Don’t make uninformed decisions based on fear

Now what? It’s darkest before the dawn, to be sure, but what does Toronto look like once the dust settles after the Danforth shooting?

The mayor of Toronto’s words to date have been restrained, reasonable and grief-stricken. Yet the decisions Toronto city council is making are fearful — as in full of fear. The public outcry in Toronto these days about gun crime is untethered from reality and torqued by fear, from which bad decisions get made.

Meanwhile, amid the palpable public anguish, Toronto remains a safe city, particularly compared to the rest of the world, even the rest of the continent. Nights like that of the Danforth shooting occur every week in Rio or Johannesburg. Unless you’ve lived in South Africa, Jamaica, Central America or Chicago, you’re like me: You have no idea what it’s like to live in a place with a high firearm death rate.

Even within Canada, homicides are simply not a leading cause of death — about 25th on a Stats Canada list headed by cancer. Gun homicides are nowhere near as prevalent as suicides or accidents, let alone the so-called natural causes of death, from cancer or heart disease. Every year in Canada there are around 12,000 accidental deaths, 4,000 suicides, and 400 homicides. Of that number, Toronto has between 50-plus to 20-plus gun homicides a year. Chicago gun fatalities? About tenfold that number.

Now, please do not misunderstand me: Guns are deadly. But they’re at their deadliest in the hands of someone with suicidal ideation. Remember, among all Canadian gun deaths, about 80 per cent are suicides. If we have a gun fatality issue in Canada, it’s far more about suicides than homicides, as tough as that may be to accept this week.

So please, yes, take away the guns used in suicides and homicides, and lives will be saved. The only way to do that is to reduce the supply of guns overall in Canada, but that’s impossible now because there is no way to track firearms in Canada since the Harper government scrapped the gun registry and destroyed all the data, and then Justin Trudeau maligned the registry and promised it would never return, under his leadership. Nevertheless, there is technology and capacity to track both firearms and ammunition. Back when Canada used to do the former, gun deaths declined significantly.

The truth is that we do not know exactly why gun homicides fluctuate over time — from 53 in 2005 to less than half that in 2013, then over double that 2013 number in 2018 — to date (Toronto Police Service publishes this data on its website).

I’ve heard no comprehensive or convincing explanation as to exactly why it dropped by so much and then went back up to 2005 levels. Demographics doesn’t explain it, since we grow year over year but gun crime goes up and down. We just don’t know. So it’s unnecessary and misguided to submerge our city in video and audio technology, such that we’re constantly under police surveillance, contrary to our constitutional rights to privacy and liberty.

And it is wrong to make neighbourhoods feel under siege by disproportionate police presence and surveillance installations, simply because they’re populated by ethnic minorities. Note that I said “feel,” because no matter how you spin it, dumping a truckload of law enforcement into a multi-racial neighbourhood betrays our city’s aspirations, unless you’re doing the exact same thing to Forest Hill, Rosedale or the like.

The better view is to put sunset clauses on any massive changes such as new video and audio surveillance, because we know that decisions made today may look misinformed once the panic dies down.

When this too has passed, what will our city look like and feel like? I do not believe that many even know that their city is about to change. Will we regret installing technology onto streets that will not be easily removed? The answer depends on how elected leaders make decisions. If the decision-making is uninformed and fearful, then we will all be the worse for wear.