Jason Kenney's math mojo

Employment Minister Jason Kenney explained that "none of us know exactly what is going on in the labour market of today" because ... math!!!  
The quest was made even more difficult by ignoring StatsCan's official statistics showing a declining job vacancy rate in favour of using data based on hiring "an outside software program that searches for online job ads" and adds them up.

This data showed the "job vacancy rate has been increasing steadily since 2009" - which, as it happens, turns out to be spectacularly useful for bolstering the Cons' corporate-friendly argument in favour of importing temporary foreign workers.

But why did the wonky Kijiji-based data falsely show an increase in labour shortage in Canada?

Chris Harris, Kijiji’s head of Jobs and Housing, provides a clue. 
He explained : "the job postings on the site are rising in part because the site itself has had major growth in terms of popularity."

Awesome. 
.

Update : Good read from Susan Delacourt: Trolling the web for job data, Conservative-style

Shorter : The problem wasn’t fake ID in the 2011 election; the problem was fake phone calls. The same Cons who were outraged at the supposed intrusiveness of the gun registry and long form census have spent the last decade scooping up info on Canadians for their CIMS political database -- yet were strangely unfussed about the data breach of CIMS in the last election.
.

Stephen Harper - tilting at windmills

No stats supporting a rise in crime? It's invisible crime! Steve will slay invisible crime for us. Ha!

No stats supporting a rise in anti-Semitism in Canada?  Never mind. Steve set up a special parliamentary committee to slay the invisible rise of anti-Semitism in Canada and give it a whole new definition that might include you.

No stats supporting public outcry against long form census? No problemo. It was an invisible public outcry. Long form census slayed, and bonus! -  cripple StatsCan's budget.

No stats supporting examples of voter fraud? Must be invisible voter fraud then, the kind only Steve and his minions can see. Best cripple Elections Canada investigations just to be on the safe side.

Are you starting to see a pattern here? Tilting at windmills and slaying invisible monsters seems to provide excellent cover for attacking whoever Steve as Donkey Otay perceives as opponents.

.

Lockheed Martin : "We never forget who we're working for"

That famous LM motto ... which in the main of course refers to their $47.2 billion client, the US government. 

Not just an arms manufacturer anymore, LM builds spy satellites for the NSA, plus surveillance and information processing for the CIA, the FBI, the IRS, the NSA, the Pentagon, the Postal Service, and the US Census Bureau.

Lockheed Martin - counting some people, blowing other people up.

Rather infamously up here in Canada, Lockheed Martin developed and supplied the data-analyzing software to Statistics Canada that scanned the 2006 census forms using “optic recognition” software and helped rework the program for the 2011 count - sparking fears that famous motto meant census info about Canadians would be funnelled to their biggest client via the Patriot Act.

Today, 89-year-old WW2 war veteran and peace activist Audrey Tobias is in court for refusing to fill in her 2006 and 2011 census. If convicted, Tobias will refuse to accept a fine or community service on the grounds that either would be an admission of guilt. It's jail for her or nothing. 
Her refusal is based on her dislike of LM and their cluster bombs :

“Giving it to a foreign military company sends a message to the Canadian people from our prime minister and cabinet that he supports military solutions. I didn’t like that,” she said.

She doesn't care about the possible invasion of her privacy by the NSA via Lockheed Martin but her lawyer will. 


Lockheed Martin press release, April 2013 :

"Lockheed Martin is a leading provider of cyber security technology and services to the NSA and a number of defense and intelligence agencies."

From 2008 : 

"American officials are pressuring the federal government to supply them with more information on Canadians, says an influential analyst on Canada-U.S. relations."Not only about routine individuals, but also about people that you may be looking at for reasons, but there's no indictment and there's no charge," Christopher Sands of the Hudson Institute told a security intelligence conference."

Back in 2006, President of Lockheed Martin’s Americas Region and former Pentagon advisor to Dick Cheney, Ron Covais, was succinct on the subject of integrating corporations like his into the US and Canadian governments :

"We've decided not to recommend any things that would require legislative changes," says Covais. "Because we won't get anywhere."

A LM presser on its relationship to Canada refers to "the development of a North American defense industrial base" :

"Beyond our defence partnerships, Lockheed Martin Corporation stands ready to continue and grow our support to Canada's Census, health care management, information technology, as well as infrastructure and border security to ensure the safe, secure and efficient transit of people, goods and services between Canada and the US."

Health care management? Yeah, they do that too. 

