't in hysterics at some point while reading this story, you're broken:

as the morning light began to filter through the thick fog that often envelops San Francisco, viewers at Vista Point on the north end of the Golden Gate could make out the silhouette of a red Volkswagen Beetle. It was dangling from the underside of the bridge, 10 storeys above the water. A Canadian flag was painted on one side of the car. A big red “E” was on the other side.

I count myself as firmly agnostic, with strong gusts towards atheism, but the notion that a theological dispute from nearly a thousand years ago is still occupying efforts is so cool:  "A Vatican-Orthodox commission working to heal the 1,000-year split between the Catholic and Orthodox churches has agreed the pope has primacy over all bishops but disagrees over just what authority that primacy gives him."

"We know nationally there are a lot of people looking at what Wolfville does in this instance." You say that like it's a good thing.

Nothing to see here, move along

A new stanza begins: the government attempts to ensure that violent criminals are punished, and the pro-crime advocates step up their disinformation campaign.  Let's see what Tonda MacCharles, writing in the Toronto Star, has to say about the issue:

Still, Nicholson justified his bill by saying Canadians are concerned by what he called higher rates of youth crime and the "seriousness of these crimes" in such cities as Halifax, Toronto and Winnipeg.

But experts, including Martha Mackinnon of Justice for Children and Youth, a legal clinic for low-income youth, say serious youth crime is not increasing, except for a blip last year.

Interesting.  Evidently none of these "experts", Tonda MacCharles nor Martha Mackinnon have access to the internet.  Let's see what about four seconds of Googling reveal about "serious youth crime" in Canada.

Statistics Canada, The Daily, Tuesday July 18, 2000:

The rate of youths charged with violent crime dropped 5.0% [in 1999], the fourth decline in a row. This was the largest year-over-year decline since the introduction of the Young Offenders Act in 1984. Despite these recent drops, the youth violent crime rate was still 40% higher than it was in 1989.

Statistics Canada, The Daily, Thursday, July 19, 2001:

Similar to the overall crime trend, the youth charged rate for violent offences increased 7% [in 2000], while that for property offences declined 4%.  Most major categories of youth violent crime rose in 2000, including sexual assault (+18%), assault (+7%) and robbery (+2%).

Statistics Canada, The Daily, Wednesday, July 17, 2002:

The violent crime rate for youths increased 2% [in 2001], its second consecutive gain

Statistics Canada, The Daily, Thursday, July 24, 2003:

Violent crime among youth was down 2% in 2002. After increasing steadily throughout the 1980s, the rate of youths charged with violent crime continued to increase during the 1990s, but at a slower rate. Even with the most recent drop, the 2002 youth violent crime rate was still 7% higher than a decade ago.

Statistics Canada, The Daily, Wednesday, July 28, 2004:

Violent crime among youth was up 3% [in 2003], also the third increase in four years.

Statistics Canada, The Daily, Thursday, July 21, 2005:

The rate of violent crime among youth fell by 2% [in 2004]

Statistics Canada, Crime Statistics in Canada, 2005, page 13:

The youth crime rate increased [in 2005] for the most serious violent offences: homicide (+47%), attempted murder (+11%), aggravated assault (+6%) and robbery (+9%.

Statistics Canada, The Daily, Wednesday, July 18, 2007:

Violent crime among youth rose 3% [in 2006]

So, to recap, according to Statistics Canada, in 1999, youth violent crime fell 5%, which still put it at a rate 40% higher than it had been a decade before. Youth violent crime then increased in 2000, 2001, 2003, 2005 and 2006.  So, in the last eight years, youth violent crime has increased in five out eight years, and is almost 50% higher than it was two decades ago.  But, hey, there's nothing to worry about - everything's working fine and Tonda, Martha and their coterie of "experts" have it all sewn up.

The Deep Funk 11.18.07

The 15-year old Bob Tarantino contained somewhere inside me just died in a fit of gnarliness: check out this two-part interview of Guns N' Roses from 1987, taking place at CBGB's.  Slash is completely out of his gourd, and still chugging more from a fifth of Jack Daniel's - watching his multiple failed attempts to put on his sunglasses is alone worth the wait.  Steven Adler eventually apparently just wanders away from the table, and Axl comes across as a surprisingly decent guy - at one point he punches the air in apparently genuine joy at the prospect of opening up for Motley Crue a few days after the interview. It's about twenty minutes out of your life, but so worth it.

everything you could possibly need to know about Toronto public schools...

in 126 words or less:

Two parents I spoke to were particularly agitated about a Grade 9 boy who was reportedly designated a safe schools transfer.  In his middle school, he'd beaten up his teacher so badly the teacher was hopitalized and had to take a leave of absence.  The board suspended the child, then moved him to a second school, where he again punched out a teacher.  This time, it took several cops to restrain him.  He was suspended again, and when he resurfaced at C.W. Jeffreys he was escorted by a TDSB youth worker.  "Teachers were terrified of him," says Jacqueline Mitcheel, who daughter has been in a class with this student for two years.  "I had one teacher calling me at home, telling me how scared they were."

