Optimists point out that our urban problems are still minor in comparison to the decay of American cities in the 1970s, when gas shortages and double-digit inflation crippled the economy, garbage piled up in the streets, left-wing radicals sparked a wave of bombings, and crime was so bad that entire sections of major cities became no-go areas for residents at night. By the 1980s, water pollution, smog, and abandoned buildings had given urban landscapes a dystopian comic-book aspect, and it was widely acknowledged that certain major cities were simply unmanageable. They reason that if American cities can recover from it, so can we.The optimists were correct in the past: things improved, primarily as a result of economic expansion and a concentration on data-driven police operations. However, being correct about the past is not a particularly tough trick, and it does not mean we should believe the optimists about the future. I have yet to hear a credible explanation as to where the urge for social regeneration will come from this time, whether in Canada or America. It is also probable that a body politic damaged by the last illness is more prone to succumb to the next. If there are societal antibodies to chaos, we don't appear to have formed any. Instead, the moral resolve of our ruling class has deteriorated to the point where it is unclear whether they believe our civilization deserves to continue.Volunteer Chaz Smith, right, provides relief to a homeless man in Calgary, Alberta, on Wednesday, May 20, 2020. Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press.
One thing is certain: if we desire renewal economic
aesthetic, intellectual, or moral—the people who produced the problem cannot be trusted to provide the remedy. There is no chance for urban regeneration as long as our leaders continue to listen to the same activists and academics whose advice has destroyed our society's moral and legal foundations, setting us on the way to, if not collapse, universal despondency. Most experts are only wrong in theory, with their ideas confined to specialist journals where they can be safely ignored; however, when these experts were given the opportunity to experiment on real communities and real lives, they demonstrated conclusively how disastrous their ideas can be in practice.The state of our city streets after a generation of policymaking by today's experts should be a national embarrassment. Instead of expressing indignation and taking action, our ruling class has doubled down on their failures, saying that every Canadian's right to squat semi-comatose in filth is so fundamental to human dignity that we cannot question, let alone intervene. Human rights, they argue, oblige us to provide medications to the seriously mentally sick and addicted in order to fry their brains before abandoning them to collapse in alleys. Residents' reasonable desire to feel comfortable in their local streets and parks is treated with impatience, as if the worries of the law-abiding irritate the lawless, rather than the other way around. All of this, we are informed, is a humanitarian policy choice.
They are delusional and clearly wrong
A policy that perpetuates the misery of people who, as these same activists and academics like to point out, are incapable of making better choices for themselves is deeply immoral. This incapacity, remember, is the argument for considering homelessness and addiction as health-care policy issues rather than criminal enforcement, which is OK as long as the persons suffering from those issues receive the necessary health care. Instead, rejecting law enforcement as a solution has become an excuse for doing the very least to keep them alive, and much less to better the communities surrounding well-funded drug sites and NGO offices.It is time to accept the fact, which is now clear, that far too many people should not be on our downtown streets. It is not sympathetic nor thoughtful of the severely mentally ill and drug addicts to continue with the existing policy of careless indulgence. Some should be imprisoned for serious crimes; others (the majority) should be treated for their conditions for as long as necessary, and then released into society when they no longer constitute a threat to themselves or others. Some people may be able to participate in community-based recovery programs when they are ready, but many others should be cared for outside the community in a humane and permanent setting.
Providing high-quality recovery programs and institutional
care would be costly, but I believe downtown residents and businesses would be prepared to pay practically anything to restore their neighborhoods. The police, freed from responding to multiple daily calls caused by the same few repeat offenders, would have more time to enforce other laws that would improve the quality of life in our cities, such as stopping violent crime and low-level anti-social behavior and clearing the clouds of marijuana smoke in public parks. Contrary to what our experts tell us, restoring public order is not difficult; governments have the legal instruments to overcome activist opposition to restoring order on our streets. All t would take is the one thing our ruling class lacks: the desire to act.Earlier this year, Howard Anglin wrote an article for The Hub warning against the conceit of contrarianism. His primary argument was that, while the contrarian tendency might be valuable in the sphere of politics and public affairs, it must be used with caution. Excessive contrarianism, or contrarianism as the default setting, tends to lead to undesirable outcomes. Sometimes—in fact, most of the time—the consensus is likely correct. True contrarianism requires discernment to distinguish between what is and is not true.Cynicism is an intellectual cousin to contrarianism. Political criticism is characterized by a cynical outlook—perhaps more so than contrarianism. Many of today's thought leaders, commentators, and pundits operate this way. Twitter is their chosen platform for caustic commentary and where they provide their finest (or worst) performances.
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