Categories
Politics

Tax credits don’t help taxpayers

Must be a federal election. The Conservatives are promising tax credits again, and disguising them as tax cuts.

Categories
Politics

There’s no such thing as a useless university degree

A few weeks ago, someone posted the following on a local Facebook group.

Categories
Lethbridge Politics SCS

Is the Lethbridge SCS really straining police resources?

Last week, the Lethbridge Police Service released data for calls to service in Lethbridge. For some reason, they organized that data in reference to the Supervised Consumption Site,

Here are two images for reference.

Categories
Politics

Most popular social media posts from September

I decided to try a new feature here on my blog last month: my most popular social media posts. Well, here is the second installment:

Categories
Politics

Trudeau’s brownface doesn’t erase our own racism

I get that it’s problematic for Justin Trudeau to dress up in brownface, but it’s also problematic when we focus on it.

Categories
Politics

Rhetoric around Indigenous people hindering progress

During the Macleans/CityTV federal leadership debate, Andrew Scheer, was asked whether he would implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Canada if elected. While he did indicate in his response that he found UNDRIP to be an important provision with “many laudable goals”, he also said the following:

Categories
Politics

Portugal’s drug decriminalization doesn’t go far enough

I keep seeing people holding up Portugal as the preeminent example of how to respond to the drug crisis. In the last two decades, drug usage among youth has dropped, their STI rate has dropped, their drug-related death rate has dropped, and their treatment rate has gone up.

Those results are certainly better than Canada’s, so it makes sense that Canadians would want to mirror that.

Except, Portugal’s approach doesn’t go far enough.

Categories
Politics

Mexicans have a right to be in the United States

Does anyone else find it rich that Americans want to stop Mexicans from crossing their border?

Categories
Politics

5 ways to finally address drug crime

Drug crime is an issue in Lethbridge.

Dealers sell their drugs in the city. People steal from business, homes, and cars as a way to raise money to buy drugs.

But the only solution we’ve tried is enforcement. It’s not working.

It’s been nearly 50 years since Richard Nixon coined the phrase “war on drugs”. But this so-called war hasn’t really solved anything.

I mean, sure, our prisons are filled with people convicted of drug-related offences. But drug usage is still happening. Drug dealing is still happening. And property and violent crime related to the drug trade is still happening.

We need real solutions that address the underlying causes of drug crime: supply and poverty. Here are 5:

By decriminalizing all drugs and creating a pharmacare programme that would see distribution of those drugs through pharmacies at no cost to the consumer, we’d virtually eliminate drug dealers and improve the quality of the drugs (thereby reducing health risks for the users).

By redirecting enforcement funding (since drugs would no longer be illegal), we could improve prevention and treatment programmes to discourage addiction from even becoming an issue and properly addressing it when it does.

By implementing programmes that reduce or even eliminate poverty, people will no longer have an incentive to commit crime as a way to get money.

Unfortunately, most politicians don’t want to do this because it’s political suicide, and the general public opposes it because it sounds like money.

Categories
Politics

“New atheism” is bigotry, not enlightenment

Not too long ago, I went through a phase where I was watching YouTube videos of debates, interviews, and round tables of the new atheists. I was drawn to what seemed to be their rationality. This led me to the broader skeptic community on YouTube.