The last victim of a shooting: Logic

Pictured to the left are Joshua Yassay, 23, and Shyanne Charles, 14. They were shot to death on Monday night on Danzig Street, in the east end of Toronto. I wrote about the incident here.

If a shooting is gang-related, you can bet that it's drug-related in some way.

On Tuesday I looked at the situation and offered what I believe to be the most conservative and cost-effective solution possible: End the drug war, which only increases the profitability of the trade, draws more people into it, and makes violence inevitable.

Drug use in and of itself is a victimless crime. It's the criminalization of drugs that creates victims like Joshua Yassay and Shyanne Charles. The problem isn't guns, it's the creation of a black market where guns are the tools to resolve "business disputes." Pharmacists, liqour store owners and people that sell cigarettes don't have a history of shooting at one another and killing innocent children in the crossfire. Any objective study of the issue will tell you that drugs don't hurt anywhere near as many people as drug laws do.

Social conservatives don't like my ideas because anything that doesn't dramatically expand the reach of government (and in Canada, the federal government) through the criminal law. For people who proclaim themselves champions of individual freedom, they sure do like having a lot of things criminalized.

As I expected, pretty much everyone has piped up with moronic ideas of how to address the problem of gang violence. I don't expect that any of them will work, and some of them are ineffective while being incredibly expensive.

In The Toronto Star yesterday, columnist Joe Fiorto (who I happen to think is a good writer and a well-meaning guy) wrote that the problem is that the city isn't spending enough on youth employment and daycare.

The mayor says a job is the best social program of all. He is right. There, I said it.

Trouble is, he says one thing and does another.

The City of Toronto is the biggest employer of youth in the province, at least during the summer, and yet the mayor has blithely overseen cuts to city spending on recreation and other services.

The mayor should put my tax money where his mouth is — summer jobs are a form of crime prevention.

Here’s another example of soft money stopping crime: kids need daycare, especially kids from priority neighbourhoods. Why?

Because kids who are not nurtured at home do not easily let themselves be nurtured; kids who are not nurtured will have learning problems and will never learn unless they get remedial help; kids who are not read to at home tend not to cherish reading, which also limits learning; kids who don’t learn as well as others will tend towards behavioural problems; and yes, kids who learn less, earn less.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, if you want to stop crime, do two things: stop cutting social programs, and start building daycare centres.

The mayor is an idiot - dangerously ignorant, in fact. But I'll get to that later.

Jobs are great, but they're an ineffective crime prevention program so long as crime pays better than an honest day's work does, especially if you have limited opportunities in the legitimate job market.

As for reading and daycare, I'm inclined to agree that they're desirable. However, there's absolutely no evidence that gangbangers are stupid. The evidence shows that drug dealers, which most gang members are, are actually pretty adept at things like accounting. Their biggest issue seems to be conflict resolution, and that's a problem that the market the law created is responsible for.

Then my dipshit mayor, Etobicoke Slim, popped off and managed to demonstrate that he's even dumber than I thought he was, which is plenty.

He started by demanding harsher sentences from gun crimes, which is fine. As I said on Monday, I'm for that, too.

But he goes so much further than that, to the point that even the layman can easily recognize what a ridiculous little turd of a thinker Hizzoner is.

“I want meetings, I want something to be done. I want these people out of the city and I’m not going to stop. Not put them in jail and then come back and you can live in the city. No, I want them out of the city. Go somewhere else, I don’t want them living in the city anymore,” said Mr. Ford, who toured the scene of the Danzig Street shooting Tuesday. “It looked like a war zone,” he said. “There was blood on the concrete, there was paramedic gloves. It just tore my heart apart, and I just thought this is not the city we live in.” (emphasis mine.)

Good luck with that, Rob.

It's a very Soviet idea, internal exile. I'll give him that. But I can't imagine that any other community in the country is going to appreciate winding up with our scumbags. And it's not like Toronto isn't already unpopular enough in the rest of the country.

