ideology

By. Tobi Cohen, Postmedia News

 

OTTAWA — After years of cordial relations with the United States on the issue of prison transfers, the Harper government’s recent crackdown on repatriating offenders may be causing a diplomatic rift.

 

Documents obtained by Postmedia News under Access To Information indicate the U.S. Department of State sent a diplomatic note to the Canadian Embassy in Washington last December outlining concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice regarding the transfer of offenders.

 

The documents indicate U.S. officials were seeking to meet “face-to-face” with their Canadian counterparts to discuss the matter further.

 

The e-mail exchanges between Public Safety and Foreign Affairs officials talk of internal meetings to “discuss the note and tactics for response” to it.

by Martin Patriquin, Macleans

 

Canada is a safer country now than in 1999. According to a Statistics Canada report released this week, it is exactly 17 percent safer now than in those comparatively barbaric pre-millennial days of Brian Tobin and Blink 182. And what crime does occur is, on average, less serious now than two years ago–four percent less serious, to be exact, according to the Crime Severity Index (CSI), which analyses police-reported crime. Not to suggest its all peaches and cream, but we should pat ourselves on our collective back. We live in a place that is safer and less violent than it used to be. Bravo.

 

Or not. “Someone, somewhere, is manipulating the numbers.” This pithy bit of paranoia didn’t come from a crank or some the-truth-is-out-there freak in his pajamas and tinfoil hat. It’s courtesy of recently appointed Conservative Senator Pierre-Hugues Boisvenu, who by all accounts is a fine and upstanding fellow. The trouble is that these numbers don’t quite square with Sen. Boisvenu’s agenda, or that of the Conservatives in general, and he’s mad as hell about it.

By. David Borden, Huffington Post

 

One was the UN's own World Drug Report, an annual product of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), analyzing illicit drug use, production, and trafficking. One of the phenomena discussed by UNODC each year, of course, is cultivation of coca, the plant from which cocaine gets derived. Coca is grown in the Andean nations of Bolivia, Colombia and Peru.

 

The big news -- sort of -- was that Peruvian coca cultivation has surpassed Colombian growing for the first time since 1997. This happened because Peruvian growing has increased the last several years, while Colombian has decreased. UN drug chief Antonio Maria Costa had this to say about the Colombians: "The drug control policies adopted by the Colombian government over the past few years -- combining security and development -- are paying off."

 

But paying off for exactly whom? For Peruvians in the coca business, among others. Because once again, the main effect of the coca fight has not been to reduce the size of the crop -- total growing only declined by five percent last year, an amount easily accounted for by changes in demand or other fluctuations -- but to shift it from place to place.

By. Neil Boyd, Vancouver Sun

 

In these days of public sector restraint, there is one realm of waste that is often neglected -the planned and pointless expenditure of billions of tax dollars on new provincial and federal prisons, the consequence of a series of Conservative crime bills.

 

Never mind that Canada already is a global leader in rates of incarceration, far ahead of almost all of the nation states of Western Europe -and, perhaps paradoxically, Canada typically has higher rates of crime.

 

The more interesting and relevant finding from recent research is that rates of imprisonment and rates of crime are not related in any systematic way, from one nation state to the next.

 

What is significant, however, is the relationship between confidence in the political and justice systems of a country and rates of imprisonment. Polls consistently demonstrate that nation states with the lowest rates of imprisonment also have citizens who have the highest levels of confidence in their political systems and their justice systems.

 

As one contemplates the lack of science in virtually every crime bill dutifully trotted out in Parliament by the Harper Conservatives, one is tempted to either laugh or cry.

By. The Montreal Gazette

 

Canada has a $47-billion deficit, a crime rate that is falling steadily, and a public that is not clamouring for tougher crime laws. Yet in the face of little real need and even less available money, the Conservative government is planning to more than double the country's spending on prisons, to double the number of inmates.

 

The Conservatives' latest piece of get-tough-on-crime legislation, the Truth in Sentencing Act, will require about $1.8 billion over five years to build 13 more prisons, and then an additional $618 million a year for capital, operations, and maintenance costs, according to Parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page's report last week. The act dispenses with two-for-one credit for time spent in pre-sentence custody.

 

Instead of using the report as a chance to rethink the wisdom of spending billions of dollars -as much as $9.5 billion by 2015-16 -Public Safety Minister Vic Toews rejected Page's figures, saying he "must be making this up."

A video for anyone who wants to better understand the failures of prohibition and learn more about alternatives that have proven to be more cost-effective, safe, and humane.

 

Brought to you by the International Centre for Science in Drug Policy -- where science, not ideology, drives illicit drug policy.

 

www.icsdp.org

By Avinash Gavai

 

The government's announcement last week that it has invited three leaders from the hemisphere in a special G8 outreach session traditionally dominated by Africa has evoked some surprise.

 

Africa will still be represented by Algeria, Egypt, Malawi, Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa. However, the decision to include Colombia, Haiti and Jamaica is being interpreted as an effort by the Harper government to change the old paradigm and involve a part of the world Canada feels should be a global priority.

 

"I think its fair to see that the [prime minister] is hoping that the outreach guests that he has brought to this meeting will enlighten and perhaps move the main meeting with G8 leaders to consider these other countries," confirmed Peter Kent, minister of state for the Americas, in an interview on Monday.

By. Gerald Caplan, Globe and Mail

 

Are you old-fashioned? Do you still believe in gender equality? Do you intend to promote gender equality? Do you believe a woman should be able to have an abortion if she chooses to?

 

Or are you just an old-fashioned progressive? Do you sympathize with Palestinians who are treated like dirt by the government of Israel? Do you oppose the pursuit of free trade with a government like Colombia's that has a deplorable human-rights record? Have you been critical of our government for freezing foreign aid spending? For arbitrarily cutting off aid to eight very poor African countries?

 

Above all, would you care to be vocal about these views? If so, be very afraid. The Harper government is going to get you.

By Dan Gardner, The Ottawa Citizen

 

Ideas come from a lot of places, and some of them are better than others. Is the patient sick? Stick some leeches on him to suck out the bad blood.

 

That made sense to somebody, so they did it, and the patient felt better. It must have worked. Others tried it and sometimes the patient felt better, sometimes worse, which meant, naturally, that while the treatment didn't always work, it sometimes did, which is good. So more and more people did it, and pretty soon there were so many people sticking leeches on sick people it seemed obvious the treatment worked because they couldn't all be wrong.

 

Nobody asked if maybe they were mistaking correlation for causation, or there was a placebo effect at work, or popularity isn't evidence of efficacy. They just kept sticking leeches on sick people. And when they had been doing it as long as anyone could remember, they kept on doing it because, well, that's what they had done for as long as anyone could remember.

 

Needless to say, this is not a good way to develop medical treatments and we don't do it this way anymore. Now, we insist on proper scientific testing. But we do continue to use countless traditional treatments that were developed the old-fashioned way, which is why diligent medical researchers subject these treatments to proper scientific testing and encourage doctors to stop doing what they've always done if, in fact, it doesn't work. That's evidence-based medicine.

By. Charles W. Moore

I'm a Stephen Harper supporter. I think he's the best Canadian prime minister of my lifetime (the possible exception being Louis St. Laurent, but I'm not quite old enough to remember), and I would love to see Mr. Harper succeed in his quest for a parliamentary majority.

However, even I'm getting fatigued by the Conservative Party's stridently negative attacks on Opposition leaders and members, and wish they would step back a bit - something most Canadians would appreciate and thus strategically beneficial to achieving that majority objective.