Brief thoughts on the problems of Drugs, Crime and Poverty in Canada

I give some thoughts on poverty, addictions and Criminal Justice in Canada right now. I would recommend that people listening also read my article on Hostile Public Spaces.

https://thecanadianconservative.substack.com/p/hostile-public-spaces

Transcript

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All right, and we are back Russell here with the Canadian conservative, the Canadian conservative.substack.com. And I didn't have an episode really kind of planned for today. I've been seeing a lot of stuff online from various news sources in Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, somewhat Saskatchewan. And it's a topic I've covered before, but I want to talk a little bit about the system of poverty in Canada and criminal justice and addictions. This is just me riffing. Today. I didn't really plan on doing an episode, but I have a little bit of time. I'm babysitting the dogs right now. So I thought I'll throw some thoughts to the microphone here. And hopefully some of this will make sense. British Columbia recently decriminalized small amounts of hardcore drugs that people can carry on them in an effort to destigmatize drug use. So my problem with that is that I don't think drug use has been stigmatized at all in the past even 10 years. But the problem continues to get worse the overdoses continue to occur, people are dying every single day on the streets. And we're concerned about stigmatizing. Again, I don't think there's anyone out there that stigmatizing this drug use I think most people on both sides of the political spectrum, we'll recognize that drug use comes from a variety of different factors, social, economic, personal, mental health, all sorts of different factors. Where our approaches differ, I find is that for the left, it seems to be we just need to legalize it, give them a safe supply, hit him with the Naloxone and then only show compassion, empathy, never judgment. But that approach isn't working. These accounts I've been following online. And I've posted a few things too, about the cultural decay in Saskatchewan as well. I recommend if people are interested, they can read my substack post called hostile public spaces, which discusses basically how anything outside of the home now has become a hostile area, from the mall to the park, to your local hospital. These areas have been overrun by gang members, drug addicts, ex cons. And for people that are in the middle class, we can avoid most of it because we can drive our cars so we don't have to take dangerous public transit. We can go to private parks have access to areas that we don't have to see the decay. But the same options are not available for people that are part of the lower class that really should be able to go out and still be able to enjoy being outdoors without being harassed or subjected to violence. Overall, I'm conservative, and I'm somewhat libertarian. But I'm definitely not a full scale libertarian. I don't purport to be one. The problem I have is well I am 100% okay with people, adults doing what adults want with their lives as long as they're not hurting other people. The problem is, is that with drug use, people do end up hurting other people. And I've seen it, I've been a victim of it. I won't go into the story. I've told it several times now. But downtown Saskatoon, some homeless guy came right into the restaurant, and threatened to kill me and my spouse. And the police didn't even respond. They were too busy, too busy. So it's not simply just a matter of just give them the free drugs, give them a safe supply, give them a free house so they can basically vegetate in there until they die and then put in the next poor sap. That's not going to work. It's not working shelters. There's plenty of shelters. But again, shelters generally are clean, you can't consume while you're in a shelter. So people don't go there. And the people that are on the streets generally are people that don't like to follow the rules of society anyways, in some aspects, they've opted out of the social contract, which is made it very interesting for the rest of us because we have a two tier policing system now. We have the people that have things to lose, they're policed accordingly. And we have the people with nothing to lose who are policed accordingly. If I was walking with an open bottle of liquor down the street, and an officer pass by, but I'm going Have you been in some form of trouble, and then I'm gonna have to go to court, I'm gonna have to fight it. You know, if I have a criminal record, and I report that to my employer, then maybe my employer decides that they want to, they don't want the risk of having me there. So I get fired from my job. So me getting arrested, that could be huge. For me, that can be extremely detrimental. Yet, I have seen cases where police have seen junkies shooting up and people that are actively on substances, you know, seizing up on the streets, and that and they just drive right on by. So there's a two tier policing system that's in play here. When there's gang members that are pimping out women and selling drugs, they have to go through all these processes to bust them, and they get away with it for so long. But they certainly have resources to put a cruiser there to monitor people speed. So I think there's a bit of a disconnect between styles of policing. That's one issue. The other issue is that we certainly don't have enough resources. But again, most of these people don't want to utilize the resources that are available. They don't. And so we've kind of given up I find the one person has been posting daily pictures from Edmonton and Calgary, people shooting up like, like pictures, people just shooting up right there in the street, homeless people everywhere in bus stations, on benches, on transit. And you go in the comments section on Twitter, and people are like, whoa, why are you taking that person's picture? No respect their privacy, really, that is your concern. That's a misplaced concern. It's ignoring the problem. And the problem is, too is we've is we've gotten so used to it, that the pictures and the videos and that don't even shock us anymore. Everyone just knows that that's just part and parcel of living in a modern urban center. And it's scary for the future. Because the goal with the green energy movement is to move people into more