Scotty

I'll grant you the point. This is not proof of a causative link. It's suggestive of one, though. But I've never said this is proof of anything. In responding to others, who claim that the Tories and their get-tough-on-crime attitude is regressive, and who use crime stats to show how great we're doing because crime is dropping from it's 1990s high, I've merely pointed out that it's still far and away higher than it was before we got soft on sentencing and parole, and asked just why people think Harper getting harder on them will be such a disaster? After all, it's not like we have low crime compared to how it was in the sixties. We have far more crime, and far more violent crime than we had then. Certainly we have more than I'm content with. Further, I've pointed out that the Justice Department estimates the cost of crime to us at $57 billion per year - that's exclusive of policing, court and prison costs. And that there is a 37% recidivism rate. So how is it people seem to think that keeping prisoners in prison longer is a bad thing? You must have a hearing problem, because I've never said, or even inferred that I have a particular problem with whatever weeds people grow or smoke. My problem is with criminals who break into houses, steal cars, or who stick people up at ATMs or drag women into bushes. Maybe a burglar isn't violent, but the cost to society is immense, and given the number of times I've read about burglars convicted of multiple counts it sounds mightily like a career to me. That being the case, I'm all in favour of putting career criminals away for good. And no, that doesn't mean life in prison for swiping a chocolate bar. It means that if you have a guy with a rap sheet longer than he is you give serious consideration to just locking him up and throwing away the key. It'll be cheaper in the long run.

Why are you talking like that when the survey itself flatly and unequivocally contradicts everything you've said? Oh, wait, you never read it. Of course. That'd be too much effort. So here, I'll save you guys the trouble. Go straight to table 10 which lists the percentage of various crimes which were actually reported to police. You'll find that only 37% of physical assaults are reported to police, along with 46% of robberies, and 15% of rapes, Victim reports to police .But I've NEVER said crime is up. Go ahead. Find me anywhere I've said that. What I've said is that the rates aren't down in the victims surveys, just the rate of reporting is down, and so maybe that's accounting for all or at least a substantial amount of the so-called 'drop' in crime. In addition, I've pointed out that regardless of what the police-reported crime rate has down in the past ten or fifteen years, it is still, even using official statistics, several times higher than it was in the sixties. And so I've asked, where do people get off thinking that our hug-a-thug system, which was, coincidentally, slowly introduced in the sixties and seventies, is so great compared to a tough-ass conservative approach?

You are talking about the education required to be a LAWYER. Not a judge. And how many people fresh out of university ever get near high positions in the first few years? Well, if so, you've done nothing to contradict it. Basically, from what you've said, any lawyer can be a judge unless he's in trouble for something. Oh, right, you have to put in ten years first. Duh. And we know just what a great sense of justice lawyers in general have...

Next time why don't you include some text so it's easier to respond to. What you quoted was them saying the rate of crime was UNCHANGED, which is what I said. Again, what they said, what you quoted, was that the reporting rate dropped from 34% to 31%. Now I don't know where you went to school, but as far as I'm concerned that means a drop of about 9% if measured by just that group. Now if you want to measure it from the whole, ie, from the 100%, then yes, it's a drop of 3%. But in reality, 'reporters' if you will, fell by 9%. Split the two and you have 5%. You're saying the public at large are ignorant about matters of justice? Yet it's their standards our society is enforcing. Or are you saying the standards belong only to elitists and that the general members of society should, due to their ignorance, have no say in what those standards of justice should be? Why do you think people should even get to vote, then? Which is why, overwhelmingly, nobody had any interest in supporting the Tories crime agenda, right?

del

I'm quite capable of reading. I'm just less credulous than you in being told how gosh-darned impressive it is that prospective judges have to fill out a form and then check back later. Oooooo! Aaaawww! Ooooo! Oh, and they have to do an interview? Wow! You ever held a job, by chance? Doing an interview is generally a normal part of being hired. You know, my girlfriend recently applied for a promotion. Here's what she had to do. First, she had to go and take several mini-tests to determine if she 'might' have the competencies in 5 key areas. After determining that she did, she was required to write a statement, generally 5-10 pages, giving an example of when she had displayed the competency, backed up by an observer. She had to do this for each of the five competencies. After all that was approved, then she was able to write the test, and after that the interview, and after that she was in the pool. Oh, and I forgot, she also had to submit performance appraisals to show she had already done a good job. So pardon me if I'm not so impressed by your little check list of minor requirements to be a judge.

Police-reported crime, which is how Stats Canada defines it, is dropping. On the other hand, also according to Stats Canada's Victims survey, people are not bothering to report crime to police as much as they used to. The reporting rate dropped by 5% last year over the previous survey taken five years earlier - where it had also fallen 5%. That means 10% fewer crimes are being reported to police - not that there are 10% fewer crimes. But as I wrote earlier in this thread, regardless of the crime rate, Canadians want individuals who commit crime to be properly punished, no matter how many of them there are.

No, but 99% of the BQ's funding comes from that source, so when Harper eliminates the vote subsidy that will basically put the BQ out of business.

Quebec has the same natural resources Ontario has, along with a huge, heaping load of hydro resources to boot. It has lots of arable land, timber, and mining assets, including copper, iron and gold.

In other words, you have to be a lawyer who hasn't been formally found guilty of fraud or incompetence lately, nor arrested. Wow. Major qualifications there! Oh, and you have to submit an application, and then check back on occasion to see how it's going. I am really impressed.

I'm sure you would agree, Bob, that the proportional rep and constant minorities gives them a political leverage far out of proportion to their numbers in society, and that this has a major impact on the willingness of the political leadership to confront them.

