Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Canada is seeing violent crime like never before. What's behind the crime wave

nationalpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 87 posts

Re: Canada is seeing violent crime like never before. What's behind the crime wave

#51

Post by Pxtl »

osigurdson wrote: post #42
Pxtl wrote: post #8

Note that National Post is a very conservative publication, and as such is going to have a bias for "tough on crime" solutions. It is not surprising that this article chooses to focus on bail reform. Personally, i notice that the sudden rise in crime happened almost exactly at the same time as the fact that rents jumped out of reach for many people. The fact that the spike in random violence appeared at the same time…

Agree. In Canada,we basically have media that is universally anti-Trudeau (National Post, Toronto Sun) and media that is universally pro Trudeau (CBC, CTV, Global news, Toronto Star).

Global is owned by Corus, the same company that owns all of right wing talk radio. It is not firmly right-wing like the a postmedia group, but also not firmly pro-Trudeau. And while the Star has historically had a stron left-wing bias, it is starting to drift to center under its new conservative ownership.

As for the CBC, while they're quite progressive, they bog down their political coverage under so much boring trivial cultural stuff that it's basically unlistenable.

If an asteroid were flying towards the earth, Postmedia would blame Trudeau, the Star would blame Harper, and CBC would be airing a detailed history of the nose-flute in the Philippines.

Re: Canada is seeing violent crime like never before. What's behind the crime wave

#52

Post by outlace »

FpUser wrote: post #47
outlace wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question here: How does poverty imply violent crime? I’ve been to impoverished areas of China and it was safer than any place in the US for example. I don’t see how when someone is struggling with poverty that will increase their probability of engaging in violence.

I would not want to compare people's minds in "impoverished areas of China" to those in Canada. I think we have different composition and behavior patterns.

In that case, wouldn’t that imply that we should figure out how to change people’s “behavior patterns” as the root cause of violence instead of blaming poor people for violence just by virtue of them being poor?

Re: Canada is seeing violent crime like never before. What's behind the crime wave

#53

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

outlace wrote: post #33
zawaideh wrote: post #13

30 years of cuts to social safety nets, and life becoming affordable will do that. When as a country we prefer funding more policing, and less on affordable housing, healthcare, and education, we end up with a crisis like this. The fact that people act surprised is mind boggling. People have been warning about this for decades. I fear that this is only the start of a worsening trend.

Honest question here: How does poverty imply violent crime? I’ve been to impoverished areas of China and it was safer than any place in the US for example. I don’t see how when someone is struggling with poverty that will increase their probability of engaging in violence.

> I don’t see how when someone is struggling with poverty that will increase their probability of engaging in violence.

Relationships between poverty and violent crime, specifically children growing up in poor households, have been well known for a very long time and the relationship continues to be shown repeatedly. See e.g. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS2468-2...

> I’ve been to impoverished areas of China and it was safer than any place in the US for example.

If I had a nickel for every time someone said "I saw something once, so the entire history of collected statistics must be wrong" I'd be very rich. It happens in China too. See for instance https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

The only real questions are about specific actionable causes and why crime can still go up even when overall average poverty goes down.

Re: Canada is seeing violent crime like never before. What's behind the crime wave

#54

Post by data-ottawa »

tough wrote: post #4
anovikov wrote: post #2

[flagged]

Lol, are you saying the issue in Canada is poor people don't fear god? Btw what struck me -weird- when visiting over there, was how much the state seems to do to keep their poor citizens at bay. Disposable needle containers in the Tim Horton's bathrooms is not something I was expecting.

I suspect the containers in the bathrooms comes from the restaurants themselves. My brother is a manager of a Tim Hortons in a small city and he's had 3 overdoses in their bathroom in the last year. It's a sad artifact of the opioid epidemic which has grown a lot in the last several years.

Re: Canada is seeing violent crime like never before. What's behind the crime wave

#55

Post by [deleted] »

zawaideh wrote: post #13

30 years of cuts to social safety nets, and life becoming affordable will do that. When as a country we prefer funding more policing, and less on affordable housing, healthcare, and education, we end up with a crisis like this. The fact that people act surprised is mind boggling. People have been warning about this for decades. I fear that this is only the start of a worsening trend.

