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SURREAL WORLD
CANADIANS BECOMING PRISONERS TO LIBERAL GOVERNMENT SPIN

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Maybe it's just me, but I get a surreal feeling these days about the country we live in. There's a disconcerting disconnection from reality. Sometimes it seems like that 1960s British TV show -- The Prisoner -- where everyone lives on a comfortable island, everything is managed by experts who pry into our secrets, and nobody can escape.

For example, our headlines tell us, "Gun registry makes progress," "Murders down, says Statscan," and "Violent crime drops further." You're in good hands, folks. With gun control, we Canadians have a "culture of safety." Toronto, meanwhile, witnessed seven shootings this week in 24 hours. There were guns going off in streets and parking lots from Etobicoke to Scarborough.

Toronto Mayor David Miller blamed the mayhem on the Americans, for letting too many illegal pistols come to Ontario. Other than this week's blood-letting, said Mayor Miller, the crime rate is coming down. Ontario Liberal MP Paul Devillers told the same thing to a Rally for Justice at the Manitoba Legislature earlier this month. "Violent crime is not increasing," he insisted, "it is decreasing."

Maybe. The official report shows the rate dropping less than 1% a year since its all-time high in 1992. But it's still well over triple the level of the early 1960s. There were 20 crimes committed per police officer then; today there are 43.

There used to be one major crime organization in Canada -- the Mafia. Now there's a veritable Disunited Nations array of them, terrorizing neighbourhoods. Whatever these people may say, Canada has a serious and growing gang problem. But nobody in charge seems willing to admit it, let alone deal with it. "Dealing with it," of course, would require a few changes.

For example, we might have to reconsider our new policy of letting over half of our criminals serve their whole sentence at home. We might have to take all that money we now spend registering hunters, and redirect it to catching and incarcerating law-breakers. We might have to admit the real rate of repeat offences (recidivism) is four or five times higher than the 10% claimed all these years by Corrections Canada.

We might have to admit Canada's per-capita violent crime rate is now twice as high as the Americans. (Why no federal advertising campaign about this?)

Canadian liberals like to cluck their tongues about how fascist the Americans are for having the highest rate of incarceration in the world. Our incarceration rate is much lower, not because we have less crime but because we catch the bad guys and let them go. Is it any wonder our annual violent crime rate is now about 1,000 incidents per 100,000 population, and in the U.S. it's 510? Could it be because they put their bad guys in jail?

This same disconnection from reality afflicts us in other ways, not just crime.

Ottawa's latest bright idea is to declare war on fat. There is surprisingly little evidence the new "obesity" crisis, if it exists at all, is doing much actual medical harm. Nor is there any reason to think that even if it is, the government is going to fix it. Yet they're off on the campaign, setting up committees, browbeating provinces and hiring ad agencies. (I wonder where?).

The same was true of the Kyoto boondoggle, about which Ottawa is still nattering at us on television. First, we committed to a CO2 target we couldn't reach. Then, we poured scorn on the Americans for staying out and not "doing their part for the Earth." Then, we increased our carbon emissions even more than them. Then, most of Ottawa's technical staff quit because the program is impossible. Now, the emerging scientific consensus elsewhere is that solar fluctuations, not man-made CO2, are the main cause of climate warming, so Kyoto is a waste of effort and money.

I want off the island. It may be pleasant, but I can't stand it.