Calgary Herald Column: In Defence of Wal-Mart

This week's Herald column from yours truly argues that Wal-Mart has every right to shut down a store, and that suggestions to the contrary are part of a broader - unjustified - anti-Wal-Mart campaign:

 

...The right to close your business ought to be pretty close to absolute. If the business is losing money, then shutting it down makes sense. Conversely, if the business is profitable and closes anyway, then that profit is there to be had by someone else.

 

(...)

 

How ironic that in a country that has seen so many attempts to block Wal-Mart, the closure of one would become a crisis.

 

For all the dire predictions that accompany the arrival of Wal-Mart, you'd think the residents of Jonquiere would have cause to celebrate.

 

Not to mention the UFCW and its allied forces, who missed what was surely a glorious opportunity. Assuming for that moment Wal-Mart got the union heebie-jeebies and fled town--why not open a unionized store in its place?

 

These employees would have kept their jobs, no doubt with much higher wages and benefits, and the world would marvel at the vast emptiness of Wal-Mart's anti-union arguments.

 

Or, maybe it's not all that simple.

 

It is Wal-Mart that is providing tens of thousands of jobs across this country. It is Wal-Mart that is giving Canadian families the opportunity to increase their purchasing power.

 

It is a real world win-win, and the anti-Wal-Mart forces are only hurting those whom they claim to be helping.

 

Yet, despite the hue and cry in Jonquiere, there remain communities in this country that have resisted Wal-Mart. The company is just this month opening its very first store in Vancouver.

 

There remains a belief that regardless of the union status of its employees, the arrival of a Wal-Mart means the end for "Mom& Pop" small businesses. However, the evidence shows no net negative effect on small business, and in some cases the effect can be positive.

 

University of West Virginia economists Russell Sobel and Andrea Dean set out to measure (PDF) the impact of big box stores on small businesses in the U. S., and found what they termed a trend of "creative destruction."

 

What that means is that although Mom&Pop hardware or grocery might go under, other types of small businesses rise in their place, fuelled in part by the money now being saved via cheaper goods.

 

When the researchers compared the five states with the highest rate of Wal-Marts per capita and the five with the lowest, what they found was that, on average, the former had more small businesses per capita and higher rates of self-employment.

 

Throwing up roadblocks and filing lawsuits against a corporate giant like Wal-Mart might seem like a noble means of sticking it to the proverbial man, but the facts tell a different story.

 

In other words, the Wal-Mart bashers should be careful what they wish for.

Calgary Herald Column: Drinking is Not a Crime

This week's Herald column from yours truly looks at the trend of attacking the consumption of alcohol as a means to attack alcohol-related crime:

 

...As we amass a long list of "problems,"we need to be careful about which warrant government intervention and which are none of our damn business.

 

If someone chooses to get drunk in his own home, its none of our business. Even if that someone gets drunk at a pub, it's not necessarily our business. Granted, a precondition for drunk driving is the impairment itself, but the crime is in the act, not the precondition.

 

Which brings us to a controversial case in Ontario's cottage country. Sixteen people have been charged in connection with a fatal crash last summer.

 

The three young victims had all been drinking at a posh golf club. Of the sixteen accused, three were working in the club at the time, while the other 13 belong to the board of directors of the firm that owns the club.

 

All are charged with permitting drunkenness and supplying alcohol to intoxicated individuals--charges which seem open to interpretation, to say the least.

 

I would venture that if these young men had simply hopped in a cab, nobody would be facing any charges at all. Drunkenness contributed to the tragedy, but drunkenness did not make it unavoidable.

 

But what is "drunkenness"? Strictly applied, most bars and lounges would be guilty of these offences. Is it now a crime to be drunk at a bar? Drink, but don't get drunk?

 

There is a major distinction to be made between the louse who stumbles home, and the louse who gets behind the wheel.

 

We should be and remain vigilant about drunk drivers, but has our vigilance brought us to the point of targeting those who are perhaps not a threat?

 

A constitutional challenge of the government's elimination of the so-called "two-beer defence" might help answer that question.

 

Breathalyzers are not infallible, and eliminating the "two-beer defence" may have taken away the opportunity for someone who was legitimately below the legal limit to present evidence to that end.

 

The groups that cheered the elimination of the "two-beer defence" are the same groups pushing for a lowering of the blood alcohol limit to .05. We may well find ourselves regularly punishing those who really did have just a couple of glasses of wine over dinner.

 

Just don't drink, they'll say. Alcohol too expensive? Just don't drink. Liquor store too far? Just don't drink. Should you ignore this unsolicited advice, they'll still be telling the bar how much to serve you and when to send you home.

 

Promoting responsible drinking is one thing, but mandating it is something else entirely. Under the guise of fighting crime, we're allowing a modern day manifestation of the temperance movement--a movement not exactly famous for vanquishing crime.

 

The neo-prohibitionists may conflate drinkers and criminals, but clearly we can separate the two and focus on the latter. 

Calgary Herald Column: Bad Men, Bad Law

This week's Herald column from yours truly looks at the conundrum we face in using a bad law (Section 293 of the Criminal Code) to prosecute two bad men (the two leaders of Bountiful, B.C.):

 

...Not only does the law have roots in a late-19th century effort to exclude Mormon immigrants, the actual wording of the law discredits it regardless of when it was written.

 

The law criminalized not just polygamy as we know it, but also "any kind of conjugal union with more than one person at the same time."

 

Also, there is no need to prove "the method by which the alleged relationship was entered into,"whether there was consent, or whether "the persons who are alleged to have entered into the relationship had or intended to have sexual intercourse."

