Long on rhetoric, short on science

There are, at least in my mind, two important political issues going on right now where emotions are being used to argue the case. Worse, there seems to be a deliberate attempt to keep science out of the picture.

Firstly, there is the Quixotic "Scrap the long-gun registry" windmill.
Fact: it did cost a billion dollars to implement over a decade.
Fact: it now costs between $1.1 million and $3.6 million per year.
Opponents still call it "a billion dollar boondoggle."
Fact: as a result of overwhelming evidence presented in public hearings the House of Commons Public Safety and National Security Committee passed a motion to recommend to parliament not to do away with the registry.
Fact: the RCMP held an independent audit of the effectiveness of the long-gun registry.
Fact: the Government refuses to release the audit report and its results.
Rumour (unsubstantiated but persistent): the report proves that the registry is effective and efficient.
Fact: 427 out of 430 police chiefs believe it is valueable for law enforcement and public safety (if Antonia Zerbisias has her facts right in the Sunday Toronto Star.)

The anti-registry group seems to consist mainly of hunters, gun collectors and the Conservative government. Today's Toronto Star quotes Greg Farrant of the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters as saying, "We should not have a registry of individuals in this country who are allowed to own firearms; we should have a registry of those individuals too dangerous to own firearms." To this Toronto police chief Bill Blair responded, "I don't tell hunters how to hunt. I'm not sure why hunters want to tell the police what we need or don't need to do our jobs."

As a Canadian and a voter, all I ask for are the facts and figures. Let's have the audit reports and results, please, so that we can all make informed decisions. Cut the crap out of scrap.


Secondly, we have the even bigger Quixotic windmill, "We need more and bigger prisons." This is according to Stockwell Day who told us a couple of weeks ago that statistics which show that crime in Canada is on the decrease are wrong because the number of unreported crimes is actually increasing. He did tell us how he knows there is unreported crime but he did not tell us how he knows it is increasing. He also did not tell us how we were going to catch the criminals who commit unreported crimes.

Daniel Baird has a great article in today's Toronto Star covering some wonderful and effective work being done by Rev. Harry Nigh, a chaplain for Correctional Services, Canada, with a program called Dismas. The purpose of Dismas is to provide a community where ex-prisoners can find support to try and make it in a society not willing to trust ex-cons. This lack of trust makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to find employment, accomodation, and friends who will not lead you back into a life of crime.

A key point of Baird's is that one consequence of having more prisoners is that, eventually, you have more prisoners being released who will need all the services that are presently poorly and under-supplied to today's prison population. This oversight is so typical of what happens when governments, or anyone for that matter, don't use full-cost accounting. We presume that the cost of petrol/gasoline is what you pay at the pump, or that the cost of plastic shopping bags is what the supermarket pays its supplier, or that the cost of generating electrical power is the charge to the end user, and ignore the cost of creating greenhouse gasses and the health costs, or the cost of disposal after use. The worst offender here is the "cost" of nuclear power generation. It only includes short term disposal costs in the calculations. Nobody has any idea as to the cost of safe, long-term disposal or the cost of research required to come up with that solution.


Why am I worrying? My grand-children can sort that out! They'll love me for that, won't they!

But I digress. My point is that it seems to me absurd that we would discard a billion dollar investment in the long-gun registry for the relatively paltry saving of a couple of million dollars a year while justifying the launch into another huge investment into building more and bigger prisons with unknown ripple costs - and all without any published research or findings showing that either course of action has any more link to reality than the windmill dragons of Don Quixote.

Friendship Appreciation Day

Today I want to express my appreciation to all of you my friends. Thank you for being my friend and letting me be your friend. This includes members of my family, blood and in-law, and starts especially with my wife, Ingrid, my best friend.

You, my friends, make up a widely and wildly disparate group of people. Some of the variations are common to most people's friends : I have friends who are old, friends who are young, male and female, friends of different nationalities, racial backgrounds and different economic and educational backgrounds. Many of my friends are apolitical while others are decidedly left or right wing or fringe. I even have a very few friends who, like me, are Green supporters. I have American friends who support the Republicans and some who are Democrats. Some of my Canadian friends seem to know more about American political issues than Canadian. Some Canadian friends are wannabe Americans and some define their identity as decidedly not-American.

To my knowledge none of my friends are neo-Nazis and if you are a closet neo-Nazi then I don't want to be your friend any more.

I have been out of South Africa so long I no longer know who supports which parties but I think the ANC and the DA account for most of you.

Some of my friends are Québécois who think that the best thing for Quebec is to leave the Canadian federation. I have some English speaking Canadian friends who think that the best thing for Canada is for Quebec to leave the Canadian federation.

Some friends are deeply religious, whether Jewish, Christian, Hindu or Moslem. Some are decidedly atheist. Some don't know and don't care if there is a God or gods and aren't sure what the difference is between atheism and agnosticism. They don't mind if I pray for them. Thank you.

I have friends who are straight as a laser beam and other friends who are, or whose children are, gay, lesbian or queer.

I have friends who are passionately Pro-Life and others who are just as passionately Pro-Choice. For the record, I am passionately Pro-Life but I seriously doubt the usefulness of hurling insults at people who believe differently to me.

I am under the impression that very few of you have a similar mix of ingredients to me. It is highly probable that most of my friends would not like most of my other friends. I should be used to that by now. My mother would not have liked many of my friends and I was careful not to bring them home.

But I like you all and I value your friendship. Heck, some of you even asked me to be your friend on FaceBook! I value that, especially considering one of my own family clicked ignore to my friend request !:-) I can live with that. We are good friends in other ways.

Once again, thank you for being my friend and thank you for letting me be your friend.

This is my daughter Miriam (right) and her friend Liora.

Childhood friends and still friends today.

Water IS a human right

If there are any human rights at all, the right to life itself has to be the first one. From this it follows logically, as surely as banging your head produces pain, that the most essential means to continued life must also be human rights. Top of the list of essential means to life must be air and water of sufficient quality to sustain life.

As a Canadian I am disappointed and ashamed that, instead of leading the charge, Canada chose to join 41 other countries who abstained from voting for the recent UN resolution declaring access to clean water and sanitation is a human right.

Does this have something to do with the fact that so many aboriginal communities (more than 100 according to today's editorial in the Toronto Star) are on "boil water" advisories or relying on emergency deliveries of drinking water and that voting with the UN resolution would appear hypocritical. I get the impression that neither Conservatives nor Liberals in Canada are too concerned with First Nations issues. This can only be because they do not see the Aboriginal vote as having much impact on their fortunes.

Can you imagine how long Torontonians or "905'ers" would tolerate being on a boil water advisory or being told it is dangerous to shower?