I am Groot

I don't accept that history is responsible given things have gotten worse (in terms of crime and family breakdown) as civil rights have improved. Are you saying that lynching kept the murder rate down? Because I don't think that's really it... It's not that simple. The crime rate, esp certain crimes skyrocketed into the 1980s and into the 1980s, in some cases peaking in the mid 1990s. But it's still far, far above what it was in 1960. In some cases by an order of magnitude. Rape, for example, went from 9.6 per 100k to 44 last year. The murder rate is the same now as it was ten years ago, but the Black share of that has risen to 60%. And there's a difference between 'single parent' families where the father still helps out and those where he doesn't. The way so many young black men come to associate status with never giving an inch, with physical toughness and not accepting any disrespect, however slight, certainly plays a part. Well... sort of. Certainly there's less police violence against civilians. But I wouldn't be so quick to congratulate a country on its policing when it has a 7% crime solution rate. Agreed. Yes. The time between charge and trial or other settlement is atrocious in this country, too, even for minor crimes. The legal system is horribly bureaucratic and time consuming. Who would imagine a system run by lawyers who bill by the hour would be so time-consuming and inefficient?

Not what I said. All nations have a racist past (something generally overlooked). Most have a racist present, too. But virtually none of the Black people in Canada today or their ancestors suffered because of our racism. In fact, the vast majority of them prospered due to our lack of racism in allowing them to immigrate here.

Why we don't like her? Terry Glavin is reasonably succinct on that point. She represents that sneering progressive attitude that despises Canada, its traditions, values and history, and says we're all racists and 'settlers'. Why would we not have contempt for such a person. As an activist and frequent opinion-pages contributor, Elghawaby has adopted all the respectable standpoints with just the right degree of transgressive élan, rarely too strident or too squishy. She called for removing the Queen as Canada’s head of state and dismissed Canada Day as a festival of “Judeo-Christian storytelling.” She’s been gushing in her praise for Trudeau and backs the Trudeau government’s extremely contentious moves to regulate commentary on the internet. She’s argued in favour of Muslim prayer rooms in schools, and once blasted the former Conservative government of Stephen Harper as having done more harm to the image of Canadian Muslims than al-Qaida’s atrocities in New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001. What the point of her appoint is. The whole thing is a mess, and it’s as just as jumbled and fractious as Elghawaby’s appointment, which is as Trudeau described it — to “build bridges.” But it’s to build the Liberal party’s bridges to Muslim voters. https://nationalpost.com/opinion/amira-elghawaby-being-used-by-liberals-to-woo-muslim-votes

Also against Christians and their places of worship but Trudeau hasn't said a word about that, let alone appointed any special 'representative'.

How come whenever a Muslim murders people the Left falls all over each other to shriek at the world about how those are just a small minority and not the least bit indicative of the Muslim population in general. But whenever an act of violence or terrorism is committed AGAINST Muslims that's a general indictment of our entire society and we all need to bow our heads in shame and accept our guilt?

They are? How are they mistreated in Canada? Remember that almost all the Black people now in Canada are immigrants and their Canadian-born kids. So if their ancestors were mistreated it wasn't here.

Yes. Do you want to compare African Americans to those in South Africa? No, it's a cultural thing. That's the general liberal excuse. But it fails to explain why violence and crime were so low among African Americans in the 1950s and early 1960s. It also fails to explain why the great majority of Black kids grew up in two-parent families up until the early 1960s, when American society brought in numerous civil rights laws, and why only a small percentage of them now do so. These are things which grew much worse after civil rights (and the welfare state) expanded. Well, to begin with, that rarely happens. There are millions and millions of interactions between police and citizens every year and the vast majority are peaceful. But there are over 900k police in the US and for the most part they're not very well trained (nor are they in Canada). There is also a kind of mentality trained into them which says they have to 'take charge' and that means allowing no questioning of their 'authority' without a direct response. I've seen people yelling at and arguing with police in the UK who are then allowed to go on their way when they'd certainly have been grabbed and handcuffed in the US (or Canada). I would also suggest the whole narrative around BLM and policing and 'defunding' police, along with moves to make bail automatic and free and to largely ignore street crime and refuse to prosecute people guilty of minor assaults, thefts, vandalism, public drug use, etc. combined with a zealous oversight of everything police do have combined to make policing an extremely unattractive profession for most people with alternatives. Pretty much every large city police force in America is short staffed, along with most of the smaller ones. They can't hire people fast enough and the ones already there are leaving in droves. Even those who stay are not doing pro-active policing, ignoring things they see on the street because they don't want to risk becoming the target of official ire if there's a struggle. Nor do they really want to stop some suspicious guy in a high crime area and be immediately surrounded by a cursing, hostile crowd. This is why violent crime has risen so fast, particularly in Black communities. A lot of cities are offering entry level salaries of $80k and relatively quick increases to well over $100k and still can't get qualified applicants. Perhaps not but there are tons of videos on youtube with police acting very calm and polite and respectful and still getting shot. Often by Black people.