(Taken from "Deadly Lesson", by John Lorinc, Toronto Life, December 2007, pp. 37-54 at 49-52).  What's absolutely hilarious about the article is the tone of complete bewilderment heard from the reporter, the teachers, the union, the parents, everyone.  No one seems able to connect the dots between a near-total lack of disciplinary action and, you know, a near-total lack of discipline.  Even the union, sniffed at by Lorinc and hinted at as wanting to bring to bear some kind of hardline corporal punishment, only wants to sequester perpetually violent students in their own separate school (brilliant idea, I say: keep all the really aggressive ones together - maybe they could hire ninjas to watch over the classes and protect the teachers). 

By the end of the piece, about the only thing Lorinc is willing to concede is that "maybe kids who continually abuse the public education system shouldn't have unfettered access to it" [emphasis added]. 

Not that he's prepared to jump to such a radical conclusion, mind you.

"regrettably certain"

I'm pro-cop.

Make of that (or of me, in light of that) what you will, but my instinct is always to give the police the benefit of the doubt.  I like to think I give everyone the benefit of the doubt, but when two benefits of the doubt conflict, and one runs in favour of the police, I'll err on their side, until evidence is tendered to the contrary.  I've had a few different preconceived notions challenged in the last few days.

Hvaing watched the long version of the Robert Dziekanski video (that's a six-minute version - there's also an approximately nine-minute version here), I'm not sure how anyone can come to a conclusion other than that the police conduct on there is utterly ... appalling.  That's the most docile "violent" person I think I've ever seen - how it is that what he was doing warranted two Taser shots is beyond me.  What you see on that video is homicide - and now it'll be up to the courts to decide what type of homicide, and the punishment (if any) to be handed down for it.

Those four officers aren't solely to blame, of course.  That the staff at an international airport in Canada were apparently befuddled by a traveller who didn't speak English shouldn't come as any surprise to anyone who has travelled extensively, but it is no less absurd for that.  That the security personnel evidently weren't quite up to handling a non-violent, frustrated man who was acting erratically is unlikely to qualify as breaking news either.  Finally, that the bureaucrats have conducted their own review of their own conduct and found ... wait for it ... nothing culpable about it whatsoever, is also about par for the course (my favourite quote is that "airport staff are not responsible for that area" - meaning, as near as I can tell, that there is a no-man's land inside the airport where the writ of the airport does not run - or something).

But I have to admit that, for me, coming a close second to the infuriating manner in which Robert Dziekanski died, is this meme:

Somehow, despite his total lack of knowledge of English, Mr. Dziekanski was cleared to enter Canada at a Border Services inspection point before straying into baggage claim, within the secure area of the airport, and remaining in various places, unable to communicate with anyone, for 10 hours or more.

Catch that?  Let's try it again.

Somehow, despite his total lack of knowledge of English, Mr. Dziekanski was cleared to enter Canada at a Border Services inspection point before straying into baggage claim, within the secure area of the airport, and remaining in various places, unable to communicate with anyone, for 10 hours or more.

People who don't speak English!  In our country!  Crossing the border!

I'm beggared by the sentiment.

That sentence is taken from a National Post editorial.  And that's not even the bad part.  This is:

The attitude that an immigrant to Canada is under no obligation to learn the rudiments of either official language before arriving may even have played a role (a fact that will no doubt feature prominently on overheated talk-radio commentary).

Forgive the lapse, but are you fucking kidding me?  I almost want to let that sentence fester on its own, wilting in its utter repugnance.  That the editors evidently felt the need to attempt to ameliorate its fetidness by sotto voce opining that only the lower kind of "talk radio" rhetoricians would even raise the matter, despite the fact that they just did so themselves, says most of what you need to know about it.  It's like a warped inversion of the Seinfeld "not that there's anything wrong with that" joke, except that this is neither intended to nor actually results in humour.  Presumably the writers realize that even if Dziekanski had been just, say, a tourist, he would likely have ended up in the same position (i.e., dying while staring at the floor, with four RCMP officers pinning him to the ground, presumably trying to figure out why he had just had 50,000 volts of electricity channeled through his body), since tourists also go through the baggage claim area?  Or are we just planning on keeping out everybody who doesn't pass a TOEFL test?  You want to see Niagara Falls/the CN Tower/the Rockies, you gotta tell me a story in English or else you can go the f*** back where you came from!  Is there some new movement afoot that argues for making even temporary visitors to the country pass some sort of fluency test, else they run the risk of being killed and, in an off-hand, kinda-sorta, we're-just-asking-questions, just-a-few-percentage-points-of-responsibility manner partly blamed for it in the pages of one of the country's national newspapers?  If so, is there some kind of membership I can take out to voice my disgust at said movement?