And didn't you guys just get hacked by China a couple of years ago?

In 2010, Tony Clement announced he would "introduce legislation this fall to remove threats of jail time for persons refusing to fill out the census and all mandatory surveys administered by the federal government." But then he didn't.

Fun juxtaposition  : The witness for the Crown against Tobias -Yves Beland, operations director at Statistics Canada - says he has never heard of Edward Snowden and testified that all Canadian census data is completely safe from Lockheed Martin.

.
Wed. Oct 9 Update : Tobias acquitted!

"The judge also described the Justice Department's decision to prosecute Tobias, a Second World War veteran, as a "PR disaster."

.

Fakers and Cons

Still adding to the list of Con fakery below, if you have more suggestions.
.

Fakers

Fake F-35 mock up cockpit from Lockheed Martin for DefMin Peter Airshow MacKay to hold $47,000 presser in to announce purchase of 65 Lockheed Martin stealth fighters in 2010.
Tony Gazebo and Rona Ambrose attending.



Fake citizenship ceremony in which half of the participants were actually Citizenship and Immigration Canada staff passed off as new Canadians on Sun News Network





Fake lake, the $57,000 part of a $1.9 million display for the 2010 G8/20 summit, concerning which I asked some more questions earlier today.

Fake G8 border infrastructure slush fund that splashed $50M around Tony Gazebo's riding for gazebos and flower pots miles away from the border, and incidentally increased his vote margin win from 26 votes in 2006 to almost 11,000 in 2010.

Fake protesters made up of Conservative party interns and staff sent out by the PMO to heckle Justin Trudeau on the lawn of the House of Commons as he gave a presser announcing "new measures to increase transparency in the HoC." 

Fake apology to First Nations

Fake election phone calls, live and automated, presumably originating from the Cons' CIMS data base, either being obnoxious while pretending to be from an opposing party or advising voters their polling station had moved or closed.

Fake Jobs Grant from the same people who thought it was a super idea to grant businesses a 15% wage reduction pass NOT to hire Canadians. This new idea, which doesn't exist yet despite a recent Hockey Night in Canada ad blitz at $95,000 a pop, would again subsidize business while rolling back $300M from the provinces should they agree to hell freezing over.

Fake Commander-in-Chief shtick while surveying Alberta flood damage, and good lord, he's wearing fucking wings.
Unsurprisingly reminiscent of Bush photo op surveying Katrina.  Mr. Dress Up's spox explained it was "in tribute to the military".  
See Boris : last paragraph.

Fake CIDA "not", crayoled in at Bev Oda's request above the signatures of CIDA dept heads, making it look as if they, not she, had gutted KAIROS' funding from CIDA. After initially fudging about it, eventually she fessed up.
Meanwhile over in Israel, Jason Kenney told the Israelis he'd done it for them, then retracted it when he got back to Canada.

Fake security at the G20. $1-billion and 19,000 police unable to prevent a few black bloc from rioting but as protests wind down on the last day, kettling without first giving the crowd a chance to disperse nets many shoppers, media, and people returning home from work in the largest police bust in Canadian history. Public Safety Min refuses to divulge origin of command for police state crowd control exercise.

Fake 'red menace' scare. 
Steve, Airshow, MacKay, and PMO staffers make ridiculous remarks about bravely staring down Russian bombers in the Arctic. Meanwhile Canadian Forces are participating with those same Russian bombers in a Canada/US/Russia exercise in joint air traffic coordination in the Arctic. 
aka Fake justification for purchase of 65 F-35s.

 Fake "Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act", which made no mention at all of child pornography because up to an hour earlier this bid to require internet service providers to give police your name, unlisted phone #, and IP address without a warrant was called the Lawful Access Act.

Steve's fake outrage at Lib/NDP/Bloc coalition proposal - with separatists! and socialists! - following the 2011 election.
Following the 2004 election, Harper himself proposed a Con/NDP/Bloc 'cooperation' with those same separatists and socialists to unseat the minority Libs.
In 2000, a proposed coalition of the Bloc, Alliance, and PC parties sought to make Stockwell Day Prime Minister of Canada.

Fake 'grassroots' website Ethical Oil
Alykhan Velshi left a six figure job with Steve's gov to relaunch Ezra Levant's Ethical Oil  -"mooching off free Wi-Fi at coffeehouses and wearing flip-flops” - after which he returned to the PMO fold. Con Resource Bureau-connected webserver Go New Clear hosts Ethical Oil, Jason Kenney, Joe Oliver, Kathryn Marshall, etc.

