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Toronto's woes no national crisis

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When bullets start flying in Toronto -- as happened this summer -- farmers, trappers, hunters and aboriginals elsewhere in Canada would be well advised to take cover.

A single shotgun blast to the chest of 23-year-old Georgina Leimonis during a failed robbery in 1994 at the Just Desserts Cafe in Toronto resulted in a life sentence for Lawrence Brown, a Jamaican who, though raised in Canada, spent his life in crime. That act led to creation of the $2-billion gun registry that has made outlaws of hundreds of otherwise law-abiding, mostly rural Canadians.

So, on the eve of an election call, when Prime Minister Paul Martin bows to the pressure for a gun summit, the rest of Canada should take notice. In calling for it, Sandra Carnegie-Douglas, head of the Jamaican Canadian Association, told the Toronto Star: "The fact that almost 50 young black men have died this summer is a crisis. That's a national crisis."

And so it becomes a national crisis, but not because of the lamentable loss of life. As tragic as it is that Toronto's shooting deaths have increased since summer, it doesn't become a crisis until the politicians get hold of the issue.

The smell of burned cordite was still lingering over the latest shooting victim when politicians of all stripes, in an attempt to claim a share of votes in Canada's biggest city, began demanding further restrictions on our rights.

In one of the last pathetic gasps of the 38th Parliament, the Liberals tabled a bill Friday to get tough on gun crimes. The bill has two things going for it -- the government will die before it can pass, and it's less foolish than the Opposition's proposal.

The Tories are contemptuous because the Liberal law, although it increases mandatory minimum sentences, still doesn't lock up enough people for long enough. Conservative MP Daryl Kramp has proposed laws that would require judges to jail offenders at least 10 years more on top of any other penalty they receive if a gun is used when they committed their crime.

Before joining him on the mandatory band wagon, Justice Minister Irwin Cotler mocked Kramp. The formerly renowned McGill law professor pointed out that mandatory minimum sentences don't act as a determent to murder. When a mad-dog abusive husband is intent on ending his spouse's life, he is as likely to take his own as to worry about a few extra years in jail. When a gang member drives up to a church and shoots a perceived enemy, he isn't worried about jail -- a place where he can forge deeper connections with gang members -- so much as he is about a reputation that will serve him well behind bars.

The most amazing thing about this hysteria is that it comes about in the midst of what Statistics Canada calls a precipitous drop in gun violence and deaths -- a drop that began before the Montreal Massacre, that convinced the former Progressive Conservative government to introduce costly, intrusive and ineffective red tape in the form of the firearms acquisition certificates, or the useless registry that followed the Just Desserts shooting.

"You've got to remember there have been gun-control laws for most of this last century, of one sort or another," Kathryn Wilkins, author of the Stats Canada study on the decline of gun deaths between 1979 and 200, said in an interview in June.

Not only are gun deaths down, but Toronto is a particularly safe place. Even after this "summer of gun violence," the murder rate in Canada's largest city is barely half that of Saskatoon -- another city that is incredibly safe. Saskatoon and Regina regularly top Canada's list with the highest per-capita homicides, and although guns are often enough used in the commission of offences, they are rarely used in homicides.

Last year, when Regina logged 4.98 murders per 100,000 population compared to Toronto's 1.8, that wasn't a national crisis. Although the Regina deaths mostly involve aboriginal people and are related to federal social program cuts and failed attempts at assimilation, the city is left to deal with the fallout.

And, although Ottawa believes Canada is facing a health-care crisis because it takes too long for a middle-class person to get a hip transplant, no one seems to consider it a crisis to have thousands living on the streets, or food banks carrying a greater load.

It's nice to think that the politicians being driven out into the cold to campaign have a chance to learn what Canada is about. But it's hard for them to learn anything when they are blinded by vitriol.

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"Democracy cannot be maintained without its foundation: free public opinion and free discussion throughout the nation of all matters affecting the state within the limits set by the criminal code and the common law." -The Supreme Court of Canada, 1938