Ryan Bergen from Montreal Canada writes: I understand that violent crime has tapered off in absolute terms and this has been credited to changing demographics i.e. there just aren’t as many young people around to commit crimes as there once were relative to the population as a whole. Is this accurate? So then what about the number of crimes committed in relation to the size of the smaller cohort. There may be less violence in Canada than in the past, but are Canadians in fact less violent? Thanks.

Demographic shifts do explain a good deal of the variation in homicide rates, and the rates of other kinds of serious violent crime. In the mid 1970s young men (those between the ages of 18 and 29) represented 10 per cent of the Canadian population; today they represent about 5 per cent of our population. This demographic category is responsible for close to 70 per cent of all violent crime, and so it follows that when their numbers shrink, the crime rate drops. Canadians are no more or less violent today than they were 30 years ago, but the character of the violence has probably changed. We have less domestic violence, for example, but a greater number of homicides involving handguns (and fewer involving rifles or shotguns).

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The federal Conservatives have reversed a 30 year old policy of asking the U.S. for clemency in cases of Canadian citizens awaiting execution in the United States. We have traditionally asked U.S. jurisdictions not to carry out the sentence of death in such instances; successive federal governments have been opposed to the death penalty, on a number of grounds: it does not deter homicide, it is barbaric, and it is increasingly out of step with all civilized nation-states on the face of the earth.

So it is disturbing that the Conservatives appear to be so comfortable with the idea of the U.S. imposing lethal injection on a Canadian citizen. But the logic expressed by Stockwell Day is even more remarkable. “It would send a wrong message. We want to preserve public safety here in Canada”, Mr. Day announced.

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The federal Conservatives were acting in my economic interests when they announced a cut in the GST from 6 to 5 per cent, effective January 1, 2008. As a relatively high income earner, I will receive ten times as much cash in my pocket next year (about $1,000) as will an indvidual earning $40,000 (who will take home little more than $100). In the interest of my own short-term economic well-being, I should support the legislation; my lack of support is, in all fairness, a statement against my economic interests.

The GST is, after all, a tax on consumption, and higher income earners necessarily consume more in the way of goods and services. If a government gets $34 billion of its $50 odd billion in tax cuts from a GST reduction, they may as well come out and tell us what they believe: that they want the wealthy to have a bigger share of the pie than they already do (never mnd that the top one per cent of Canadian income earners have almost doubled their share of the economic pie in the past 25 years, from about 7 to 14 per cent).

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