To a degree, but Hispanics have a far lower crime and especially a far lower violence rate. No matter what the Trumpists would have had you believe. Blacks are 13.%% of the population and are responsible for 60% of homicides where the race of the offender is known. Hispanics, who are pretty close in poverty rates, are 19% of the population and we don't know what percentage of homicides they commit because as far as the FBI is concerned there are no such thing as Hispanics. They are lumped in with Whites in uniform crime reports. But given the "whites" are responsible for 37% of homicides where the race of the offender is known I think we can be safe in saying the Hispanic murder rate is way lower than blacks. In other words, no, it's not just poverty. It's culture. Yes, but it matters if you want to address the cause of why it's happening, esp if it's happening so disproportionately among certain communities.

A while back the US government under Obama decided that since statistics showed young black boys were being expelled from school at greater numbers than young boys of other races this must be racism. It warned local schoolboards that federal money would be withheld if they didn't equalize the number of expulsions. This is still government policy. As a result, a lot of inner city schools are violent and there are fights and violent bullying every single day, multiple times a day. Students also ignore the teachers, curse at them, play music, and otherwise disrupt classes because there's almost no way to get rid of them. It only takes one or two kids to wreck the learning environment for all the rest in the class. So if expelling more kids will help that environment that's the way to go. None of these people are getting an education anyway.

That would be dumb. Stop telling young black men that their problems are due to racism and the white man keeping them down. Improve education for black kids. That would mean forcing the kind of discipline on inner city schools they presently lack due to government policies, and funneling more of the massive amount of money American cities spend on education to the actual schoolrooms as opposed to the massive bureaucracy of school boards and corrupt unions. No tolerance for violence or backtalk. No tolerance for truancy. No tolerance for not doing homework. If that means tossing ten percent of the kids out permanently then so be it. There also needs to be a whole community effort to convince young black women to not have babies until they're out of high school and in an actual committed relationship. I don't know how to go about that. It might be that the state could make contraceptive implants freely available to all teenage girls and urge them to make use of them, just to start. But there needs to be a cultural shift away from a culture which most admires the 'tough men' of gangsta rap. And where men get the most status from being ready and eager to beat the hell out of anyone they think is dissing them.

Why would you think that? I assume you're saying 'disproportionately' because of course there are more white cops than black cops. Then again, proportionately, there are more violent black criminals than violent white criminals. But I've seen nothing that suggests white cops kill black people at a higher rate than even black cops kill black people. I don't know how often black cops kill white people. No one has ever done the study, as far as I know. If you want to deal with an issue you have to talk about it. I'm quoting the former (black) chief of the NYPD and the LAPD here in a Macleans article. Well, thank you. Tell me, the gang violence that you are experiencing, what is the racial or ethnic background of the gangs?That's a refreshingly blunt question. Some say it may be as high as 80 per cent Jamaican. But no one knows for sure, because people here don't like to talk about that.You need to talk about it. It's all part of the issue. If it's Jamaican gangs that are committing the crimes, well then, go after the Jamaican gangs. And don't be afraid to go after them because they're black. That's the last thing you need to be concerned with. What the underlying causes are differ depending on who you talk to. Liberals believe it's all due to racism. Conservatives, including black conservatives, and even some Black Liberals, blame culture, a lack of interest in education and far too many teenagers having children. The problem is if you blame it all on racism, which is the default position of government today, you're unlikely to make much meaningful improvements. How about that. Discussions flow in all kinds of directions. The issue of violent Black interaction with policing and vice versa has Black crime, esp violent crime as the underlying cause. There's a reason these kinds of things keep happening to Black guys rather than Asian guys or even Hispanic guys (though it does happen to all races). The culture of violence among black men, often as a response to perceived 'disrespect' is something no one ever addresses except for certain Black conservatives who are largely ignored by the media.

Those of us who watch and read the news get it shoved in our face.

It's partly irritating and partly amusing how the Left in Canada is so disapproving of the US but at the same time is so desperate to imitate whatever the US Left is up to. Nothing makes that more obvious than the subject of Black people. About 13% of the US population is Black. They obviously have a very long history with racism and prejudice and the majority of Blacks in the US (or their parents and ancestors) experienced that history. And so they have things like affirmative action, and Black History Month and all kinds of 'anti-racism' seminars, lectures, books and insistence everyone take courses. Canada has no such history. That's not to say we were paragons of virtue but we simply had almost no visible minorities in this country prior to immigration being opened up in the nineteen seventies and eighties. Most visible minorities in Canada are immigrants. Most of the remainder are their kids, born to them here. Hasn't stopped our Left from doing their best to imitate the Americans. We too have hiring and promotion quotas for visible minorities - especially blacks. And we have the same fixation, even obsession with 'antiblack racism'. Black History month is where the Canadian Left searches desperately for something to say about Black people in Canada and about how important they were despite there being almost none of them here. Today, about 3% of the population is Black. In the 1970s there weren't more than 30k Black people in Canada. We put a black woman on the ten dollar bill, replacing our first prime minister with a beautician who had been fined a dollar for sitting in the wrong section of a movie theater. She appealed the fine, lost, and went back to being a beautician. There are no quotes from her because she never said anything notable. Then she moved to the United States. Not, I'm guessing, to escape the virulent racism in Canada. Canada Post has a new stamp for "Black history month". Who did they find, what notable person to put on the stamp? A woman who was a slave about 80 years before Canada was even formed. Apparently fearing the Empire was about to end slavery her master took her south to sell her in the US. She struggled and made a lot of noise so that people noticed. That was it, people. That's what get her a stamp. The governor of upper Canada banned such future transfers. Okay. So? It just shows the desperation our woke government has to invoke guilt and shame on our 'dark history', despite our history being as pure as the driven snow compared to just about every other nation on Earth. Because that's the purpose of such exercises. To shame Canada, and for Black people to wallow in victimhood while white liberals strut and virtue signal. It's divisive and stupid.

