Theoria

Two items from the newspaper worth noting:

• “Black residents of Ontario are 10.1 times more likely to become involved in a police shooting than their white counterparts,” the study says. “The aboriginal police shooting rate… is 4.1 times greater than the white race.” (Toronto Star) The co-author of the report, Scot Wortley from the Center of Criminology at the University of Toronto, caused a sensation last year with his report entitled, “Racially Biased Policing: The Kingston Data Collection Project,” which found that blacks are three times more likely than whites to be pulled over by police in Kingston, Ontario (even when controlled for all other variables), however, Wortly noted in the report that he felt that cops in the study refrained from pulling over minorities during the period of the study. The latter report, commissioned – no doubt to prove their innocence! – the Kingston Police Services, can be found here.
• The National Council of Welfare released a report which found that “In prosperous Alberta, a single adult’s welfare cheque dipped to $5,050 last year from the present-day equivalent of $9,881 in 1986. The near 49 per cent drop, even after accounting for inflation, is among the biggest rollbacks in Canada.” (Toronto Star) In Canada, poverty lines are indexed to the size of city and size of family. In Edmonton and Calgary, the largest cities in Alberta, the poverty line – for a single person – is just over $18,000. (The line increases about $5,000 for every other person. Reported in 2001 dollars.) The Fraser Institute, the “think” tank behind the neo-liberalo-conservative revolution in Canada, of course, disagrees. At any rate, the original report can be found here.