Magic Statistics

When Prime Minister Stephen Harper visited Canadian troops stationed in Afghanistan last week, he ended his address with “God bless Canada”. His habit of finishing speeches with that sentence was first noted during the recent federal election campaign. The PM’s invocation of a blessing from the Almighty on our country has offended some. Globe and Mail columnist Rex Murphy is not sympathetic. In fact, he wonders whether the offended secularists are unhinged by the implied challenge to practical atheism’s hegemony of Canadian public life.

Mr. Harper's “God bless Canada” may be something more than a mere annoyance to them: It may be the first shadow of a doubt — and nothing is more cruel to a fundamentalist than the approach of doubt — that the ascendancy they assume is complete is a fiction.

That would be intolerable. The faith of unfaith cannot abide a discrepancy between its reality and reality. The thought that religion might have a meaning and significance for a great many of their fellow citizens, beyond its anthropological and historical significance, that it might mean something here and now, and that it should be expressed, is a horror of an insight.

There is another objection to Mr Harper’s expression of hope that God will bless Canada, namely, that President George W Bush often ends his speeches with a analogous request, “God bless America”. It’s bad enough that Mr Harper is pro-God; he may even be pro-America; or, heaven forfend, pro-Bush. To Canada’s militant secularists, being pro-Bush is heretical.

For free access to the complete column, click here.

Looking for a restaurant where you'll have some privacy? Then you'll want to make a reservation at Dans Le Noir? with locations in Paris and London. Your anonymity is assured because the waiters are blind and meals are served in complete darkness.

Guests choose their menu at the bar before coming in and then the experience takes place like in any other restaurant.

No move is allowed in the dark room without the help of your guide. Even to go to the toilets you need to ask the blind guides to drive you back to the exit and to bring you back to your place later on. We advise anyway to go to the toilets before coming in the dark room.

Dans Le Noir? recommends the Menu Surprise for a totally blind dining experience: you receive whatever strikes the chef’s fancy. Not only can you not see what you’re eating, you don’t even know what you’ve been served.

Not knowing what you’ve been served at Dans Le Noir? may be a plus, if the experience of Richard Alleyne, restaurant critic of the London Telegraph, is any indication. He knew what he ordered, but the dishes he received didn’t taste like what he was expecting. (He doesn’t say if anyone in his party jabbed a nose with a salad fork or dribbled wine down his shirt.)

This intrepid convoy of diners is entering the darkness. Each person places a hand on the shoulder of the person in front, and the waiter leads the group to their table.

Once inside, no one is permitted to move around unattended to ensure the safety of the waiters. It’s a little difficult to catch your waiter’s eye if you need something, so you have to call out his name.

The concept doesn’t appeal to me–but I’m sure it’s a great spot for a blind date.

via Pave France.

Those books you're wearing certainly are fashionable.

A model wears a dress by Ukrainian designer Andre Tan during fashion show at the traditional spring-summer pret-a-porter Fashion Week in Kiev, Ukraine Friday, March 17, 2006. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky) AP - Mar 17 11:03 AM

via CUANAS.

Canadian aboriginal persons are incarcerated in numbers well above their proportion of the overall population. Comprising 3 percent of the national adult population, aboriginals account for about 20 percent of those receiving jail sentences.

In 2003/04, Aboriginal people accounted for 21% of admissions to provincial/territorial sentenced custody, 18% of admissions to federal custody, 18% of admissions to remand, 16% of probation admissions and 19% of conditional sentence admissions. At the same time, Aboriginal people represented 3% of the Canadian adult population.
. . .
Aboriginal people had higher levels of representation in sentenced custody compared to their representation in the adult population, most notably in Manitoba (68% versus 11%), Alberta (39% versus 4%), Saskatchewan (80% versus 10%), British Columbia (20% versus 4%) and Ontario (9% versus 1%).

Here are the data for the northern territories: Yukon, 73% versus 20%; Northwest Territories: 88% versus 45%; Nunavut: 97% versus 78%.

Source of above statistics: "Correctional Services in Canada, 2003-04", Juristat, Vol. 25, no. 8 (Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, Statistics Canada, catalogue no. 85-002), pp. 14-15 [not available online]

Most explorations of reasons for the disproportionate representation of aboriginals in Canadian jails are based on the assumption that aboriginal persons are victims of discrimination. Aboriginals are over-represented because of cultural and historical differences between aboriginals and non-aboriginals. The criminal justice system fails to take into account the damage aboriginals have suffered in the history of their relations with non-aboriginals. If this experience were to be recognised and appropriate adjustments made to the system, so this line of argument contends, the disparity would be rectified.