In what conceivable moral order is not speaking the language a justifiable building block in making the case that someone deserves to be killed or at least measurably contributed to their own death?  At least two of the Post writers who contributed to that editorial have taken the opportunity to publicy opine that it constituted an excellent example of editorial writing at its best.  That they failed to notice the gaping fault line that runs through it and which hinges on, I don't know, bizarre adolescent xenophobia, is, at best, distressing.

I hope and trust that Robert Dziekanski's mother will use the mechanisms available to her to obtain compensation from the incompetent government and its agents who contributed to this man's death.  In short, I hope she sues the pants off of everybody and wins.  Regardless of the cold comfort that will provide to her.  And the rest of us.

Great Moments in Canadian Sentencing 11.17.07

The weak link in the criminal justice system resides not with the police, nor the corrections apparatus, nor even, as might otherwise be surmised, the criminals.  It's the judges.

Cody Paul Lemay raped a baby.  Repeatedly.

To quote from the doctor's report:

"In my years of experience in care of the sexually assaulted patient, KN had the most severe genital injuries I have ever examined in a pediatric sexual assault case."

The physical violence was so great that the tear to the baby's anus was described as an “open, gaping laceration”.  The assaults occurred on "at least five, and perhaps as many 12 occasions".

The maximum punishment which can be meted out for a conviction of aggravated sexual assault is a term of life imprisonment (see section 273 of the Criminal Code of Canada).

Cody Paul Lemay received a sentence from the trial judge of five years in prison.

Now what's fascinating about that punishment is how it was arrived at.  It's an example of what I will dub the Moldaver Paradox (for reasons which will become apparent momentarily).  As the British Columbia Court of Appeal noted, when the trial judge was reviewing other court cases for guidance on what constituted an appropriate sentence,

"he had difficulty understanding why some of them had not attracted longer sentences"

With the story so far?  Confronted with a case of hideous violence (against a baby), the judge looks at what other judges are handing out as punishment - and he's bewildered to discover that the judgments he reads are lenient to the point of absurdity. 

So what does he do?

He hands out an even shorter sentence.  We can call it the Moldaver Paradox, because one of the cases which the trial judge relied on was R. v. B., J. [.pdf], a judgment of the Ontario Court of Appeal, involving a five-week old baby boy and six year-old girl being "horribly assaulted", by a "sexual sadist" prone to "extreme acts of violence".  In that decision, Justice Moldaver, reacting unfavourably to the "degrading", "dehumanizing" and "extreme acts of brutality" which the convicted had committed, imposed a sentence of ... wait for it ... six years (which was really only four years, after the convicted was given credit for pre-trial custody).  The trial judge in the Lemay case evidently figured he could pitch it a little lower, so he just went for five (with, of course, time off for pre-trial custody).  It's a paradox because these judges, by their own words, recognize that what they are dealing with are crimes of incredibly brutality - the worst, without engaging in hyperbole, of the worst.  They seem, again, from their own words, to want to levy stiff sanction.  And yet they seem incapable of rendering sentences which their own revulsion would warrant.  Perhaps the easiest way to cast the issue in relief is to pose the counterfactual: if the maximum sentence is life in prison, what exactly would it take for these judges to deliver that punishment?  What, in other words, is missing in these cases?  What accounts for the difference between "five years" and "life"?  What more could they possibly need in order to actually render the maximum punishment which our criminal law permits?

In the Lemay case, we see the Moldaver Paradox at work also at the level of the Court of Appeal.  The Crown appealed the ludicrous five year sentence.  The BC Court of Appeal, consisting of Justices Newbury, Low and Kirkpatrick, harrumphed at how low the sentence was, noting the extreme violence, the brutality of the assaults, the complete lack of remorse by the rapist, and increased it to ... seven years.

Our judiciary has the tools.  They consciously, deliberately, inexplicably and consistently refuse to use them.

your lying eyes

At some point, someone is going to have a fun time explaining why it is that Canadian politicians and members of the professional commentariat seem congenitally incapable of telling the truth about our crime rates.  Lies and obfuscation are the order of the day, and seemingly nothing, but nothing, can change the received narrative.

