Big Brother is Watching You

You remember 1984, George Orwell’s epic novel about the future? It was the future of Winston Smith, a nondescript man who lived by himself in a world of Thought Police, and such government ministries as the Ministry of Love, Ministry of Truth, and Ministry of Peace. It was a world of propaganda and slogans. Fiction is truth. War is peace. And, of course, Big Brother is watching you.

While no one would argue that Canada is like the world of Winston Smith, it may be a bit naive to think that this country is above the pettiness and, dare I say corruption, which we know has taken place south of the border.

My first book was published in 1984. Victims: The Orphans of Justice was about a man whose daughter had been murdered by a perfect stranger, an offender just released from federal penitentiary on mandatory supervision. Today it’s called statutory release, and it means that just about anyone – lifers side – who are doing federal time get out after 2/3 of their sentence, whether they had qualified for parole or not.

While Victims was about the disgusting manner in which victims of violent crimes were treated by our justice system, it was also an indictment against the automatic early-release system. It even cited the federal government’s own study – the Solicitor General’s Study of Conditional Release – about crimes committed by offenders out on early release. This study said: “Penitentiaries have a strong interest in seeing as many full releases as possible occur in order to save costs.”

How? Back in 1984, it cost $25,000 a year to incarcerate an offender in penitentiary, but only $2,000 a year to supervise that offender in the community under conditional release. So this meant an annual saving of $23,000 a year for every offender let out. Today, of course, those figures are much higher. The average cost of incarcerating a male offender in maximum security is over $110,000 a year, and about $20,000 a year to supervise the offender on statutory release, which works out to a ‘saving’ of $90,000 a year.

Needless to say, Victims poked a few holes into the government’s highly touted notion of rehabilitation as I discovered the ease with which violent criminals – murderers, rapists, child molesters – were released onto the streets of Canada every day, and the litany of crimes they committed.

The first time I told the father of the murdered girl that I wanted to write a book, he said: “What if someone paid you $25,000 NOT to write this book?” I had no idea what he was talking about. Well, I forged ahead and wrote it. It was published in paperback with a retail price of $4.50.

At the time, Pierre Trudeau and his Liberals had a majority government. An earlier Trudeau government had publicly endorsed the new approach to corrections. In 1971, Solicitor General Jean-Pierre Goyer said: “We have decided from now on to stress the rehabilitation of individuals rather than the protection of society.” Those guys weren’t kidding. Rehabilitation became the mantra of corrections in Canada, and we were told time and again about the high success rates of offenders on parole and automatic release.

After Victims was published, I started receiving cheques for $4.50 from people who couldn’t find copies of it in bookstores. We started tracking where these people were from, and it appeared that anyone living in federal government ridings held by Liberal Cabinet Ministers couldn’t find a copy of it in their ridings. Huh? Come again.

Cheques were arriving from the federal government riding of Cape Breton Highlands-Canso, which was held by the then Secretary of State for External Affairs. And from Windsor-Walkerville, which was held by the then Minister of Justice. And so on right down the list. You couldn’t find a copy of Victims in those ridings if your life depended on it.

I couldn’t believe this was happening, and organized some friends to check it out. They did, and it was. In fact, one day before I left to do media interviews in B.C. and Alberta, the book was actually pulled from the shelves of bookstores in the federal riding of Winnipeg-Assiniboine, which just happened to be held by the furthest west Liberal MP you could find.

Of course, the Tories were very helpful in furnishing me with information about all the crimes committed by offenders on release – when they were in Opposition – but once they took office later in 1984 with their Conservative majority, they disappeared into the woodwork.

I have seen several elections since then, and now yet another one is on our doorstep. I advise my fellow Canadians to listen intently to what your candidates have to say, but don’t forget about Winston Smith. Those hoodwinkers, they’re everywhere.

Read More of Jerry’s articles and book excerpts at http://www.authorjerryamernic.com.

