Tale of Two Criminals

It's been some time since the last post mostly because there was the IdleNoMore movement and I wanted to wait and see the political fallout.  On one hand I was hopeful, the different native tribes of Canada was fed up with their government and the non-native Federal government and wanted change.  The political landscape of the world was ripe for democratic demands.  It was a people based protest.

In the end nothing happened.  By and large, most non-native Canadians aren't concerned with long standing poverty issues in native areas.  What the reasons may be are likely multitude but not the point of this post so I'll move on and simply say I am disappointed that Canada, in general, didn't utilise that unique opportunity for positive change.

Instead, what I'd like to talk about is a reasoned approach to high profile crime in Canada.  There are two cases I am focusing on and while I dislike giving infamy to criminals I will speak their names.  The brutal murderer who made a film of the act (Luke Magnotta) and the terror suspect in the Via derailment plot (Raed Jaser).  There are a few issues I'd like to tackle.  First is a broad based opinion on how this type of crime comes about and what we might do to lessen it (in an effort to eliminate it).  Second is the topics that are usually discussed that are wholly irrelevant to the crimes and that detract greatly from useful debate in Canada.  Third is a long standing and unfortunate issue that surrounds racism.  Racism is treated last because speaking about it only points out a continuing problem in the country but does not speak about solutions (which are not race-based).

Crime is a topic of much discussion and debate, especially with respect to how it comes about.  I'm not a criminologist and I don't hold that much expertise so as far as my discussion goes, I can only give broad opinions.  The two people are accused of heinous crimes (at the time of this writing, they have yet to be convicted as far as I know but their convictions are likely to come soon after this post).  How they came to be is hard to say.  But there may be broad issues affecting Canadians statistically that result in individual criminals.

One thing is mental health issues.  A person doesn't have to be crazy to commit crimes but they can be put under pressure or other circumstances that greatly increase the likelihood of crime.  For instance, investigation into the so-called "warrior gene" showed that its expression is largely dependent on a person's life.  That is to say that the environment was more important.  Tracking the mental health of Canadians isn't something we do right now and we certainly don't put much money into combat those stress factors.  We could in general reduce  this type of crime by improving the mental health and the mental health monitoring of Canadians.

Imagine for instance that rather than let the murderer of Jun Lin carry out his plan that it could have been pinpointed by medical professionals that there was a problem and it was privately dealt with.  That would be pretty amazing but even if you can catch a few people like this, wouldn't that be worth it?  Mental health issues in general reduce secondary costs, such as policing, when cops don't have to detain ill individuals on the street causing trouble.

Additionally, there is a lack of low-level soft measures to identify problems and move to solve them.  This is very difficult with Jun Lin's murder (since identifying violent behaviour with individuals is quite impossible as of right now) but much easier with terrorism.  In the case of the Via plot, the individuals who brought the man to justice were primarily imams working at mosques concerned about the rhetoric being said by Jaser.  This type of community involvement of Muslim communities ensuring safety within their own ranks and involving police as a last resort is actually the solution you want to implement.

Why is that the preferred solution?  A person isn't a criminal until they commit a crime or at least start the process of committing one.  Any time before that if you can convince them away from the action, then they are not and never were criminals.  What is the cost to society?  Far less than letting a crime happen and then having to clean up the mess afterward.  That's why it's important for Canadian police to continue to build trust with places such as Muslim communities and it's important for non-Muslims to recognise that Jasper was caught because imams identified him to the police.

Let's talk about the problem of the discussion of these issues.

In general, we don't want to think that a normal (well Jasper wasn't Canadian but he lived in Canada for twenty years) person can simply turn to terrorism over time.  Instead there claims about how the "immigration system let someone slip through the cracks".  Do we seriously believe Jasper was a terrorist at six years old when he came as an illegitimate refugee and waited twenty years to hatch his evil plot?  That is quite the claim.  The more likely problem?  He was ignored by Canadian society and turned to terrorism and his community rejected him for it and turned him over to the police when they failed to push him away from the path of violence.

What we, as the rest of Canadians, should recognise is how someone was pushed onto the path of violence in the first place.  For too many people, attempting to understand a situation equates to justifying it and thus reject any and all solutions to the problem and are content to live with continued terrorism.  Instead, what Canada as a mature democratic society needs to do is identify how a person could feel rejected, how they are rejected and how to lessen that.

As a small extension to that, think about the three very Canadian individuals involved in the gas plant attack.  There is no way you can call those people "not Canadian" and scoff that off as a problem of the immigration system.  They were simply jobless youth with nothing to live for.  They weren't particularly skilled and we can't start deporting them.  More than twenty percent of Canadians live below the poverty line, should we deport them as well?  They were people easily convinced to go die for something because Canada offered them nothing to live for.

It's not a simple problem.  Everything is at fault.  The economy, the politics, the social system.  And so we'd like to believe in magical easy solutions.  Let's ban immigration!  That'll solve everything.  But it won't.  Crime will still happen.  We have to strive over the next few decades in trying to tackle poverty, to give people more economic freedom, to tackle divisive politics, to give people more hope in life, we have to tackle gaps in the social system, simplifying it and making it easier for people to ask for help.  We have to be willing to give help to people that are in need, whether for economic reasons or perhaps even mental ones.  We have to eliminate the stigmas attached to that to allow people at the lowest ends of society the opportunity to move into the middle class.

Lastly, as an extension to the previous discussion I move onto racism.

Generally, I don't like to talk about racism because I'd like to think that Canada is not racist.  Although, in all honesty, I think it is more classist than it is racist, racism rears its ugly head every now and then.

Compare the murder of Jun Lin with the debacle of the greyhound bus.  The immediate discussion following the greyhound incident was about immigration.  Not mental health issues.  Not job stress.  Not the problem of unemployment that led to the development of mental health issues (the ultimate cause of the problem).  People felt that excused a person who shouldn't be in Canada committing a murder.

But with Luke Magnotta, we immediately repatriated him from Germany in order to stand trial for murder.  There was no discussion of immigration.  Afterall, we can't exactly deport 70% of Canadians from Canada (and where would they even go?).  Though it still didn't exactly follow a "what was the root cause", the discussion was marginally better due to the lack of racism.  And that creates a roadblock when we want to stop these events from reoccurring.

Not only can we not deport Magnotta, we had to repratriate him and he will likely spend life in jail here in Canada on our tax dollars.  That's what we have to do because we never prevented him from committing murder.

What would have been preferable?  Two crimes caused by presumably mentally ill individuals should warrant the exact same discussion.  Why?  The solution to both problems would be similar because they are similar problems.  Unfortunately, Canada is capable of turning them into two different problems.

In finality, Canada is a country that must continue to strive to make itself more equal in all senses.  We need only look at countries with superior quality of life and notice how their governments care more to tackle mental health, economic inequality and notice that in the long run they have less serial killers (or otherwise horrific murderers) in general, they suffer less terrorism (and the terrorists they do have are much less successful) and suffer less crime.  People talk about easy and hard solutions and doing the right thing even if it's hard.  They're usually equating "easy" with "left" solutions and "hard" with "right" solutions.  That usually means spending money to tackle social problems or in the latter case, it is the fault of the people with problems that they have problems and thus you do nothing.

Canada needs to do the hard thing: it has to tackle its social issues instead of ignoring them.