An April 8, 2023 article in Canada’s Globe and Mail entitled Simple Solutions, mocked the “conservative” belief that “tougher bail laws and more cops” might actually improve public safety.
Typical of what is happening in most cities across North America, crime in Toronto has skyrocketed over the last few years, the thousand or so incidents of assault and/or robbery in its subway system in 2020 representing an increase of 60% over 2019. But, say Kent Roach and Cheryl Webster, the writers of the article, the “conservative” solutions cited above really accomplish very little. Why, they ask, has crime continued to mount in Canada when the number of prisoners held in remand has increased 400% since the 70s. Their implication is that Canada is clearly trying to protect its citizens by keeping the accused in custody even before their trials. That they had to go back 50 years to come up with this startling number seems rather suspicious to me. But two sentences later they undermine their very own logic when they point out that we are in fact “filling our detention centers with more and more non-violent offenders.” The “tougher bail laws” advocated by most “conservatives” are specifically intended to keep violent, repeat offenders behind bars, and jurisdictions which hold non-violent individuals in custody as they await trial while subsequently releasing murderous psychopaths, actually highlight the sanity of that approach.
The third paragraph of the article cites the unprovoked 2023 murder of a 16 year old Toronto boy, Gabriel Magalhaes, by a homeless man with “many assault convictions,” as he sat on a bench with a friend awaiting the arrival of his subway. How many acts of violence, one wonders, must a person commit before our legal system decides he is no longer entitled to probation or indeed freedom of any kind.? Ought not the safety of its law abiding citizens to be a primary goal of every sane Democratic government?
In typical Leftist fashion, the Globe article proceeds to argue that harsh bail laws might actually increase crime rates by exacerbating the rage of those already prone to violence, and that social programs designed to allay such impulses would seem a far more beneficial solution. Apparently, we ought to placate our criminals rather than incarcerate them! Informing such notions is the belief that those responsible for recent increases in urban crime are actually the helpless victims of either mental illness or socio/economic deprivations that quite rightfully incite anger. The establishment of a “just society,” it seems, would radically decrease the criminality we see exploding before us. Problem is, of course, that merit and morality have been more or less eliminated from the Left’s deterministic and utterly superficial definition of “social justice.”
While the mentally ill with tendencies to violence are clearly not responsible for their actions, they must be institutionalized until they no longer pose a threat to anyone. The notion that they are “entitled” to their freedom is absurd. But not all recidivist criminals are insane, many simply being vile human beings with respect for no one but themselves? Bizarrely, the more heinous their behavior, the more likely those of a “woke” mentality are to deem them mentally compromised, their assumption being that no sane person could possibly be so evil! The question is moot, however. Was Adolf Hitler insane or one of the most despicable human beings aver born? Either way, he needed to be stopped!
The fact that Myles Sanderson, an Indigenous man arrested 56 times, often for acts of violence, was free to kill 11 innocent people in Saskatchewan in 2022, is an indictment of the sheer stupidity of judicial rulings rooted in empathy for the “disenfranchised.” So also was the recent Christmas Day stabbing of two teenage girls in New York’s Grand Central Station by Steven Hutcherson, a man with a lengthy rap sheet and history of mental illness who was heard to shout “I want all the white people dead” shortly before the assault. Arrested for engaging in threats of violence in a Nov. 7 incident, Hutcherson was “conditionally” discharged by a Bronx judge on Dec. 12. The “conditionality” of his release tacitly acknowledged that he might in fact engage in further acts of violence. Yussif Abdullahi, one of those threatened by Hutcherson in the Nov. event, said he was appalled to learn that a judge had casually released an individual who was clearly a violent psychopath! Fortunately, the two girls assaulted on Christmas Day survived the ordeal.
A poll cited on Jonathan Garthwaite’s website on Dec. 24 indicates that the top 15 crime ridden cities in the U.S. are all governed by Democratic Mayors. This is no coincidence. The “soft on crime” policies of the Left, reputedly rooted in compassion, entail a brazen disregard for the indisputable Fact of Human Evil. If anything deserves the epithet “simple solution,” it is the neo-Marxist notion that evil can be legislated out of existence. While most “conservatives” fully support programs designed to help decent people born into difficult socio-economic conditions, a significant number of the “underprivileged” are in fact the victims of their own moral failings, of their self-indulgence, their use of drugs, their promiscuity, their utter lack of any sort of work ethic. They are Not the innocent victims of “social injustice.” In preaching that they are, the Left both encourages their moral degeneracy while then exonerating its often horrific consequences. And so the family of 16 year old Gabriel Magalhaes shall forever be tormented by the needless loss of their son at the hands of an individual who clearly should have been behind bars. Here in Hamilton, Ont., the prison sentence of Shaun Chiasson, who murdered his young girlfriend in 2020, stabbing her 28 times, has recently come under review, his lawyers arguing that he is terribly sorry for his crime which was in fact a product of his prolonged abuse of drugs. But the notion that Chiasson is a victim of the drugs he chose to use, of the degenerate lifestyle he fully embraced, utterly circumvents what used to be a given of Western Civilization, the concept of Man as a Moral Being fully responsible for everything he does. It is a concept the Left has more or less abandoned, save when condemning the sins of the “privileged” classes which, in a gross display of hypocrisy, it vilifies even for such inanities as the use of a “hurtful” pronoun in addressing anyone of non-binary gender.
No one seems to care when retail outlets owned by multi-national corporations such as Walmart are plundered by thieves who see themselves as the victims of their capitalist overlords. But how many thousands of small, privately owned businesses have been vandalized as a result of this same simplistic bit of Leftist gibberish? And how many innocent people have been brutally beaten or in fact murdered by individuals who have been arrested repeatedly, only to be released by our “progressive” legal guardians? A frequently posed justification for this fact is that even wealthy nations such as the U.S. do not have the funds to produce the necessary number of mental institutions and prisons to deal with the problem in question. My “conservative” response is that if governments would stop spending hundreds of millions pursuing questionable agendas such as the accommodation of illegal immigrants within our borders, they might in fact have the funds to fulfill one of their fundamental obligations, the safety and well-being of those who elected them. Here in Canada, 1.3 billion dollars will be going to the CBC in the coming year, thereby producing a biased network utterly reluctant to bite the hand that feeds it. Gee, might those taxpayer dollars be put to better use?
How many innocent people, one wonders, must die at the hands of some career criminal before Western populations turn against the permissive legal dementia of the Left? One such death is, to me, one too many! I can’t imagine the torment of the Magalhaes family, knowing that their son was killed by one with “many assault convictions” who was nevertheless granted his freedom again and again. Quite literally, the politicians, judges, district attorneys and juries responsible for such decisions are themselves guilty of murder.