i hate election debates

Listening to the provincial candidate election debates tonight was almost as pleasant as sticking chopsticks into my ears.

The amount of time spent talking about crime was asinine.

On the issue of justice, Mr. McGuinty pointed out that Ontario has the lowest has the lowest rate of crime in Canada and the second-lowest violent crime rate in Canada. But he said there is more work that needs to be done - and he tried to get Mr. Tory to support his efforts to ban hand guns.

Mr. Tory replied that Mr. McGuinty there is already a virtual ban on handguns.

“Mr. McGuinty has not made a safer Ontario,” said Mr. Tory. “It is under his watch that the crown attorneys have been agreeing to these bail deals, plea bargaining deals and sentencing deals that allow the criminals to thumb their nose at the rest of us and frankly thumb their nose at the justice system.”

Mr. Hampton said he thought the solution is to put more money into preventing young people from turning to criminal activities.

Are you frigging kidding me?

Let’s take a look at some hard data from oh - I don’t know…. but I guess we could start with somewhere completey frigging obvious like Stats Canada.

Virtually all provinces and territories reported declines in their homicide rate in 2006. The most notable occurred in Ontario, where there were 23 fewer homicides.

Oh wait. People are afraid in cities. It’s too bad that StatsCan doesn’t collect data like that. Oh wait.

They do.

Taking population into account, the homicide rate of 2.5 homicides per 100,000 people in rural areas was actually higher than the rate of 2.0 in large urban areas and the rate of 1.7 in small urban areas. This pattern has held constant over the past decade.

Sadly - all three party leaders played the “there’s lots of work to do on crime” card - preying on people’s fear and uncertainty in a hope to grab some votes.

Here’s what I would have liked to have heard:

I don’t care what your opinion is. The fact is - crime is steadily going down.

Cities are safe.

If you’re really worried about people dying, you should probably look at the roads. There are over 14 people per 100,000 dying on the roads because of traffic incidents. We have 2.5 per 100,000 dying because of homicide. How about we just put more cops on the highways to catch stupid drivers and we’ll save more lives.

If you’re actually worried about crime, you need to look at the actual crime data to realize that there really isn’t a problem. If you still don’t believe it - you need to take some remedial math classes.

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