Oh, and it's unconstitutional. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms specifically grants mobility rights for Canadian citizens.

6. (1) Every citizen of Canada has the right to enter, remain in and leave Canada.

Rights to move and gain livelihood

(2) Every citizen of Canada and every person who has the status of a permanent resident of Canada has the right

(a) to move to and take up residence in any province; and

(b) to pursue the gaining of a livelihood in any province.

It stands to reason that if citizens, which include convicted criminals, have the right to live and work in any province, it follows that they can do so in any city therein. Mayor Ford might not like that, but nobody's asking him to. On the other hand, if he knows so little about constitution, which hasn't exactly been hidden from him since 1982, maybe he shouldn't be mayor at all.

Then he mused that our immigration laws can somehow be used to address the problem, which unequivocally proves that he has no idea what the fuck he's talking about.

This is because Canadian immigration law already works that way. As a matter of fact, the federal government has recently made it significantly harder for criminal aliens to even appeal deportation orders.

It gets even better. Or worse, depending entirely on how much you like laughing at Rob Ford.

Ford was the lone member of council to vote against $16 million in community grants last week. He told Bynon that such social spending is not effective as a solution to youth violence.
“It’s a proven fact that when we had the most murders in the city, it was the same time that we had the most grants. I think we handed out over $50 million that year in grants. Throwing money at the problem, and having these, I call ‘hug-a-thug programs,’ they just do not work,” he said.

Ford’s stated “fact” is incorrect. Homicides peaked in post-amalgamation Toronto in 2007, with 86. The Community Partnership and Investment Program, which handles grants, had a budget of about $42 million that year. CPIP’s budget rose in future years as homicides dropped steadily; it gave out a high of $47 million in grants in 2011, when the city recorded 48 homicides, the fewest since amalgamation.

There's even more about Ford's Council votes, even when "free money" is on the table.

Mayor Rob Ford was the only member of council to vote against accepting $350,000 from the federal government for a year-long gang intervention project that will not cost the city anything.

Council voted 33-1 on Thursday to accept the funding from Ottawa’s National Crime Prevention Centre. Ford’s vote, which he did not explain, baffled even conservative allies like Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday.

“It’s free money,” Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, another conservative, said when asked why he voted in favour. “Why would you turn down $350,000?”

(...)

Ford made his name as a principled, penny-pinching council contrarian who regularly found himself voting alone or with few others. He has occasionally cast solo votes as mayor, such as when he voted last year against $7.2 million in grants to community groups — some of which work to prevent violence — and against accepting $100,000 from the province for HIV and syphilis screening.

He said then: “Everyone says it's provincial money. No. It's taxpayers' money. So, you know what? In the big picture, they say it doesn't cost the city a dime. Well, it costs people money.”

He also voted against accepting a provincial offer of no-cost public health nurses, saying he didn’t want the city to eventually be stuck paying their salaries — though the health minister said the provincial funding was ongoing. He changed his mind after council guaranteed the nurses would be laid off if the funding ever expired.

Of course, Ford isn't all that "principled"  about asking the province for "taxpayer's money" this week. He wants the province to fund more cops for the city because he won't pay for it out of his own budget.

That raises and interesting question. If Ford's so concerned about the taxpayers of, say, Sudbury (which is well outside of his mandate) when it comes to public health screening, why shouldn't he be just as vigilant about gang violence? After all, the Danzig Street shootings aren't Sudbury's problem, are they?

The fact is that Ford isn't at all "principled." If the spending goes toward something that he doesn't like, he's more than willing to demagogue the issue of provincial spending. But if it fits his priorities, then he not only demands the subsidy from other taxpayers, he threatens to unleash his retarded and nonexistent "Ford Nation" on the provincial government. Notice how that didn't make Tim Hudak premier? I did.

I resent that he's described as a "conservative" because he isn't. He's an opportunistic showboat who isn't above spending billions of dollars of other people's money, but only when it benefits him politically.

I would describe Rob Ford as cynical, but that would imply that I think he's smart enough for cynicism.