Toronto the Good

Frank Sullivan, who lives in West Vancouver, had a letter printed in the Globe and Mail last week. “Given the number of bullets flying around the streets of Toronto,” he said, “I’d think the city’s bureaucrats would be more concerned with preventing lead poisoning than skin cancer.” He was responding to the city erecting shade audits that would measure the angle of the sun at different times of day so as to protect children from the sun’s rays. I won’t get into that now, but I will get into the bit about lead poisoning. Or guns.

 

Frank’s letter made me think back a few years when I was working with a young woman from Sudbury, Ontario at an Ontario government office. At the time, Toronto’s so-called ‘year of the gun’ was making news all over the place, and this woman told me how her mother kept phoning from Sudbury because she was worried about her daughter being shot.

 

Well, let me tell you my story. I was born and raised in Toronto – and encountering such people is becoming more unusual all the time, but that will be another article – and have lived in this city for over half a century. Not once have I ever witnessed any situation or altercation where a gun was involved. Not once! I have never seen somebody get shot. I have never even seen a firearm of any type discharged. No AK-47. No Uzi. No sawed-off shotgun. No pistol.

 

Not a single time in over 50 years.

 

I’m sure that all you people in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Montreal, and everywhere else figure that I must be the only person in Toronto who has been shielded from all this violence, and for such a long time, too. Why, I must be living in a closet with my eyes closed. How could this be?

 

I’ll tell you.

 

The reason I haven’t witnessed any of this violence is because at 3 a.m., on any given morning, you will find me at home in bed. If I’m not in my bed, you will find me in the living room reading a book or watching TV as a means of fighting insomnia. But you won’t find me in those areas of the city infected with gangs and crack houses, which are generally found in low-income, government-subsidized, high-rise towers where thousands and even tens of thousands of people congregate in ugly, seedy ghettoes that breed crime. Which isn’t to say that everyone who lives in such places is a criminal. But the ratio of criminals to the population is a lot higher there than it is on my street.

 

I could draw you a map of Toronto – the entire city – and show you where these places are. This doesn’t mean that innocent people don’t get killed or shot through no fault of their own. They do, just as they do everywhere else in the world, but in Toronto it’s not common. As I say this, my heart goes out to any innocent victims of violence who find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. But to imply that Toronto is a city where you one is in constant danger of being shot is ridiculous.

 

This tells me that something is very much amiss in how my town is perceived by those who don’t live here.

 

I have little doubt that if a poll was taken asking Canadians what they thought was the most crime-ridden city in the country, Toronto would be no. 1. How could it not? A day doesn’t go by when the print and air waves – right across the country it seems – aren’t blazing about gun violence or three men found slain in west end or mayor seeks to ban all guns. At the same time, recently released crime stats reveal that Canada’s largest city is also – are you ready? – the safest big city in the country!

 

The highest crime rate was in Regina, Saskatchewan. Population 200,000. In fact, cities with the highest crime rates were all out West.

 

Now I know as well as anyone that figures can lie, just as liars can figure, and politicians are especially good at this. But I just wanted to assure people like Frank Sullivan in West Vancouver that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and it’s not his fault. It’s largely the fault of the media, which has an increasing tendency to create stories, and more than stories, issues that may or may not even exist, and if they do exist what gets reported is way out of whack from the reality. It is also the fault of some of those aforementioned politicians to whom the mere scent of a possible voter can trigger an outbreak of unadulterated BS.

 

Toronto is a city which, in many ways, is under fire. Gridlock is horrendous. The streets are falling apart. Many areas are not as clean as they used to be. Some parts of the downtown are in a sorry state because of a proliferation of beggars, panhandlers and drug addicts who are allowed to breed like mosquitoes. But Toronto is the fifth biggest city in North America, and for all big cities in North America, it has the lowest crime rate. Don’t get me wrong. When it comes to dealing with the bad guys, I’m all for getting tough, and in some cases, throwing away the key.

 

But implying that Toronto is under fire from the gun is a bit like calling Afghanistan a democracy.