Faked support for abolishing StatsCan long census. 
MP Maxime Bernier claimed "thousands" of complaint emails per day during 2006 census, all unfortunately deleted, vs. the 22 recorded "expressions of concern" sent to StatsCan. 
When Tony Gazebo falsely claimed StatsCan support for abolishing long census, StatsCan chief Munir Sheikh at left resigned in protest.

Fake smaller government

The Cons' 2012 budget proposed slashing 19,000 positions from the federal public service over five years, but added more than 34,000 between 2006 and 2012 - a 14% increase.                                                                                            Additionally, a 2011 CCPA study discovered a shadow public service: "Over the past five years, federal personnel outsourcing costs have risen 79% ... and remain above $1 billion a year."

Fake emergency preparedness
"It's really just posing," Alberta Fire Chiefs Assoc. Pres. said, singling out fed politicians like SafetyMin Vic Toews showing up to "help out" Alberta flood victims after Cons' 2012 budget slashed federal funding for the Joint Emergency Preparedness Program. "They can just stay in Ottawa. They got in the way."

Fake "cooperation" with Elections Canada, including stonewalling on EC reports of election fraud 3 days before election,  'reviewing' Poutine logs at Responsive Marketing Group before EC, cutting their budget, taking 3 months to not provide EC with witnesses, delaying promised election reforms, and in the words of Judge Richard Mosley : generally engaging in "trench warfare". 


Dr. Dawg sees much of this as Conservative theatre.

I think they're just fakers always hoping not to get caught.

Feel free to add your own "faker" suggestions and links in comments - updating as they come in.

Video version on Youtube 
.

Keystone XL vs owning the tarsands

Former U.S. ambassador to Canada David Wilkins calls it "catastrophic", FinMin Flaherty said "the delay may kill the project" so Canada will look into sending our oil to China via BC instead, and TransCanada Corp is "deeply disappointed". So goes the official reaction to the US State Dept decision to delay Keystone XL for further examination.

But the vast majority of comments from the public under these news stories boil down to this :
Why doesn't Canada do its own tarsands refining?
Why isn't Canada building its own refineries and keeping the jobs here rather than just shipping the raw material abroad?

The response from purported industry insiders under these comments runs as follows :

that no investors are willing to undertake building tarsands refineries because it would be very very expensive; not enough profit margin; that there would be considerable Canadian nimby, environmental, and FN opposition to building them leading to a protracted approval process of uncertain outcome; that Canada does not have the expertise to build them; that Canadian labour costs are too high.

I guess it's too obvious to include that multicorps and foreign companies operating in the tarsands likely want to optimize corporate control and profits by owning both ends of the supply line. 

Or that we're importing 1,088,000 barrels of oil per day against the 1,929,000 that we're exporting because even though TransCanada CEO Russ Girling says : 

 “We can route a pipeline through the Andes, over the Rocky Mountains, through the Everglades, through the Sand Hills”

 apparently we can't route one to eastern Canada.


Foreign ownership :

StatsCan : Total assets, operating revenues and operating profits under foreign control

Oil and gas extraction and support activities - 2009 

• Assets - 35.9% under foreign control
• Operating revenues - 51.1% under foreign control 
• Operating profits : 41.3% under foreign control

"American-controlled enterprises continued to dominate the shares of assets, revenues and profits under foreign-control. These enterprises increased their share of both revenues and profits to 59.1% and 58.3% respectively." 

"In the oil and gas extraction industry, foreign-controlled enterprises increased their share of revenues to 51.1%. This occurred as revenues declined nearly twice as fast in 2009 for domestic enterprises as they did for foreign enterprises."

Looking through the producing members of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, I notice nearly 20% of them list their head offices outside Canada, mostly in Texas. 20% doesn't sound like much but many of them are the bigs, including Koch, ExxonMobil, Shell. 

Meanwhile China's investment in the tarsands is up to what - $13-billion now? 

 
Leo De Bever is head of Alberta’s $70-billion pool of public sector funds, including pension funds, endowments, and the $15-billion Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund.

"My simple point is that you lose ownership, you lose control. Those who control the resource always have the incentive to dig it up as soon as possible,” Mr. De Bever said. 

Mr. De Bever said it would make more sense for Canada to accelerate the development of technologies to produce the oil sands, improving environmental impacts and efficiency, rather than accelerate extraction.
“That is where that tradeoff of digging up now versus digging up later comes in,” he said. “If you know that in a few years you can make it drastically more efficient, it makes the resource more valuable.”

