Canada And Crime

Eli Lehrer talks about an NDP plan to reduce gun ownership in the US. In the article he puts to sleep the myth of the peace-loving Canadian vs the gun-crazed American:

It's an easy bone for Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin to throw to his coalition partners, but it's a bad idea. While Canada has banned most handgun ownership since 1977, Canadians remain even more likely to hunt and shoot than their American counterparts. The NDP wants none of this: It proposes taking away vaguely defined "assault weapons" (this likely refers to hunting weapons, since private ownership of machine guns is already illegal in Canada) and lobbying U.S. state and federal governments to take away their own citizens' guns.

In addition to being awfully arrogant, this plan is ironic, since more crime probably flows from Canada to the U.S. than vice versa: The nation has an overall crime rate half again higher than the United States'. Toronto, once the safest large city in North America, now has more muggings, car thefts, and violent assaults per capita than New York City. All of Canada's major provinces would rank among the 20 most dangerous American states. Since American crime rates peaked in the early 1990s, crime has fallen in 48 American states and over 80 percent of America's major cities. Meanwhile, it has risen in six of Canada's ten major providences and seven of its ten largest cities. The reasons for this divide are complex, but it's notable that the United States imprisons wrongdoers at about five times Canada's rate and has about a quarter more police on a per-capita basis. Canada, meanwhile, can boast only of a national gun-registration database that cost 1,000 times more than originally projected.

This is all ironic given the campaign during the election. The Liberal and NDP campaigns spent a lot of effort in pushing the idea that the Conservatives would implement American style gun control (or lack thereof) and crime prevention methods. Scary! Fear!

Why did the media never question the Liberal and NDP candidates on these claims? And if the media is so concerned about getting to the truth why would they not allow an honest debate on the level of crime in our cities?