cities to make driving less accessible, to make people be stuffed on a metal tubes to go from point A to point B. And frankly, it's it's not going to work. I mean, I would hate to be stuck on a city bus these days. city buses are some of the most dangerous places you can be on. I mean, this goes back years ago when I was a teenager, and that's a long time ago now. But I remember there being fights on buses. And I've seen fights on the bus where people are fighting, and the bus driver just keeps on driving. They they frankly, they don't care. Because they realize calling the police or doing anything about it isn't going to change anything. So we've all become desensitized. And there you go, there's there's no stigma. I don't see any stigma. And since I'm just riffing this podcast, I don't really have a set structure for it. I'll move on to the next topic I wanted to discuss and that's this whole, like poverty, pimping industry that's going on, there is no incentive to have people do better in society. There is none. We have made an entire system that relies on people addicted to drugs, relies on criminals, and relies on people in poverty like conditions. In a first world country, there's no incentive to actually help people. And I understand some people don't want to be helped. And that's, and we need to find better solutions to deal with that than what we have now. Because what we have now isn't working. But there's no incentive to, for example, get people off of welfare. A client cured as a client lost. There's no metrics for success. It's just managing crisis after crisis. Part of this was of course, adopting a more community based mono model. Where as we closed a lot of the Mental Health asylums, and we moved it down to community caseworkers that manage people that are already struggling, and this model hasn't worked. And so now we have people that are mentally ill just wandering the streets, not taking their medication. They're not under any conditions. Because in Canada, you're allowed to be as crazy as you fucking want. Can't be forced to take medication. So you can just wander the streets schizophrenic, untreated, self soothing and self treating with illicit drugs. And you know who the biggest victims are, it's usually not the rich, it's not the judges, it's not police officers or anyone like that. It's usually other people that are low social economic status. But I have to ask myself, how many more deaths, how much more misery is going to be acceptable in society before we say, You know what this model isn't working, we need to come up with real solutions. There has to be a balance. There is no balance currently in our society. You know, the liberals went after Pierre pretty hard for making the videos that he did. And again, they went after him because he noticed the problem. And he documented that they don't want you to notice the problem. Unless you're just going to give compassion empathy. That's the only solution they seem to have. And I'm not purporting to have the solutions here. But we have to start thinking outside the box, we have to start developing legislation, and policymaking that reflects, actually solving these issues. There's no point in decriminalizing drugs, if you're not going to go hard at the drug dealers themselves. That's the whole point you decriminalize. So you can get these drug addicts into treatment. And then you go hard after the drug dealers. But that's not happening. We're not going after the drug dealers. And we decriminalize drugs. So we've given up essentially, we just don't care anymore. You know, we want to talk about discrimination. The left place talk about discrimination. This to me is discrimination. It's it's poverty pimping. And when I say poverty, pimping, how many middle class jobs rely on the suffering of others. I mean, think about a look at all these insights in Vancouver, in different areas. And all these nonprofits, and all these areas are, and all these organizations are supposed to be helping people get off of drugs, like methadone programs, which don't work. Suboxone programs, not a huge success rate, just get addicted to something else, rely on the state. And these people, they make good money, often subsidized by the government. And it helps them afford their nice home. It helps them put their kids through college, it helps them live a nice upper middle class lifestyle, while the people that are suffering continue to suffer. So it's a racket, it really is. There's no incentive to really help people. There's no metrics, no one gets in trouble if no one's actually helped. All right, there's no actual incentives to help people. Because at the end of the day, the paychecks gonna come in no matter what, and the more addicts there are, it means the more middle class subsidized businesses, and nonprofits, they can make from it. So at the end of the day, we have to do something this the system that we're using isn't working. I mean, if we solved a lot of the poverty, if we solved a lot of the hopelessness and nihilism that people are having this lack of meaning and purpose in their lives, then maybe we would see less people in the criminal justice system, but instead, you know, it's just this revolving door that never ends. Anyways, I'm just riffing on this one. So hopefully, you found some meaning out of it. Definitely just starting a conversation. We need to have a much bigger conversation, we need to have a real conversation. We're not just throwing petty crap at each other. All conservatives just want to do this, oh, liberals just want to do this, it start tackling these problems before something really, really bad happens. Because eventually what's going to happen is, in cases where the police aren't even going to respond anymore, to these violent acts like what happened to me in Saskatoon. Eventually, people are going to start taking justice in their own hands. They're gonna say, You know what the powers that be are, I follow the social contract, the powers that be are in upholding their end of the bargain. So I'm going to enforce the social contract, and then we'll end up with vigilantism. And then we'll have a whole new big problem on our hands. All right, that's it for me Russell, the Canadian conservative, you want to check out my work I suggest you check out the article I did on hostile public spaces. You can find that at the Canadian conservative.substack.com Till next time