“If you want a strong Canadian economy, to some degree large Canadian institutions have got to take it upon themselves to be not just passive investors,” said Mr. De Bever. “Doing the right thing is not part of my mandate. Doing the profitable thing is. But if  I can do the right thing and the profitable thing, I would do so.”

Sounds like a "no-brainer", doesn't it, Steve?

.

CPCCA : Waving at anti-Semitism

Yesterday the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Anti-Semitism released its Final Report -two years in the making - on what co-chair and former Lib MP Mario Silva referred to as the "wave of anti-Semitism we are witnessing in our nation". A 71% increase.

Yet a mere seven months earlier in December, here is the CPCCA's other co-chair, Con MP Scott Reid (at the 13:33 mark) :

Avi Lewis : "There's no wave of anti-Semitism in Canada?"

Scott Reid : "No, no, no, no, absolutely not. No, it's funny I've heard people who have criticized us saying that we think this but no there is absolutely no spike in the kinds of anti-Semitic incidents that I think appall us." 

Yet there were both Reid and Silva yesterday - gravely intoning at their presser about the need for government to get involved because "Canada is witnessing an unprecedented increase in anti-Semitic incidents and hateful discourse".

What? Just since December?

Well no, because we're talking "the new anti-Semitism" here, or as Silva puts it : "demonizing Israel as an apartheid state."
Criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic, the report explains, unless you refer to its [current right wing] government['s policies] by the word apartheid.
Especially Israel Apartheid Week.
Especially on campus, where the first Israeli Apartheid Week in the world was held in Toronto in 2005, a movement now gone global.

Reports on campus 'new anti-Semitism' and its lefty or clueless profs and administrators take up 21 pages of their 80 page report. And they have recommendations :

All university staff and students should be encouraged to document and report antisemitic incidents whenever they occur.

We recommend that professors be held accountable for academic rigour of their curricula.

We recommend that Federal Government and/or the Inquiry work with the provinces to help administrators develop suitable tools and structures to deal with this burgeoning problem in an effective and principled manner.

On law enforcement : The Inquiry Panel recommends that police forces across Canada send their officers to the "Tools for Tolerance" program at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in LA.
.
On funding NGOs to do monitoring :

We recommend the creation of a permanent, publicly accessible “ambassadorial” position under the auspices of the most appropriate Department (Foreign Affairs, Justice, Multiculturalism) to develop and implement policies, projects and research on combating antisemitism, including the provision of funds to NGOs to further these aims.This office should also monitor implementation of priority recommendations and ensure compliance and accountability.

What, like Israel's NGO Monitor perhaps, the group Kenney credited in his defunding of KAIROS?
Well, we're right off the thought-crime map now, aren't we?

But what about actual anti-Semitic hate crime? Via StatsCan : Police-reported hate crime in Canada, 2009 - but in my own words where not in quotes:

54% of all hate crime incidents reported in 2009 were : "mischief, (e.g. graffiti, vandalism to religious property)"

The second and third highest percentage in hate crimes was : "minor assaults (13%), in which little to no physical harm was caused to the victim, and uttering threats (10%)"
All the other hate crime categories were around 1 or 2%.

There were 283 hate crimes targeting Jews reported to police in 2009. 

"In 2009, hate crime rates were generally highest among youth and young adults. For both victims and persons accused of police-reported hate crime in 2009, the rate peaked among those aged 12 to 17 years and generally decreased with increasing age."

Teenagers and hateful graffitti.

Meanwhile 100s of unnamed First Nations women have been kidnapped, beaten, and killed.
No special $½-million committee for them. No Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Aboriginal Death on the world stage for them.
Hell, the Sisters in Spirit aren't even allowed to use their own name anymore and what federal grant money they had to research those missing women has been rolled over into a general RCMP missing persons fund end of that story.

Speaking of funding ....
CPCCA presser June 2, 2009 : "We will voluntarily disclose all sources of funding."

Scott Reid on video yesterday at CBC :

"We had a number of donors who donated on condition of anonymity and uh the uh we passed a bylaw to ensure that no donations from groups such for example advocacy groups, from trade unions, from businesses would be accepted. These were all individual donations ."

I'll bet. And after all that, you still haven't come up with a reasonable definition of your new anti-Semitism.
"Tools for Tolerance" indeed.
.
Update : The definitive smackdown from Dr. Dawg
.