[deleted]

Re: Canada is seeing violent crime like never before. What's behind the crime wave

#56

Post by phkahler »

zawaideh wrote: post #13

30 years of cuts to social safety nets, and life becoming affordable will do that. When as a country we prefer funding more policing, and less on affordable housing, healthcare, and education, we end up with a crisis like this. The fact that people act surprised is mind boggling. People have been warning about this for decades. I fear that this is only the start of a worsening trend.

>> When as a country we prefer funding more policing, and less on affordable housing, healthcare, and education, we end up with a crisis like this.

That's interesting, any data to back it up? The article suggests the problem is due to a 2018 change in the law that prevents arresting and jailing people for bail and parole violations.

You're probably not wrong, I believe all of these things are likely to be factors.

Re: Canada is seeing violent crime like never before. What's behind the crime wave

#57

Post by phkahler »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #3

This is beyond satire, the very first line is: > Violent crime has technically been worse in Canada, Technically worse? (Is that the best kind of worse?).

>> Technically worse? (Is that the best kind of worse?).

I think "historically worse" is what they were after. If they said it's worse than ever, that would be technically incorrect even though it might be true of the last 30 years.

Re: Canada is seeing violent crime like never before. What's behind the crime wave

#58

Post by logicalmonster »

nequo wrote: post #46
logicalmonster wrote: post #25

Canada has made a concerted effort in recent years to accelerate immigration and increase their population. I believe their population recently went up by a million in 1 year for the first time ever for example. For a smallish country, that's a massive leap. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65047436 On an individual level, I'm sure most immigrants are fine people. But there's a social cost to rapidly increasi…

Is the excess violent crime committed by recent immigrants? The article says that the spike in violence has even affected First Nations: In Saskatchewan, First Nations leaders are sounding the alarm on a “crisis” of on-reserve violence.

> Is the excess violent crime committed by recent immigrants?

Important to this discussion is that I'm not necessarily saying that recent immigrants are committing a disproportionate share of crimes. I'm just pointing out that a rapid growth necessarily stretches social resources everywhere which might have an effect on crime overall.

If you have loads of new people and housing costs are X% higher because of that for instance, I'm sure that fact alone can have some impact on people who are on the edge of deciding that crime might be worth it because they can't earn an acceptable quality of life otherwise.

> The article says that the spike in violence has even affected First Nations:

These aren't like some isolated monastic communities with literally zero interaction with the outside world, are they? Unless these communities are completely isolated with literally zero interaction with the outside world, it seems logical to think that a lack of social resources and negative effects in the rest of Canada at least indirectly impacts them as well.

Re: Canada is seeing violent crime like never before. What's behind the crime wave

#59

Post by Pxtl »

VHRanger wrote: post #31

How is HN falling for this again, barely 24h after the Bob Lee story showed how this forum is prone to these narratives? The very first link in the article from StatsCan is "Canada's crime rate: Two decades of decline". It says the opposite of what the NP article is quoting it for. This misquotation is followed by a series of anectodes, and backed up by the intellectual weight of... an opinion survey. The multiple of…

"Bob Lee story" ? I missed that one.

Re: Canada is seeing violent crime like never before. What's behind the crime wave

#60

Post by nequo »

logicalmonster wrote: post #58
nequo wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the excess violent crime committed by recent immigrants? The article says that the spike in violence has even affected First Nations: In Saskatchewan, First Nations leaders are sounding the alarm on a “crisis” of on-reserve violence.

> Is the excess violent crime committed by recent immigrants? Important to this discussion is that I'm not necessarily saying that recent immigrants are committing a disproportionate share of crimes. I'm just pointing out that a rapid growth necessarily stretches social resources everywhere which might have an effect on crime overall. If you have loads of new people and housing costs are X% higher because of that for…

> I'm not necessarily saying that recent immigrants are committing a disproportionate share of crimes

I see. The reason I thought that is that you wrote that immigrants haven’t been culturally integrated which seemed in this context as if you meant that they were the perpetrators.

Do you know if areas with more immigration have seen a larger increase in violence? Indirect effects through housing should be correlated with that.

Post reply on HN