Commentary
Statistics Canada has produced a worrisome new dataset that shows violent crimes are now on the rise again.
This news likely won’t surprise that many people. While there hasn’t previously been much hard data to confirm it, what we witness in the news and on social media certainly gives us that impression. The question now is what to do about it.
Statistics Canada released a new graph to accompany the data. It shows trendlines in crime over the past 25 years.
The graph has one line that covers the general crime severity index. This covers all crime. And this line has dropped a lot since the late 1990s. We just have significantly fewer crimes happening as a percentage of our population.
The same can’t be said for a different line on the graph though—the “violent crime severity index.” This isolates just the violent crimes.
Around 2006, the violent crime line starts to drop incredibly. But then in 2015, it shoots back up again, and we are now where we were before. All crime is still relatively down, but violent crime is up. It’s like we’ve completely lost the progress we made throughout an entire decade.
Looked at through the lens of public policy, it’s interesting to note that the years with the major drop in violent crime were the years Stephen Harper was prime minister, and violent crime begins its fast rise almost immediately after Justin Trudeau became prime minister.
There’s an old saying that correlation doesn’t mean causation. But policy choices have real consequences on our lives, and that likely plays some part in what’s happening here.
Let’s take a recent tragedy and look at how policies may have played a role in it. People across Canada were shocked by the recent shooting death of a Toronto mother. Karolina Huebner-Makurat was walking in broad daylight in Toronto’s pleasant Leslieville neighbourhood when she was killed by stray gunfire as three criminals shot at each other. The 44-year-old leaves behind two young daughters.
There are at least two factors in this awful event that appear to involve policy choices. The first is that the shooting took place right near a drug injection site.
During my recent run to be mayor of Toronto, I repeatedly argued that the further expansion of these sites will only increase urban decay and crime in our neighbourhoods. The more injection sites we have, not only do we get more overdoses, but we get more violence in the immediate area of the site.
Drug dealers go to their client base, so if you open a government-sanctioned drug site, you’re inviting dealers armed with weapons to head to that area. The bulk of the crimes that happen in the vicinity of injection sites are a direct cause of the choice made to permit the site in the first place.
The other item is that not long after the shooting, we learned that the accused was out on bail and had a lengthy criminal record. Damian Hudson, 32, has been charged with second-degree murder.
For many months now, law enforcement, municipal and provincial politicians, and the general public have been demanding that the federal Liberals do more to get tough on bail conditions, which they previously eased.
The Trudeau government’s Bill C-75 made it easier for violent criminals to receive bail, and Bill C-5 eliminated mandatory minimums for violent gun crimes. It’s alarming that Trudeau never hesitates to bring in laws that make life more difficult for law-abiding firearms owners, but makes life easier for violent gun criminals.
When it comes to bail reform, earlier this year the federal Conservatives highlighted some troubling statistics in a press statement: “In B.C. alone, about 200 frequent offenders were collectively involved in 11,600 confrontations with police within the span of a year. But Liberal catch-and-release policies mean these dangerous repeat violent offenders often end up back on the streets, in some cases reoffending and getting released multiple times in the same day.”
Canadians are increasingly living in a low- or no-consequences culture that has become more permissive of lawlessness. We are now seeing the sorts of violent incidents that until recently we thought only happened in American cities.
Last week in the Greater Toronto Area, half a dozen teenagers were charged over their alleged role in a gunpoint carjacking. This isn’t common in Canada. Or at least it wasn’t.
This sudden shift in the rise in violent crimes should be worrisome to policy-makers and ought to compel the public to demand better.
Whether it’s halting the expansion of drug injection sites, ending permissive bail reform, or just doing a better job of investing in our law and order system, this country clearly needs to up its game. The numbers are heading in the wrong direction.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