Canada Census - The dilemma

Do we fill it in nicely to show our solidarity with StatsCan and their important data-gathering, currently under siege by the Cons, or do we fill it in using really big crayons and attached pictures of cluster bomb victims to protest its having been farmed out once again to war profiteer and surveillance/espionage experts Lockheed Martin?


Back during the 2006 census, some of us worried that Homeland Security would wind up with access to our census data via the US Patriot Act. StatsCan was at great pains to alleviate those fears : LM would not get the actual data because LM were only supplying the software; the actual data would remain with StatsCan.

Lockheed Martin : "We never forget who we're working for".

Well of course not. $35.7B in US government contracts alone out of $42.7B worldwide in 2008 is a whole lot of not forgetting.

ML accounts for one of every 14 dollars doled out by the Pentagon, amounting to a "Lockheed Martin tax" of $260 per taxpaying household in the United States.

Besides there's the US government network to maintain : $12 million on congressional lobbying and campaign contributions in 2009.
NYTimes, secondary source :

"Men who have worked, lobbied and lawyered for Lockheed hold the posts of secretary of the Navy, secretary of transportation, director of the national nuclear weapons complex, and director of the national spy satellite agency.

Lockheed Martin is now positioned to profit from every level of the war on terror from targeting to intervention, and from occupation to interrogation."

Including spying on Quakers and anti-war activists and recruiting interrogators for Guantanamo, Iraq, and Afghanistan for the Department of Defense.

Of Lockheed Martin's 57 Federal Contractor Misconduct violations listed at the Project on Government Oversight, nearly a third involve court dispositions and fines for "Government Contract Fraud".
Say, how are our F-35s coming along?

Four months after the 2006 census, Lockheed Martin President of the Americas and Co-Chair of the SPP's North American Competitiveness Council Ron Covais explained to Luiza Ch. Savage how the Security and Prosperity Partnership would be implemented - in incremental changes by each country's executive, bureaucrats and other regulators outside government.

"We've decided not to recommend any things that would require legislative changes because we won't get anywhere."

It may not be entirely rational to fuck with the census form on the grounds that LM profits by it, but sometimes protests are not particularly rational - they are just one of the only means available to us to register our disgust with the creeping militarization inherent in our incremental deep integration with the US.
.
My apology to commenters - all comments were lost in Blogger's big fubar today.
.

Harper hacks StatsCan budget

Who didn't see this coming? CP :

Statistics Canada is cutting five of its surveys after being told by the federal government to chop its budget by $7 million.
The surveys include environmental and business statistics, and are in addition to other belt-tightening at the troubled agency.

As Pogge blogged back in July :

"Harper does not like StatsCan, that's what we kept hearing," according to a longtime employee of the agency. "In particular, he does not like the analytical work we've done for years." The Prime Minister thinks of it as fodder for critics."

Harper especially did not like StatsCan after its head statistician, Munir Sheikh, quit rather than be shanghaied into pretending to approve the government's move to replace the long-form mandatory census with a voluntary survey.
Statscan has also been reporting a steady decrease in crime since 1991, which doesn't exactly jibe with Harper's "if you build them, they will come" bid to stock more prisons with more Canadians.

Luckily there's no need for those Statscan environmental and business statistics now anyway since Harper will be getting his advice from the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy, a Suncor-sponsored Harper-appointed group of Export Development Canada guys, politicians and corporate CEOs. They have just released Climate Prosperity, your guide to, as De Smog Blog puts it : "reframing climate change as a good thing for Canada's economy."

Sure, they tell us, there will be less skiing but we'll have way more golfing and easier access to oil and gas in the far north.
See? Business and environment stats rolled into one.

Actual scientists weigh in on Climate Prosperity:

"I was surprised they'd spent one and a half years working on it. It was a complete mess," said John Stone of Ottawa's Carleton University and a prominent member of the IPCC.
Danny Harvey of U of T : "It is full of bad science and utterly downplays the serious impacts of climate change."

We will not be hearing criticism from any muzzled government-employed scientists of course as they must get cabinet minister approval before speaking in public about their own research.

There better damn well be some stink in the press today about this further gutting of Statscan.
.

Doris' war on crime stats

Doris' cheery crime shoppers philosophy on prisons seems to be : If you build them, they will come

According to Shockwell Doris and JusticeMin Rob Nicholson yesterday, we're going to need more prisons to deal with the "alarming" increase in "unreported crime" ... that was last reported six years ago.

