A few months ago, The Spectator magazine ran a cover story about the state of the modern United Kingdom titled “Welcome to Scuzz Nation.” The title pretty much gives away the story; the text just confirms it. “Scuzz Nation,” the author says, “looks very much like the country of a few years ago, only worse. It’s a place where decay happens faster than repair, where crime largely goes unpunished and where the social fabric has been slashed, graffitied and left by the side of the road.”
From my own observation of Scuzz Nation, local high street businesses have been replaced by vape shops, American fast food, illegal Deliveroo drivers on e-bikes, dodgy Turkish barbers, and, if you are lucky, a mini-version of a down-market grocery chain with a desultory security guard posted at the door, apparently to monitor shoplifters rather than deter them. The look—one-part cheap plastic late-capitalism and one-part chaotic multiculturalism—has been dubbed the “Yookay Aesthetic.”
Good imperial outpost that we are, Canada is developing our own version. A stroll from the Parliament Buildings down Rideau Street is like stepping through a dystopian looking glass. Passing under the Rideau Centre’s pedestrian walkway, you leave behind the gothic gables of East Block and the stolid Second Empire style of what we are no longer supposed to call the Langevin Building and enter a world of crude signage, shawarma shops, tattoo parlours, boarded-up windows, and vagrants.
As if determined to prove the Broken Windows theorists right again, the police have largely abandoned these streets to social as well as physical decay. The result is a cycle of degeneration and alienation: people avoid the area, crime gets worse, more people avoid it. Nor does the blight remain localised. In Calgary, you can follow a trail of petty crime each day from the Sheldon Chumir injection site next to Memorial Park—a gem of urban planning now off-limits to the law-abiding—to the drop-in centre and shelter by the river.
In Victoria, raiding parties emerge from the shanty-town on Pandora Street to smash storefronts and rob local business in the tourist core—the Government Street 7-Eleven was reportedly losing $2,000 a day to shoplifting before it closed—before retreating to tents that might as well be under police protection. In Toronto and Edmonton, crime follows the subway and bus routes; transit authorities count it a good day if no one is stabbed or assaulted (screamed threats and public indecency are too routine to be reported).
And yet, amid all this obvious disorder, there is apparently good news—at least if you listen to progressive politicians. If you follow crime stories on social media, as I do, sooner or later you will see an elected official, usually a Liberal or NDPer, popping up to insist that there is no cause for alarm. Haven’t you heard? Crime is down, they say. Things are looking up! They usually have statistics to back them up. They might, for example, point to the latest Statistics Canada report, which says the (police-reported) Crime Severity Index was down 4 percent from the year before.
Don’t believe them. What is happening in Canadian cities is no longer captured by crime statistics, not since our governments decriminalised (de jure or de facto) much antisocial activity, including open drug use, vandalism, and vagrancy. As for what remains illegal, people have learned not to bother reporting low-level crime to unresponsive police. This explains why non-violent crime reported to police has apparently decreased at the same time that shoplifting has increased. Normal people know it’s a waste of time to call the cops, but businesses have to report losses to claim insurance.
Even if actual (as opposed to police-reported) crime were decreasing from recent record highs, it wouldn’t necessarily be reason to celebrate. It would likely just show that people know to avoid the worst areas. This factor above all accounts for the disconnect between official statistics and how people experience the spread of criminality. That experience is not just about what is measurably illegal, but about how safe we feel in our towns and cities and whether the state of our streets indicate that the governments have lost control of them or, worse, become accomplices in decay.
If a city block or alley is full of tents, trash, and human waste, people learn to avoid it. If a park is littered with used pipes, needles, and glassy-eyed tweakers, families stop taking their children to play there. If public transit is filthy and dangerous, people stop taking it. The result on paper may be less crime, but the reality is more and more no-go zones and a palpable sense of social breakdown and official impotence or indifference. That, and not whatever sterile statistics a politician may cite, is what people are feeling in Canada’s own Scuzz Cities.
Howard Anglin is a doctoral student at Oxford University. He was previously Deputy Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Principal…
