Re: MPs, MLAs must end crime, Advocate, Feb. 5, 2015.
This letter is disturbing because when the author links crime to the problems of the current economic downturn, he incorrectly points to immigration as the root cause.
Dennis Combs starts by giving us a figure of 105,000 people entering the province in the last year. He compares this number to the size of a small city, the infrastructure of which he assumes will have to be provided at the expense of the existing inhabitants of the province.
Most immigrants move from one province to another or from one country to another because there is a shortage of labour. Companies regularly advertise for immigrants, most of whom are well educated and trained. Arriving immigrants join the existing workforce in the production of wealth and the output of this workforce depends on the amount of investment in machinery, which vastly increases its productivity.
This is the manner in which Canada was constructed. We are a nation composed mainly of immigrants or their descendents and without whom there would be no Canada, as we know it.
Combs throws the kitchen sink at immigrants, linking them with drive-by shootings, home invasions, drug dealers, car thieves, welfare recipients and aids. The only surprise was that he did not include the threat of the Ebola virus. He probably expects us to take seriously his assertion that we have magistrates and judges who keep turning violent criminals loose to prey on us and on our children.
To Combs, it seems that Albertans sit around worrying about living in a ‘colony’ of Ontario and Quebec while not spending enough time and thugery knocking crime out of our children. We should, it seems, also emulate China, producing wealth with the labour of those convicted of crime. The problem is that Chinese hellhole prisons do not rehabilitate people or create wealth; the immense growth in China was from massive investment in the means of production.
The economic downturn and the plunge in the price of oil are caused by falling incomes and the lack of demand in the marketplace. Unfortunately, there are those who, when failing to understand the reasons for present economic situation, look instead for scapegoats.
If we examine the economic situation in Europe we observe a decline in the support for traditional political parties, an increase in the support of ordinary people for new parties and also, worryingly, increased support for extreme racist, anti-immigration, nationalist parties.
Political parties that represent ordinary working people, including immigrants, have a responsibility to give answers and economic alternatives.
As history clearly demonstrates, intolerance is a slippery slope.
Keith Norman Wyatt
Innisfail