You are misapprehending the situation, understandably because of the OPs misuse of the terms. It's not orthodox Jews who are the problem. It is the ultra-orthodox, or Haradim, who currently make up about 8% of the population the OP is actually speaking about. They are religious fanatics, don't work, and don't serve in the military.

Do they? Harper, a man with no charisma who just came through a recession got 40% of the vote, despite the 'scary-scary' still making a lot of people apprehensive. What are people going to use for 'scary-scary' after four years of him in a majority government? And if the economy improves, which it probably will, do you really think it improbable he could get over 50%? Now imagine the Conservatives with a leader who was a better speaker, and who had some charisma...

Oh, how is it not? Would you care to articulate the reason? . No, there isn't. I don't recall saying that. I merely said there was no reason to suggest that the concept of 'justice' as made by any given judge or a group of judges would be any closer to reality than that made by the citizenry at large. The argument, after all, was whether the great unwashed of society, and their opinion of justice, had little merit compared to 'trained' judges. Maybe, or maybe not. Judges occupy a privileged position in society. They don't live in poorer areas. They don't live in high crime areas. Their children don't go to schools in poorer areas and are pretty unlikely to be menaced by or recruited by gangs and such. In other words, judges are not subject to the same reality that many other Canadians are. Their viewpoints are necessarily different, then, from society as a whole, part of which is made up of people who do experience a different reality. Carol Goar wrote a column in the Star today saying poor people voted Conservative because the Tories' tough on crime agenda appeals to them, they being the most affected by crime. We don't select judges based on their intelligence or good judgement. We select them based on a variety of criteria of which actual legal knowledge and ability are secondary, at best. They are political appointees, after all.

Maybe you have a different understanding of what basic human rights are than others. For example, 'hard labour' is still a term used in sentencing by the British, but I have a feeling it would absolutely horrify the Canadian Left.

So, let me get your theory straight here. We soften up the laws and make parole easier, crime skyrockets, and stays high for decades, then it slowly eases down a little bit - though still several times what it used to be before we softened up - and this is proof positive that the softening of the laws worked really well? Recall the figures for violent crime in particular. 221 ---> 1024. This during your glorious period of thoughtful, judicious restraint on the part of the state towards criminals. Now it's dropped.... all the way to 930, still more than four times what it was, and this contents you?

It is the first table at the end of page 9

Anyone interested in honesty (that clearly excludes you) can scroll back to find that what I claimed is exactly what the facts are. English a third language for you? Into early senility? I've already stated that there is a difference between 'police reported' crime, and actual crime. Is that too monumental a concept for your brain cells to handle? Which is irrelevant to the point I made that the present crime rate is multiple times higher than it was a generation ago. Statistics Canada's Victims of crime report has been posted numerous times already detailing that victim reported crime has not fallen, but that fewer people are bothering to report crime to police. It's boorish to brag and strut about your success, but it's really declassé when your success is in your own head.

It doesn't need to be all that expensive. You don't need to have the entire office be bilingual, only one person on duty at any given time, and only in offices with public contact. Where we run into expenses is the idiotic 'language of work' amendment the Chretienites put through, which says that every employee has the right to work in the language of his or her choice. So if you hire one francophone to provide bilingual services in Vancouver, you have to hire a manager for him that's bilingual, and HR staff, and Clerical staff, and IT staff and security, etc. etc., who can all communicate with him in French. Even though, of course, he's bilingual.

The original promise was that they'd have a tiny, $300 million deficit in 2014-15. During the election they promised to have a surplus instead. I'll wait to see how it eventually works out. One thing for sure, they need to be in surplus by next election.

Doesn't change the unfortunate facts of what he's saying. Israel is ultimately doomed if the demographics continue as they are. And how is it that Israel doesn't do something about this? It's called Proportional Representation. It results in constant minority governments, and the major parties desperate to cut deals with all those little extremist religious parties. If Israel has a FPP system they'd have a chance at a strong government which could tell the religious wackos where to get off.

I guess you're just not very good at googling then. Scroll down to page nine. You'll see that the violent crime rate was 221 per 100k in 1962. It is now, after a decade of 'falling crime' at 930, a fall from its peak of 1090 So crime rises from 221 to 1090 and we're supposed to sing halleluiah because it's now fallen to 930? The overall crime rate was 2771, which rose to over 10,000 by 1991 and has now fallen to just under 7,000 But bear in mind all of that is for 'police reported' crime. If it doesn't get reported to police, then it doesn't get included in these statistics. And Stats Canada's victims survey shows only a minority of crimes are reported, and that the rate of reporting, ie, the number of people who tell police about crimes committed against them, has been declining for the past ten years. Canada's crime rates by year

You know, guyser, you have a habit of responding in near total ignorance. I mean, not just ignorance in that you clearly don't have a clue what you're talking about, but ignorance in a way which suggests your parents never taught you any manners. It would be bad enough if your mockery had any substance to it. That is, if I was actually wrong about anything I said. But of course, I'm not. Police reported crime might be down but Stats Canada's victims survey shows no such decline, only a decline in reporting rates. So we can't say that crime is or isn't really down from last year. What we can say is that crime shot up back in the sixties when we got all kind and gentle and caring. This is absolute fact and the only people who would question it are those who are completely ignorant about Canada's historical crime rates. By the way, if you weren't so intellectually lazy, you'd have read the historical crime rate figures in your own cite. But I guess you couldn't be bothered scrolling down that far.

No.

The world price of gas is the world price of gas. I recognize that there's a lot of ripoffs going on but that doesn't change anything. There's nothing an individual government can do about it, and anyone who thinks otherwise isn't thinking clearly.