 

If anyone is looking to give this law a colourful nickname, may I suggest the "Mr. Roper Law"--a reference to the nosy landlord in the '70s television sitcom Three's Company.

 

Under this law, one could build a solid polygamy case against the platonic roommate trio of Jack, Janet and Chrissy.

 

One element of the sitcom premise was that the roommates had to convince Mr. Roper that Jack was in fact gay --otherwise, Mr. Roper would have presumed a conjugal relationship and evicted the three.

 

The law itself seems rather like a stodgy old landlord preoccupied with the private affairs of others: why should the state care if three people --be it two women and a man, two men and a women, or even three people of the same gender live and sleep together?

 

It may seem kinky and weird, but if all are consenting adults, where's the harm? Better yet, where's the victim?

 

Winston Blackmore may have inadvertently spoken to more truth than he realized during his defiant post-arrest news conference.

 

Blackmore declared that "tens of thousands" of polygamists are "hiding in plain sight all across Canada."

 

Queen's University law Prof. Beverly Baines studied the question of Section 293 for the federal government, and concluded the law would not stand up in court. She pointed out to me last week that one of the fatal flaws of the law is the wide net cast by its very ambiguity.

 

Take, for example, anyone who is finalizing a divorce and romantically involved with someone new. That is probably thousands of Canadians, and as Baines sees it, each and every one is technically guilty of polygamy.

 

It's obviously too late to draft a new law, so this crucial case rests on a poorly written law with dubious origins.

 

If we now have our bad law, can we cast our positive outcome?

 

While Section 293 does not identify a victim, there are indeed victims here: children.

 

Former sect member Debbie Palmer has spoken at great length about her horror at being married off at age 15 to a man 40 years her senior. In a tragic irony, that marriage made her Winston Blackmore's step-grandmother.

 

She is far from alone-- Blackmore himself has admitted to taking on wives as young as 15 and 16.

 

Vancouver Sun reporter Daphne Bramham's fascinating, chilling and crucial book, The Secret Lives of Saints relays these and many more tragic tales.

 

She also focuses on another group of victims: young boys. In any society, the natural gender balance cannot facilitate multiple wives for every male. However, fundamentalist Mormons are told that polygamy is an obligation. Ergo, the "lost boys"--young men banished from their families and their community so as to maintain a gender balance suitable to the aims of the sect.

 

I would like to think or hope that other legal means exist to address the crimes that have taken place in Bountiful.

 

These two men ought to be held to account, but that cannot justify Section 293. There is no positive outcome here

Calgary Herald Column - Time to Blink on Surveillance

This week's Herald column from yours truly offers a critical look at the city of Calgary's plans to install 22 surveillance cameras downtown:

 

A revealing parallel now exists between Calgary's fixation on surveillance cameras and Toronto's fixation on gun control.

In both instances, we have politicians and bureaucrats overreacting to and capitalizing on public fears over crime by offering useless and intrusive policies that have little or no effect on crime and needlessly ensnare law-abiding citizens.

 

Both allow politicians to claim they are "doing something about crime"when they are doing nothing of the sort.

 

At least in the case of Toronto, Mayor David Miller and his allies are more or less powerless to implement any sort of gun ban. Unfortunately, the City of Calgary seems unencumbered in its zeal to unleash the watchful eye of Big Brother.

 

(...)

 

The most obvious case study has been the U. K., which has more surveillance cameras than any other country in Europe --more than 10,000 in London alone. The mounting evidence suggests that the British embrace of surveillance cameras has been a costly failure.

 

The head of images and identification at New Scotland Yard has described the surveillance camera experiment as an "utter fiasco".

 

Only three per cent of London street robberies have been solved with the help of cameras, and four of the five London boroughs have a below-average record of solving crimes.

 

(...)

 

The list goes on and on: last week, it was reported that after several months of cameras in Durham, N.C., not a single arrest had resulted. The Mary-land State Attorney's office says Baltimore's cameras are "not a useful tool to prosecutors." Tampa, Fla., brought in facial recognition technology in 2001, but dropped it two years later after zero arrests. The police chief in Oakland rejected cameras after concluding they would do nothing to prevent or reduce crime.

 

Here's the rub: not only are Calgary officials considering the wrong solution, it's unclear that there's a problem to solve in the first place.

 

That's not to say there's not crime in this city, but where's the evidence it's getting worse?

 

The most recent data available from Statistics Canada shows an 8.4 per cent drop in the overall crime rate from 2006 to 2007, and that includes a reduction in violent crime.

 

(UPDATE: Links added)

So Many Nanny-Statists to Thank...

A very respectable 18th place finish for yours truly in the Western Standard's "Liberty 100" - 100 Canadians who "distinguished themselves in 2008, or over a lifetime, in the defence of liberty."

 

The top ten:

 

1. Ezra Levant www.ezralevant.com  

 

2. Michael Walker Fraser Institute www.fraserinstitute.org  

 

3. Marc Emery Cannabis Culture magazine www.cannabisculture.com  

 

4. Mark Mullins Fraser Institute www.fraserinstitute.org

 

5. Peter Jaworski Institute for Liberal Studies www.liberalstudies.ca

 

6. John Williamson Manning Centre for Building Democracy www.manningcentre.ca

 

7. Peter Holle Frontier Centre for Public Policy www.fcpp.org

 

8. Dennis Young Libertarian Party www.libertarian.ca

 

9. Mark Steyn Maclean's magazine www.steynonline.com

 

10. Jean-Serge Brisson Ontario Libertarian Party www.libertarian.on.ca

 

More here. Hard to argue with this, however.