[O]ver-representation of Aboriginal people in the criminal justice system has been due to a combination of "culturally insensitive" and discriminatory policing ("over-policing" as well as "under-policing") and criminal justice processing (e.g., sentencing), and a high rate of offending (and victimization) in "Aboriginal communities," which itself is the result of historical colonization, exploitation, and consequent social, economic, and cultural deterioration of such communities.

Policy proposals arising from this perspective typically advocate radical restructuring of Canada's justice system. Policing of aboriginal communities should be taken over by independent aboriginal police services. Separate and fundamentally independent aboriginal justice institutions that respect aboriginal culture, experience, and social needs should be set up to ensure that Canadian aboriginals are treated fairly in the courts.

The problem at the root of aboriginal over-representation directly arises from aboriginality itself. Therefore,

the “white” criminal justice system is, and will always be, inherently incapable of responding appropriately, effectively, and acceptably to these Aboriginal realities.

An article recommended to me by a colleague looks at the data from a different angle, challenges the assumptions, and contends that those policy proposals do not address the root conditions and therefore will not mitigate the problem. The article, entitled "Exile On Main Street: Some Thoughts on Aboriginal Over-Representation in the Criminal Justice System", by Carol La Prairie of Justice Canada and Philip Stenning of University of Toronto, is the source of the above and all subsequent quotations. (Full source information is given at the end of this post.)

Aboriginals are not the only identifiable demographic group that is over-represented in Canadian prisons. Males, young people, the unemployed, and those with low levels of education are imprisoned in numbers far beyond their proportion in the overall population. These factors (with the exception of male) are also found in the aboriginal population to a much greater extent than in the non-aboriginal population. Aboriginal Canadians are more likely to be young (aged 15-24), unemployed, and have low levels of educational attainment; they are also more likely to have low income and to have been raised by a single parent. In fact, the demographic profile of the general aboriginal population resembles that of the prison population to a far greater extent than does that of the overall Canadian population. Prison inmates share demographic characteristics that are shared by the general aboriginal population.

In the provinces with an exceptionally high proportion of aboriginals among those sentenced to custody, one also finds that aboriginals are over-represented among residents of low-income, high-crime, inner-city neighbourhoods.

[T]he concentrations, demographic compositions, and socio-economic circumstances of Aboriginal populations in the Prairie cities are very different from those in other large Canadian cities. The cities with the largest proportions of Aboriginal people living in extremely poor neighbourhoods are Winnipeg (41.2 percent), Saskatoon (30.2 percent), and Regina (26.9 percent). The cities with the smallest are Toronto (15.8 percent), Vancouver (17.1 percent), and Edmonton (19.4 percent). In the eastern cities, similar proportions of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people live in poor neighbourhoods, but in Prairie cities the proportion of Aboriginal people living in these circumstances is three or four times that of non-Aboriginal people. In Vancouver and Edmonton, it is twice as high.

This is the basis for the contention that over-representation in criminal activity is connected with the characteristics of the area in which it occurs rather than racial or ethnic discrimination.

[P]olice and other criminal justice officials are called upon to respond to patterns of crime and victimization in certain neighbourhoods (notably poor inner-city neighbourhoods), which make it understandable, if not inevitable, that the most disadvantaged people in those neighbourhoods (be they Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal people) will more frequently come to the attention of the police and, consequently, be statistically over-represented in the criminal justice system.

It is also important to note that most aboriginal crime is intra-racial: Aboriginals are over-represented among victims of crime as well as perpetrators.

If this view is correct, then policy prescriptions involving justice system modifications designed to encourage or require “cultural sensitivity” toward aboriginal people will not address the issue of over-representation. Moreover, when one realises that most aboriginal crime is committed against other aboriginals, “sensitivity” toward offenders may entail insensitivity toward victims.

The conditions out of which aboriginal crime arises are not unique to aboriginal people. Circumstances such as young age, low education, unemployment, and inadequate parenting occur more often among aboriginals, but they are also widespread among non-aboriginals; and they are not amenable to improvement through changes in police and judicial institutions. Young, single, poorly educated males are over-represented in jails, irrespective of ethnicity. A separate, autonomous aboriginal justice system will not change that.

Finally, culturally sensitive approaches to aboriginal criminal justice have been increasingly emphasised for decades, but there is no evidence that they have reduced aboriginal involvement in criminal activity.

"Exile On Main Street: Some Thoughts on Aboriginal Over-Representation in the Criminal Justice System" is contained in a 2003 collection of papers entitled Not Strangers In These Parts: Urban Aboriginal Peoples, which is available online as a pdf document (3 MB in size). The article by Dr La Prairie and Prof Stenning is found on pages 179-194. A press release announcing the book’s publication is posted here.