I know what the Bell curve is and about the book and its author. I just wasn't sure what connection you were doing with the police and media. It's certainly true the media doesn't want to hear anything which might suggest anything might be behind one group's lower performance than another besides racism. In the case of Blacks, though, from all I've seen it has nothing to do with race or intelligence and everything to do with culture and values.

I have no idea what you're talking about here.

Similar things have happened to white men and been largely ignored. Compare the reaction of the media to the video death of George Floyd vs the utter nothing about the identical police killings of Tony Timpa or Edward Bronstein. The news media are laser focused on things they can call racist, even where there's no evidence of racist. Basically anywhere a black person is victimized or can be portrayed as being victimized by white people. The reverse is ignored as much as possible for fear of causing anti-Black racism. Which is one of the reasons the media NEVER mentions the vastly disproportionate amount of crime being committed by black people. It will talk about how they're pulled over more, searched more, subjected to police violence more, but always in the context of how unfair this is. They never mention just how much crime, particularly violent the Black community is responsible for. Canada's media behaves in an identical fashion, btw.

The media have no interest in police brutality. Nor in police incompetence or screwups. Their only interest is in playing up the racism/identity angle of stories. If the guy Chauvin had arrested had been white there'd have been no charges and it never would have made the news at all. White people have died under similar circumstances before and the media ignored them. Anyone who is actively going after criminals is going to get complaints. Especially in this day and age. You know how to not minimize complaints? Do as little as possible. Which is what police are choosing to do more and more often.

If the UK is still up there I don't see us likely to drop. They did away with freedom of speech years ago.

And less capable. I mean, Canada's media is so bad that in an environment that encouraged entrepreneurship someone would be starting up new papers/tv/internet news organizations which could completely trash them. There's o little local or even Canadian news in them vs garbage and American stuff. I would not say the Trudeau government is paying lip service to it when all its hiring and promotions are governed by it, and when everything it does, from letting contracts to handing out university grants is decided by it. Not to mention the collection of halfwits who are in Trudeau's cabinet purely due to their race, ethnicity or gender. They regularly make comments against institutions they see as having become heavily politicized by the Left and their social justice theories, yes. I don't believe conservatives in Canada are the ones attacking police, however. That comes from the Left.

"When you see police lights in your mirror, stop immediately. Everybody knows that if the police have to come get you, they're bringing an ass kicking with them." Chris Rock Sure the police were scumbags. Who do you think they're hiring in the US these days? No one with options and abilities wants anything to do with policing. The smart, capable police are resigning in droves, and every police force is short handed and getting worse. You get no backup from your superiors. You get constantly attacked by the politicians, by the media, constantly harangued and insulted by people on the street you're not allowed to talk back to. In many cities you arrest people for crimes and the local district attorney just lets them out again and drops the charges or gives them a slap on the wrist plea bargain. They won't even prosecute a lot of lower level street crime, often including assault and resisting arrest. And the streets are filled with crazy, drug addicted homeless and violent gang bangers. Who would want the job? And that's without the race angle. Which makes every violent interaction with a black man national news. The media is desperately trying to insert 'racism' as a cause here, even though all the cops were black. But if the cops were white the media would be coming in its collective pants, with 24hr round the clock coverage of this and the ensuing riots peaceful protests they had done their best to provoke. And of course if the victim had been white this would never have made the news outside Memphis. Not in a million years would the national media, including ours, want to focus on a case where five black cops beat a white motorist to death. NO way, no how. They'd scream like terrified little girls and run from this case as fast as they could.

You mean the pro-Russian president of Ukraine who had been bought off by Putin was trying to shift Ukraine towards Russia, don't you?

There have been issues because of bad political choices, but not until the Ukraine war did their cost of energy shoot through the roof to the point people are afraid to turn on the heat. I read a number of British papers, as well as watching the BBC and reading their web site. The price of home heating has tripled in a year.

Government employees regularly express their political views on their own time. Sometimes they even run for political office. And I've seen lawn signs on the lawns of people I know are public servants. In any event, I wasn't asking so much about employees as members of a professional association.

Fancy me pointing out context. And if you read the UK papers the place is an absolute mess, and it is largely due to an energy policy which prioritized renewable energy over reliable energy.