• Canada’s Welcome Mat To Crime

As Canadian taxpayers contemplate personal debt ceilings, increasing costs of living, increasing taxes, and regressing net incomes, they are being failed by a broken judicial system and police forces who are no longer empowered or willing to act in their defense and protection.

Grasping for the good life, the average Canadian family has enshrouded itself with over $100,000 of debt, which represents a debt-to-income ratio of 150%. Admitting it is difficult, and discussing it in detail brings certain shades of shame, but the stress is undeniable. That stress has consequences. One of them is the blindness it brings to the breakdown occurring in the broader society. That blindness seems like complacency, however, when you’re overburdened with the challenge of feeding your family month to month, keeping up with what your own government is or is not doing, rarely makes your priority list.

While Canadian taxpayers were averting their attention throughout the past generation, their streets became littered with crime. Whether you visit Vancouver, Toronto, or Edmonton, on almost every street corner you cannot miss the drug pushers. The drug industry has a hierarchy that is unmistakeable, from the kid with the hoody and the backpack pretending to be waiting for a bus, to the low level distributor running low riding foreign subcompacts, to the black Chrysler 300s, to the Black Cadillac Escalades with $5,000 wheels, and all with necessary and prescribed blacked out windows, the drug industry command food chain is obvious. Obvious to all, but the judicial system.

Generally, there is the pernicious attitude that, “As long it doesn’t affect me, I don’t care.” Along come the gang wars, with high caliber, automatic weapons blaring, and spraying SUVs with bullets. The latest one on sunny Sunday afternoon in front of the high-end Delta Grand Hotel on the Kelowna, BC, waterfront. Temporarily, or for a few days at best, attitudes change then go back to, “As long it doesn’t affect me, I don’t care.”

Unfortunately, we don’t care, and neither do the police, the lawyers, the judges, or the liberal minds of the legislators who evolved Canada’s judicial system, laws and sentencing guidelines.

To keep the populace quiet, the suggestion promulgated by the media is that this particular shooting, for example, was a “targeted hit.” What a classy, diverting phrase this is. Oh, well, that makes it OK, “It's just criminals killing one another, which does not concern me.” Of course, the fact that a salon was also peppered with bullets from the automatic assault weapon didn’t quite make the front pages. And still, we don’t care.

The police departments have for years rationalized their lack of aggressive effort against the proliferation of criminals and criminality, by whining that their efforts are a waste of time since the courts let the criminals go when the criminals are brought in, . . . so what’s the point? The Court system in Canada is so lax that a murderer, Sasan Ansari, can kill Josh Goos at the Hoolyburn Country Club in West Vancouver, to whom he owes $100,000, by stabbing him 30 times with video evidence, and he gets two and half years for the crime.

Canadian taxpayers believe that their judicial system contains Sentencing Guidelines because their judges tell them so. That is an outright lie. Guidelines are virtually non existent because judges’ egos will not succumb to being instructed or told what to do. They also use the rationalization that each crime is committed in a different context from the previous one. Excuses are simply, that, excuses. There should be tight guidelines and regulations for crimes, rather than loose, very loose, recommendations.

There should also be a legislated shift away from the broken liberal belief that all criminals can be rehabilitated. This is one Trudeau legacy that must be put to rest conclusively. The politically correct attitude that people change and can be “improved,” may be occasionally true, but is not the rule. It is devastating the streets of Canada to backwaters where all doors are locked.

For two decades now, the British Columbia joke is that marijuana is the biggest industry in the Province. In truth, the immigration business is bigger, but drugs have become a major multi billion dollar industry that is enormous by any comparative measure.

It’s time the courts quit hiding behind the veil of poor guidelines, and the police quit hiding behind the poor record of Canadian courts. If the trend continues, Canada’s civil society will disintegrate to unrecognizable degradation which its children and grandchildren will regret.