At first, it seems almost incomprehensible what is going on, and then little pieces start to emerge - whether it be so-called "street gangs", or someone's sense of honor being impugned by being tossed out of a private party. Adding to the picture is a recent incident in Calgary where a 14 year old girl saved her own life by unloading the pistols her father kept around the house.
While our politicians voice their outrage, we get commentaries like Ted Byfield's on the subject tinged with all kinds of religious overtones.
The flaws in applying one's own religious morality/ethics to these situations are fairly obvious - starting with the painfully clear fact that Canada is no longer even vaguely homogenous in terms of its faith community. We have sizable communities from a huge range of traditions today, and it is unlikely that they agree on much other than to disagree with each other.
No, the problems need to be examined much more dispassionately, and in a reasoned manner.
It has been observed that the kids who are getting into these situations have "no fear or respect for authority". That may well be true. I know far too many cases where teens these days are sheltered from the consequences of their actions by their parents. If they break something, mom and dad pay the damages - and at most the child seems to wind up with a tongue lashing. Our society has been built around the notion of consequences for your actions. Whether the consequences were delivered by your parents or by others (teachers, school principals, the police, whatever), you bore them yourself.
Today, for whatever reason, parents seem a lot more willing to 'turn a blind eye', or worse, actually protect their children from the consequences of their actions on the notion that it's "just a phase", or "they'll grow out of it".
However, I'm not about to take such a simplistic view - it seems unreasonable to me to lay the blame at the feet of parents exclusively, or in the abstract notion of 'the poverty cycle'. The situation that happened on New Year's Eve in Calgary was clearly not one borne out of poverty, yet it bears a certain similarity to the horrors that have afflicted Toronto this past year.
There are more subtle factors at play here. It seems that the most highly publicized cases wind up involving ethnic communities - often the second generation descendents of immigrants who moved to Canada looking for a new life. (Again - I must caution the reader that although I am talking about these groups, I am not prepared to lay the blame at their feet exclusively either, this is an examination of some of issues that may well feed the overall problem)
Consider a couple that moves to Canada seeking a more prosperous life. To be sure, in many cases they find it, or possibly even the relative life of the working poor in Canada is simply that much better than they experienced in their homeland - who knows. Assuming they achieve a reasonable degree of economic success, it seems to me quite reasonable that they may well fall into the 'covering their children's errors' trap quite easily. Often, they may come from countries where their currency in society is defined by their family honor. A few dollars handed to the local judge/constabulary would conveniently cause a 'dishonorable' action to quietly disappear in their home country - so paying their child's fine for vandalism may seem to them a way of preserving their social status.
Of course, this is a gross distortion of Canada's culture as experienced by these people. It is distorted by the lens of their cultural assumptions, and the mismatch with Canada's cultural assumptions - in particular the reflection of some of those assumptions in law.
The next factor that I see bubbling into the picture is the change that any immigrant experiences moving to a new country. Canadian law differs considerably in its foundations from that of a lot of other countries in the world. Consequently, an immigrant parent may well feel that the "disclipinary tools" that they had before have been stripped away from them, and not replaced with anything. Our laws tend to proscribe, for example, corporal punishment. Similarly, many religious sanctions simply don't have the "sticking power" in a multicultural society where the different traditions may not even recognize the sanction as being a 'sanction'. This leaves the parents in a truly awkward space when it comes to disclipline of their children (To some lesser degree, this same problem afflicts "strict" Christian sects as well who may believe in corporal punishments such as "strapping".)
Then, one adds to the whole mess of cultural tools such as "honor killings" (which we nearly had one of in Calgary in November - were it not for a young lady's foresight in unloading her father's pistols). To someone of Western European descent, the whole notion of "honor killings" has become alien. We simply have no moral equivalent to understand the perspective from which such an action would arise. (Nor would I argue that we should) Again, the proscriptions in our laws against such things are not always fully understood by people steeped in other cultural traditions. This potentially means that they are working with a very inappropriate understanding of the social "currency" of family honor and how it plays in today's Canada compared to their own traditions.
When you blend all of these factors into a space where new immigrant families may well have to work two and three jobs just to pay the rent, or if they achieve economic success may not have the "social tools" themselves to cope with it - leaving them wealthy, but somewhat isolated from society by limitations of language and other challenges. Meanwhile, their children are much more able to adapt to the society around them, and may well be able to play their parents off against "external authority" figures such as the police in that cynical way that teenagers often attempt as they start to assert themselves as independant adults.
While zero-tolerance sanctions around guns and gang activity will certainly deal with the immediate crisis (superficially), I'm not so sure that those kind of actions even begin to address the underlying problems of adaptation that I am postulating as significant factors in the picture. (I freely admit that I have no statistical evidence to back up some of the points I am suggesting are issues here - they derive from a series of conversations in the last few days, and my own inferences based on what is in the news)
I think it is a gross mistake to try and "homogenize" our culture - but we do need to examine ways to build "bridges" into the various sub-groups of our society that are running in relative isolation to each other. Bridges that help the sub-groups integrate effectively with the mainstream of Canadian society without necessarily giving up the positive aspects of their own traditions.
[Update]: On CBC's Letter's page we find this letter (reproduced in full because I don't expect it to remain on CBC's website for long):
I now live in Holland but used to live in Toronto and am here for the Christmas and New Years holidays. It saddens me to see Canada's largest city slide towards what is considered average for most US cities.
The causes are the same: poverty and lack of perspective. Most of the perpetrators are young men on the periphery of mainstream society whose future is marred by the lack of their own work ethic combined with no real chance of entering the job market. Include a ready access to guns and you have instant headlines.
If Toronto really intends to change this, it must adopt a multi pronged strategy of sticks and carrots. The carrots should include real jobs and effective societal bonds. The sticks should include stricter gun law enforcement and more responsible parenting.
—Steve Belgraver | The Netherlands
The author is going more after concrete solutions than I am, but underlying his analysis are some similar points to what I have raised.
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