Is crime in our beloved nation on the rise or is it being reduced? And what should we do about it? It depends who you ask.
Understanding crime rates in Canada means digging through statistics. It was Mark Twain who popularized the adage that "(there) are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
Twain credited that nifty phrase to former British P.M. Benjamin Disraeli; funnily enough, his attribution was almost immediately disputed, and remains so to this day.
In other words, the very history of the quote - a challenge to easy notions of truth - effectively proves its own truth.
Is your head spinning yet? No? Then allow me to introduce the latest controversy emerging from the greater Ottawa region: yet another battle between Statistics Canada, better known as Statscan, and the Federal Conservatives, better known as our minority Government.
Back in 2009, Statscan released figures indicating that violent crime rates had fallen since 2000. At the time, and since, this inconvenient truth was declared by some to be a major challenge to the Conservative government's tougher-on-crime stance.
Why crack down and spend more if things were getting better anyway? Or so went the logic.
Last week, though, Statscan's conclusions were challenged by a study from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI), an Ottawa think tank. The MLI effort was led by a former Alberta Crown Attorney turned security consultant named Scott Newark.
On Tuesday, though, that MLI challenge was in turn challenged in a Globe and Mail op-ed column by lawyers Edward Greenspan and Anthony Doob.
"Mr Newark's study is filled with problems," they wrote. "It compares figures that can't be compared. It presents figures that are inaccurate. And it ignores evidence supporting the conclusion that crime is, in fact, decreasing."
They went on to present a bunch of charts and numbers that make perfect sense, but that Newark and others could refute until all concerned are blue in the face.
Knowing how these things generally go, that's what we should expect.
However, having imposed upon themselves - if only for rhetorical purposes - a mandate to stick to the raw numbers in their column, it must have been painful for Greenspan and Doob to ignore the elephant in the room: that Scott Newark is anything but a neutral observer on this matter.
In fact, Newark has enjoyed the very coziest of relationships with the Conservative government for many years: way back in February of 2006, he signed on as a senior policy advisor to Stockwell Day. Three months later, he quit his gig and went back to the private sector - a dramatic career move presumably made much less stressful thanks to a contract, generously and immediately awarded by his former ministry, worth more than $300,000.
Stuff like that is supposed to be illegal. More to the point, it's exactly the kind of "revolving door" activity - moving in and out of the public and private sectors for personal gain - that the Conservatives had promised to stamp out when they stamped out the Liberals.
Directly or through spokesminions, both Newark and Day consistently denied any impropriety, claiming that because, in the three months that he worked for Day's office, Newark hadn't got around to signing the papers that would have made him a public office holder.
If he wasn't a public office holder, the logic went, he wasn't subject to that hinky little part of the criminal code that prohibits a public office holder from tucking into government pork within a year of holding office.
Easy peasy!
So why does Newark's past matter right now? Because it's 2011, and despite his claims to be working for an "independent" think tank, he still appears to be backing his old government buddies on what remains a pretty controversial issue.
Let's take a moment to remember that it was over the issue of the crime bill that Prime Minister Harper was forced to prorogue Parliament just over a year ago.
It seems pretty clear that whatever the facts show, the Conservatives have remained steadfast in their desire to crack down on crime as a simple matter of political ideology.
Frankly, if they thought any different, they'd have asked Newark to stifle his controversial report, for fear it might compromise their stance; instead, they've allowed him to shop it around to the press like a paparazzi hawks his latest celebrity crotch shot.
Newark, and with him, the Conservatives, would love to let people like Greenspan and Doob continue to argue over stats, preferably while they're push through new crime legislation.
But with all due respect to hard numbers, and the debates that surround them, here's the salient question: do we, as Canadians, think the kind of tough-on-crime stance we've seen in the U.S. at least as far as the days of Ronald Reagan has been an effective agent of economic growth and social transformation? Or rather, do we think it's been a hopelessly short-sighted, ruinously expensive and socially corrosive farce?
Do we, as a nation, want to spend more of our resources punishing crime, or trying to foster a society that makes it less likely?
I could find you compelling numbers to support either position. And unlike lobbyists, lawyers and all the "think tank" types somewhere in between, I could do it gratis, and in an hour or two.
On both sides, playing statistical games of "gotcha" seems disingenuous and wasteful, when what we really need to be talking about is what's right.