Well, you can see their point, can't you? If more people aren't reporting crimes, then unreported crimes must be going up and we're going to need somewhere to put all the unreported criminals!

And why aren't people reporting those crimes? Via The Jurist :

"(A Statistics Canada) analyst said the No. 1 reason given by individuals for not calling the police about a crime is that they believe it was not serious enough. Only two per cent said they feared retribution, and one per cent said they felt the police may be biased.

Statistics Canada reported in their last General Social Survey (GSS) that an estimated 34% of Canadians who are victims of crime still aren't reporting the crime to police, including: - an estimated 88% of sexual assaults; - an estimated 69% of household thefts, and - and (sic) estimated 67% of personal property thefts."

Kady advises Doris is basing his claims about unreported crime on the 2004 International Crime Victimization Survey.

Three years ago I had a look at that survey. Here are some of the more buckety questions in it :

Under Spousal violence : "Puts you down or calls you names to make you feel bad"

Under Stalking : "Sent you unwanted email messages"

Under Property Damage : "During the last 12 months did anyone deliberately damage or destroy any property belonging to you or anyone in your houshold, including a window or a fence?"

Put you down? Unwanted emails? Broken fences? Holy crap! Build more prisons!

Meanwhile here's the reported 2004 Statscan crime stats from the year Doris is still bleating about. Yup, going down since 1991. And if I may be so rude as to bring up something a bit more current, like for instance this year's : crime still going down. Deal with it, Doris.

.

Head of Statscan quits over census

Munir Sheikh, head of Statistics Canada today:

"I want to take this opportunity to comment on a technical statistical issue which has become the subject of media discussion. This relates to the question of whether a voluntary survey can become a substitute for a mandatory census.
It can not.
Under the circumstances, I have tendered my resignation to the Prime Minister."

Cue ShamWow Tony from last Friday :
StatsCan recommended move to voluntary census, Tony Clement says

“So I went to StatsCan. They’re the experts. I said to Stats Canada, ‘Give us some options. Is there a way that we can have a balance, get the data that everyone hankers for . .
"He said he asked whether the voluntary survey would produce “robust” data.
Stats Canada replied “in no uncertain terms, ‘Yes, it would give us the data that everybody hankers for.’ ”

Tony Clement is using the word "everybody" to mean the word "Steve" here. "Hankers" is a Canadian heavy metal band.

But Sheikh's resignation must have come as a big shock to Tony, given that he got around 10 supportive tweets from his 3500 followers about gutting the census (h/t Aaron Wherry) in this G&M interview yesterday.

In the same interview Tony said Sheikh would be making a statement today "to assure Canadians that Statscan is going to do its job".

And Mr. Sheikh did indeed come through for us today. Hats off to you, sir.

Reuters :

"Some Statistics Canada employees have complained to the media that the Conservatives have cut or curtailed several major surveys since the party took power in 2006 in an effort to reduce the amount of analysis the agency does."

... because pesky facts and science and analysis get in the way of the Cons making shit up.
.
Thursday update : Munir Sheikh's letter of resignation taken down from StatsCan website.
.

And in the news, crime is down again

From StatsCan today : The numbers, rates and severity of crimes reported to police dropped again last year, continuing a 10-year trend. StatsCan Tables here.

Aha! say the Harperclones, that's because people aren't reporting the crimes. Yeah. Sure.

The crime rate, a measure of the volume of crime reported to police, fell 3% in 2009 and was 17% lower than a decade ago.
The Crime Severity Index (CSI), a measure of the seriousness of police-reported crime, declined 4% in 2009 and stood 22% lower than in 1999.

Violent crimes, which range in seriousness from harassing phone calls to homicide, accounted for about 1 in 5 crimes in 2009. Police-reported violent crime in Canada is also declining, but to a lesser extent than overall crime.

Police identified about 165,000 youth aged 12 to 17 accused of a criminal offence in 2009. Both the number of crimes and the seriousness of crimes committed by youth have generally been declining since 2001, including a slight drop in 2009.

From Public Safety Minister Vic Toews website :

"Unfortunately, our safe streets and healthy communities are increasingly under threat of gun, gang and drug violence."

an exact quote lifted in its entirety from Harper's April 2006 Speech From the Throne

... and repeated yet again on the website of Con Ed Fast, Chair of the Justice Committee no less.

.

StatsCan better be careful ...

.