Take, f'rinstance, Chairman of the Toronto Transit Commission (and also member of Toronto city council), Adam Giambrone, as quoted in today's Globe and Mail:

A series of muggings at subway stations in recent weeks is not a sign that crime on the public transit system is getting out of control, Toronto Transit Commission officials say. ... TTC chairman Adam Giambrone acknowledged that the list of reported crimes - including an incident at Kennedy Station on Tuesday afternoon when four young men attacked two others over a cellphone - was longer than he would expect. "My understanding is that crime is not growing exponentially. But at the commission, we have various security issues," Mr. Giambrone said, adding that he is notified of every incident. "Proportionately," he said, "I believe crime is actually steady or falling on the system."

Sure, what the hell - "steady or falling".  Except, as you should expect, the TTC's own statistics show that crime on the system is rising, and rather rapidly, at that:

While the TTC would not release figures for 2007, the crime rate on the transit system rose in 2006. The agency recorded 1,601 crimes of all descriptions against passengers in 2006, for a crime rate of 0.36 crimes per 100,000 riders, an increase from 0.29 in 2005 and 0.24 in 2004. The rates more than double when crimes against TTC staff are included.

So... the crime rate has increased, what, roughly 50% from 2004?  But, hey, pay no attention to those squiggly little lines - it's "steady or falling".

Giambrone could be forgiven, however, if he's been getting his cues from reading the paper - because innumeracy, or lack of reading comprehension, seems to be the order of the day.  You will recall that recently the Harper government recently introduced a criminal justice bill which would, horrors, make obtaining bail harder to achieve in the case of serious gun crimes, introduce additional mandatory minimums for gun crimes and impose a reverse onus on dangerous offenders.  This engendered much sneering from the commentariat, who harrumphed that crime was actually "going down", so this was all fear-mongering by the Conservatives.  Problem is, in making their argument, they engaged in misdirection of the most mendacious sort (how's that for alliteration?).  Let's pick columns from a few different points on the political spectrum, to demonstrate how pervasive the highly politicized narrative is.

Start with Dan Gardner, writing in the Ottawa Citizen:

They have said for years that crime is a growing menace and the streets are being overrun by -- as Mr. Harper likes to say -- "guns, gangs and drugs." This is nonsense, but they claim to believe it.

What did the Toronto Star's James Travers have to say about the matter?

Most recently, and with exquisite timing, [Statistics Canada's] abacus wizards trumped the throne speech by reporting the homicide rate is continuing its happy downward spiral.  Combined with July findings that the overall crime rate is at a 25-year low, that should have poked a hole in the Conservative hot air justice balloon. Truth is, facts don't matter.

Howzabout law professor Alan Young, writing in Toronto's NOW Magazine:

Should we be surprised that Stephen Harper’s omnibus Tackling Violent Crime bill was introduced the same week that StatsCan reported a 10 per cent decrease in the national homicide rate? In fact, the national crime rate has reached its lowest point in 25 years.

The fact that the same talking point is repeated can serve as the first clue that what we're dealing with is cant, rather than fact.  Here's what each of the three gentlemen noted above, along with so many other commentators, missed: the Tories introduced a bill called the Tackling Violent Crime Act because, wait for it, violent crime is on the rise.  But don't take my word for it - let's read the StatsCan July 2007 release that fueled so many disdainful mockings of the Conservative bill.  Let's see who is engaged in spreading "nonsense" and obscuring "facts" which "don't matter".  Let's see, in other words, what StatsCan actually had to say:

Canada's overall national crime rate, based on incidents reported to police, hit its lowest point in over 25 years in 2006, driven by a decline in non-violent crime.  ... The crime rate dropped by 3%, mainly due to declines in break-ins, thefts under $5,000 and counterfeiting.

... The national homicide rate fell 10%, halting two years of increases. However, increases were reported in many serious violent crimes such as attempted murder, aggravated assault, assault with a weapon, robbery and kidnapping/forcible confinement.

... While overall violent crime remained stable, most serious violent crimes were on the rise, a situation similar to 2005.

... The youth crime rate increased 3% in 2006, the first increase since 2003. Violent crime among youth rose 3%...

So, let's concede to Travers, Young and Gardner that things that people really worry about, like counterfeiting, are on a decline.  Unfortunately marring the rosy picture they want to paint is the minor fact that inconsequential things like, say, the "most serious violent crimes" have been on the rise for a couple of years.  Anyways, let's go back and look at the title for that legislation the Tories were proposing - hmmm... why, it's called, imagine that, the Tackling Violent Crime Act!  They must be crazy! Fabricating so-called "violent crimes" out of thin air!  Lunatic, I tells ya! 

We won't be able to have a lucid discussion on criminal justice policies in this country until the fundamental facts about crime actually manage to make it through the veil draped across the issue by so many.