Smearing the thin blue line

Let’s say you’re from Afghanistan or Somalia and are new to Canada. You are eager to learn about the country and so, you pick up a newspaper. What do you see? Ex-police officer faces child porn, luring charges. Toronto cops face charges in grow-op raids. Ex-policeman accused of intimidating witness. And, of course, countless stories about how police are tasering innocent people everywhere.

What would you conclude? You’d think that police in this country are corrupt thugs just like they are back home. They carry guns and batons and, worse than that, attitude. Judging by what we see in the media every day, what else would you think? And then, when a crime is committed in your neighbourhood and the police come around to investigate, you want nothing to do with them.

Is the media waging a vendetta against the police? I would argue that the answer to that question is yes. And if the media is merely reporting the facts as they claim, then they aren’t doing a very good job of it, at least, not a balanced one.

Judging by the kind of coverage they get, police must routinely be going around brutalizing people, usurping the individual’s rights, and taking the law into their own hands because this is how they are portrayed, in newspapers especially. This is why one scribe will devote six months of columns to a case where a man is shot and killed while in police custody, and why when a black man is shot by Toronto police, Canada’s largest newspaper the Toronto Star will go into battle mode against the city’s ‘racist cops.’

Have I ever had a bad experience with a cop? Yes, the very first one, in fact. When I was 17 I was driving a girl home in my father’s car when another motorist went through a stop sign and hit us. I took the guy’s ID and insurance, and went home. In the morning, my father took a look at his car and called the police. An officer came to the house, insisted I had been high on booze and drugs the night before, and charged me for not reporting an accident. He was steadfast, and you couldn’t argue with him.

I had nothing good to say about that officer then, and have nothing good to say about him now. But to dismiss all police based on that one experience would be wrong.

If you get mugged on the street, who do you call? Do you call a lawyer? Nope. Do you call a social worker? Nope. Do you call your clergyman or maybe your Member of Parliament? Give me a break. You call a cop. And you call a cop because they are the ones looking out for us.

What would happen if, for even one day, there were no police? Why, it would be chaos. The bad guys would be even more brazen than they are now. Not only would they know that this country’s justice system is soft on crime, which it is, but there would be no one around to enforce what laws we have.

It wouldn’t be difficult to write a newspaper column about cops, and tear a strip off them every time out. Every morning you just Google ‘police brutality’ or check out the latest listing for any number of special-interest groups who have it in for the cops, then fill your space with raw emotion. Much of the material wouldn’t be based on fact, but as they say, why let facts get in the way of a good story?

What is fact is that, media aside, the huge majority of people in this country are very supportive of the police. And why shouldn’t they be? By and large, the police are first-class. They bust their butts trying to keep our streets safe, and it’s surprising that more of them don’t quit in disgust with what often transpires in the courts. I don’t know of any other profession that gives back more to the community than the police, and I’m not only talking about when they are on duty, but also when they are off duty.

Is there a more difficult job that carries such potentially fatal hazards than that of a police officer? Probably not. I wouldn’t do it for a living. I couldn’t put up with the crazy hours, and most definitely couldn’t put up with the frustration of pounding the beat and maybe taking considerable risk to arrest some dude only to see him back on the street half an hour later with a smirk on his face.

Naturally, any police who screw up should pay the price. Those who really are on the take, or who shoot first and ask questions later, or who are in the business of running grow-ups or any other type of illicit activity should not be wearing a badge, and I don’t believe that they will for very long. But are they truly representative of police per se? No.

I was at a wedding last week, and in one conversation the story about police being charged with running a grow-up reared its ugly head. “They all do it,” said one learned fellow, dismissing the whole lot of law enforcement in one fell swoop. 

Well, I would like to take all the cop-haters out there – and you know who you are – and drop them off in the highest-crime areas of the country, in the middle of the night, and let them fend for themselves. The group would include a few well-known criminal lawyers who never have a good thing to say about the police, at least one federal party leader who’s been an anti-police advocate since his days in municipal politics, not to mention an assortment of law professors, civil libertarians, activists with an axe to grind, and a whole slew of journalists who not once in their life ever had to stare down the barrel of a gun that was pointed in their face in some seedy alleyway.

Cops? God bless ’em.