A year after the Harper government shut down Parliament over this issue, it's time for Canadians to decide whether to reward or reject his government's stance on crime.
source. http://news.sympatico.ca/oped/coffee-talk/is_the_crime_rate_in_canada_going_up_or_down/835ac8b2
Understanding crime rates in Canada means digging through statistics. It was Mark Twain who popularized the adage that "(there) are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
Twain credited that nifty phrase to former British P.M. Benjamin Disraeli; funnily enough, his attribution was almost immediately disputed, and remains so to this day.
In other words, the very history of the quote - a challenge to easy notions of truth - effectively proves its own truth.
Is your head spinning yet? No? Then allow me to introduce the latest controversy emerging from the greater Ottawa region: yet another battle between Statistics Canada, better known as Statscan, and the Federal Conservatives, better known as our minority Government.
Back in 2009, Statscan released figures indicating that violent crime rates had fallen since 2000. At the time, and since, this inconvenient truth was declared by some to be a major challenge to the Conservative government's tougher-on-crime stance.
Why crack down and spend more if things were getting better anyway? Or so went the logic.
Last week, though, Statscan's conclusions were challenged by a study from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI), an Ottawa think tank. The MLI effort was led by a former Alberta Crown Attorney turned security consultant named Scott Newark.
On Tuesday, though, that MLI challenge was in turn challenged in a Globe and Mail op-ed column by lawyers Edward Greenspan and Anthony Doob.
"Mr Newark's study is filled with problems," they wrote. "It compares figures that can't be compared. It presents figures that are inaccurate. And it ignores evidence supporting the conclusion that crime is, in fact, decreasing."
They went on to present a bunch of charts and numbers that make perfect sense, but that Newark and others could refute until all concerned are blue in the face.
Knowing how these things generally go, that's what we should expect.
However, having imposed upon themselves - if only for rhetorical purposes - a mandate to stick to the raw numbers in their column, it must have been painful for Greenspan and Doob to ignore the elephant in the room: that Scott Newark is anything but a neutral observer on this matter.
In fact, Newark has enjoyed the very coziest of relationships with the Conservative government for many years: way back in February of 2006, he signed on as a senior policy advisor to Stockwell Day. Three months later, he quit his gig and went back to the private sector - a dramatic career move presumably made much less stressful thanks to a contract, generously and immediately awarded by his former ministry, worth more than $300,000.
Stuff like that is supposed to be illegal. More to the point, it's exactly the kind of "revolving door" activity - moving in and out of the public and private sectors for personal gain - that the Conservatives had promised to stamp out when they stamped out the Liberals.
Directly or through spokesminions, both Newark and Day consistently denied any impropriety, claiming that because, in the three months that he worked for Day's office, Newark hadn't got around to signing the papers that would have made him a public office holder.
If he wasn't a public office holder, the logic went, he wasn't subject to that hinky little part of the criminal code that prohibits a public office holder from tucking into government pork within a year of holding office.
Easy peasy!
So why does Newark's past matter right now? Because it's 2011, and despite his claims to be working for an "independent" think tank, he still appears to be backing his old government buddies on what remains a pretty controversial issue.
Let's take a moment to remember that it was over the issue of the crime bill that Prime Minister Harper was forced to prorogue Parliament just over a year ago.
It seems pretty clear that whatever the facts show, the Conservatives have remained steadfast in their desire to crack down on crime as a simple matter of political ideology.
Frankly, if they thought any different, they'd have asked Newark to stifle his controversial report, for fear it might compromise their stance; instead, they've allowed him to shop it around to the press like a paparazzi hawks his latest celebrity crotch shot.
Newark, and with him, the Conservatives, would love to let people like Greenspan and Doob continue to argue over stats, preferably while they're push through new crime legislation.
But with all due respect to hard numbers, and the debates that surround them, here's the salient question: do we, as Canadians, think the kind of tough-on-crime stance we've seen in the U.S. at least as far as the days of Ronald Reagan has been an effective agent of economic growth and social transformation? Or rather, do we think it's been a hopelessly short-sighted, ruinously expensive and socially corrosive farce?
Do we, as a nation, want to spend more of our resources punishing crime, or trying to foster a society that makes it less likely?
I could find you compelling numbers to support either position. And unlike lobbyists, lawyers and all the "think tank" types somewhere in between, I could do it gratis, and in an hour or two.
On both sides, playing statistical games of "gotcha" seems disingenuous and wasteful, when what we really need to be talking about is what's right.
A year after the Harper government shut down Parliament over this issue, it's time for Canadians to decide whether to reward or reject his government's stance on crime.
source. http://news.sympatico.ca/oped/coffee-talk/is_the_crime_rate_in_canada_going_up_or_down/835ac8b2