the daily snivel

There's an attention-grabbing headline for ya.

Anyway, here's an interesting thought. Writing on Toronto's recent spate of gun violence, Linda McQuaig suggests that we are in fact simply paying the price for 10 years of tax cuts:

Ten years ago, Mike Harris slashed Ontario's welfare rates by 22 per cent, thereby cutting by almost one-quarter the incomes of Ontario's most vulnerable families. The young kids in those vulnerable families are now teenagers. Recently, there's been an upsurge in violent crime by gangs of teenagers. Is it far-fetched to think there might be a connection?

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The Harris government also cut spending on an array of programs aimed at ensuring disadvantaged kids integrate into the mainstream. It cut funds for teaching English to immigrants, for social workers in the schools, for community recreation. And when some kids behaved badly, it banned them from school with a “zero tolerance” policy. Where did we think they would go?

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We've toughened up our laws considerably, including mandatory minimum sentences for gun-related crimes. But if we really want to make this a liveable society, not just enjoy the satisfaction of locking up bad people, we should intervene much earlier.

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Tax cuts may put more cash in our pockets. But are we really better off if we have more cash for shopping — yet no longer feel safe to go shopping?

I think this argument is worth seriously thinking about. Even a city like Toronto, which had an overall murder rate of 78 homicides out of a population of 2.5 million in 2005 (52 of which were shootings) pales in comparison to U.S. cities of a similar size. For instance, Chicago had 446 homicides in 2005 for a population of 2.8 million, and Houston had 329 homicides for a population of 2 million. While there are diverse causes and motivations for murder, it is striking that similarly-sized cities across the border would have such dramatically higher murder rates. To be clear, I would never suggest that one factor overrides all other variables in such a complicated equation as violent crime and murder. That said, I do think Canada's social safety nets, relative to those of the United States, may well play a role in our lower homicide rate. I think there is less alienation and frustration and anger in our culture -- and yet we see these things increase the more cuts we make to the welfare and medicare systems that greatly distinguish our society from the United States.

So why aren't we spending more money on after-school programs, community and recreation centres, social assistance, education -- in a word, crime prevention? And why aren't we insisting that our politicians make it a priority to include such priorities in a balanced budget? Spending money on police, courts, and jails can only punish crime -- but not prevent it from happening in the first place.

And for all our (rightly justified) outrage and anguish over recent and senseless tragedies, harsh penalties can only ever be applied in hindsight after the next tragedy, and thus does nothing to make the streets safer for the people that tragedy will befall upon.