You’ve got to be kidding! You’re not serious, right? It’s obvious you’ve never been to Toronto.

Toronto’s got a sizable black population, mostly from Jamaica, and a serious black ghetto (try the Jane and Finch area), drug gang problem. Most of our frequent shootings on Toronto streets, often finding dead bodies in cars, are related to the Jamaican drug gangs, which the Toronto police seem to be having difficulty controlling.

Sentences tend to be very lenient, a la the philosophy that “he’s depraved on accounta he’s deprived.” After an innocent 15-year-old girl was gunned down a few years ago at a busy Toronto intersection the day after Christmas, simply by being in the wrong place, Christmas shopping, at the wrong time — sorry, honey — Toronto’s mayor, David Miller, proposed the construction of more basketball courts and the development of employment programs to keep these poor, deprived, boys off the streets.

Like, what employment program or basketball court is going to convince a guy in a drug gang, who’s making $30,000 a deal, to clean up his act?

Employment programs. Basketball courts. LOL!!!

Not once was there a call for stiffer sentences for these criminals, and this is one reason why Toronto is such a mess.

I’m a Torontonian, living in the downtown core, and it’s not the multicultural Kumbaya Utopia you’ve described. I’m also not sure what “Anglo-Protestant heritage as strong as any” you’re talking about. This heritage is just about kaput, largely because in our multicultural stew here in Hogtown pretty much any culture OTHER than the Anglo-Protestant culture is protected by our Human Rights (sic) Commissions and other so-called “rights” legislation.

The goose that lays the golden egg is being slowly eviscerated and we’re approaching a time when the goose will be no more, so guess what happens to the golden egg?

But aren’t the lessons from Canadian cities like Toronto that (1) a perpetual “underclass” has a destabilizing effect on society (i.e. it’s bad for everyone, not just the underclass), and (2) that there’s more to immigration than the raw total — that the details of immigration policy greatly influence how effective and sustainable it is?

I’m also skeptical about how easy it will be for the US to learn from these lessons. But along with those innate biases, there are also people who rationally argue that a city like Toronto couldn’t possibly exist. Isn’t pointing out how they’re wrong a good first step in helping to break down those biases?

Exactly what I was getting at. Canada doesn’t have the underclass that America has, historically discriminated against and brought to this country in chains. Without that underclass, Toronto is simply too different from any American city to make any comparisons. There’s nothing to learn there (just like there’s nothing to learn from Portland).

I would specualte that Toronto has something similar going on with immigration. The type of immigration that Toronto has seen, where the immigrants are coming from, is comletely different than the US. If your immigrants are Asian, particularly Chinese and Indian, that’s a lot different than immigration from Mexico.

Canada’s immigration policy, which is skewed towards keeping out low skilled immigrants, makes Toronto a lot different than, say, LA or San Diego. What exactly can we learn from such a different city?