be a better way. “Surely,” I tell the caller, “you wouldn’t be prepared to risk your mother’s life for an additional ten dollars a month on your pension!” “I certainly would,” he asserts. “They are of equal value.” He later informs me that his mother is dead so the question isn’t relevant. “Is an extra ten dollars a month on a pension worth risking anyone’s life?” I ask. “Absolutely,” he replies once again. “They are of equal value.” When he refuses to rethink his statement, I tell him he is a disgusting human being, and boot his sorry butt off the air but I have no doubt whatsoever that his views are widely held.
It’s not that long ago that striking Montreal firemen cut hoses when supervisory staff tried to quell a major blaze that threatened many lives!
In Toronto, a sad little six-year-old boy slowly dies of hunger, thirst and dreadful neglect. Even as he loses more and more weight, can barely talk or walk, professional childcare workers don’t spot anything wrong. Or at least they say they don’t! Boarders living in the house see the slow murder but don’t do anything for fear of being evicted. It’s not their problem!
And let’s have a look at crime in general. If ever there was an example of how we continue to adhere to terribly failed policies, surely it is in the field of crime and punishment. Despite all the evidence (and there is plenty of it) that so-called “soft justice” does not work, we continue to pretend that it does.
We are being told that the overall crime rate is down slightly in the past few years, but that is a gross misrepresentation of the facts. Don’t take my word for it, check out an editorial that appeared in the Ottawa Sun on April 24, 2006, a few days after Stephen Harper introduced his get-tough-on-crime package to the Commons. In it, the Sun says: “Violent crime in Canada today is 35 percent higher than it was just 20 years ago.” You read that right. It’s from last year’s Statistics Canada report on the crime rate.
But how is this possible, you’re asking? Hasn’t the “hug-a-thug” crowd constantly told us that crime is going down and thus there is no need to toughen our laws?
Well, what liberal politicians, academics and pundits have been doing is quoting the statistics very selectively. It’s true that after peaking in 1991, violent crime has been dropping slowly. Today it’s down about 10 percent from a decade ago. But those who want to coddle criminals don’t tell you that this very slight decline has in no way matched the explosion in violent crime that started in the 1960s and continued for 30 years. The real story is that violent crime today is at levels that would have been considered appallingly high only two decades ago.
If, in fact, crime in Canada has declined slightly in the past few years, it surely has as much to do with our citizens locking themselves into little fortresses at night as it does any improvement in the moral climate. Playgrounds go empty because parents won’t let their children walk down the block unescorted. In some of our buildings, seniors cower in their tiny apartments most of the day, afraid to even venture into the hallways where very often punks, prostitutes, and pimps have taken over. I will never forget one woman’s anguished call to my show. “I went to get on the elevator in my building last night,” she said, “two people were having sex and asked me if I wanted to join in!” There are some, I suppose, who might think that kind of thing is funny, unless of course the victim happened to be their mother trying to live out the last few years of her life in peace and security.
One thing we are all only too familiar with is the frightening escalation of juvenile crime, especially violent juvenile crime that is up about 126 percent since 1986 (Statistics Canada Report on Crime 2005).
But our decaying civilization cannot be measured in crime figures alone; that is only one indicator. Ancient Rome didn’t have a whole lot of crime, mainly because you’d get fed to the lions for stealing a loaf of bread or crucified for challenging religious beliefs. Rome’s decay went much deeper than that. It had to do with the moral fibre of its people—once the bravest, most daring, most civilized in the world, or certainly since the ancient Greeks.
The story of the Romans and the Greeks, who created marvellous civilizations and then allowed them to rot away from within, is a story which has been repeated throughout history. There have been a great number of Neros fiddling away while our cities and our civilizations burn.
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One measure of the temper of our moral decay is the approximately 40,000 federal public servants, living in Quebec, who just prior to the 1995 Quebec Referendum signed a deal with Jacques Parizeau assuring them of equal-paying jobs in the new Kingdom of Quebec. Most of the 40,000 saw nothing wrong with workers accepting pay from Canadian taxpayers while signing a deal with the enemy!
More recently of course, the same Union recommended that its members support several separatist candidates in the Outaouais. Gatineau did just that during the January 2006 election, electing a separatist. Thousands of federal public servants voted for a party that wants to break Canada apart, while accepting cheques every week from Canadian taxpayers.
Not very good value for the billions of dollars we have spent trying to buy the loyalty of Quebec francophones!
The decay can also be measured by the fact that in the fall of 2003, the education of some 16,000 of our children was threatened by an Ottawa teachers’ work-to-rule and school board lockout, even as three million dollars was paid out to teachers for unused sick leave. Obviously both the school board and the teachers believe that paying millions of dollars in unused sick leave to retiring teachers takes precedence over educating our children.
Today, at a time when our education system slips further and further behind that of most European and Asian nations, it is widely reported that we in Ontario owe more than one billion dollars in unused sick leave pay to retiring teachers! Strikes affecting the education of tens of thousands of school children across Canada are commonplace because we as a nation cannot agree that education is a basic right and that methods of settlement which do not use children as pawns must be adopted.
A recent US News Today story reported that fully 76 percent of American children graduating from high school cannot read or write at a level European Union nations now deem appropriate for entry into university. We don’t have comparable figures in Canada since we don’t have universal testing, but most people who know anything about it will admit we are only marginally ahead of the Americans, if at all.
Here’s another scary thought: A recent test indicated that the average Canadian high school graduate was at least two years behind students of the same age in India. In science we are so far behind most Asian countries we are hardly in the race.
You don’t need nationwide tests to prove any of this. Just check around the neighbourhood. We have a friend whose ten-year-old daughter has just been tested and found to have reading and math comprehension at the grade-two level. She’s in grade five!
In my opinion, failure to make the education of children the highest priority is an indication of a civilization in decline. Nothing should take precedence over education, especially in today’s global economy. Common sense dictates that if our children cannot compete in the classroom it is only a matter of time until the country itself cannot compete with better educated populations. Sadly, in Canada today the education of our children seems to take a back seat to union contracts, tenure, province-wide negotiations, school board amalgamations, pension plans, prep time, PD days, and sick leave.
Listen, if this was a great civilization and not one in decline, here is what we would do: We would tell our schools, “You must educate at least 76 percent of the students who come to you to an accepted international level or we will find someone else who can.” If 76 percent of high school graduates can’t read or write at an international level, close the school down and start all over again. Get new administrators,
