The Vancouver Scrum

On the move!

Agh! You’re still here? My new site and weblog, ianking.ca is now up and running; new posts are building up over there, never to be mirrored here. Go! What are you waiting for? All the stuff worth keeping has been migrated over to the new server, and I don’t anticipate making any more posts here.

Bloggers and webmasters: Update your links! Simply replace vancouverscrum.blogspot.com with www.ianking.ca in your blogrolls or bookmarks to point to the new site. Old posts will remain on this server for as long as the people at Blogger/Google allow them to remain; unfortunately, I’m not going to bother to come up with any way of converting permalinks on this blog to their corresponding posts on the new site. Yes, I plead laziness. I also realize the irony of switching away from Blogger just it starts to add features that the demanding blog nerds insist upon.

Thanks for reading and linking, and see you over at ianking.ca!

—Ian King, December 13, 2004

Thursday, July 29, 2004

 

Canada's murder capital

Not gang-riddled Vancouver or the decadent metropolis of Toronto, but God-fearing Abbotsford. Yes, the buckle of British Columbia's bible belt, represented in Ottawa by a vulture who made his career out of others' sufferinganti-crime crusader Randy White, had the highest murder rate of any metropolitan area in Canada, tied with rough-ass Regina.

ADDENDUM, 12:10 AM: Abby mayor Mary Reeves is trying to downplay the news, as you'd expect. Her line: using metropolitan areas is misleading; the lower numbers in Vancouver include stereotypically sterile wealthy bedroom communities, while the stats for her burg include mainly the city of Abbotsford, with the surrounding area being about 25% of the Abbotsford metro area's population:
Reeves says if Abbotsford were examined on its own, and compared to larger neighbours such as Surrey, it would be seen in a more favourable light. "But you see Surrey is included in the Greater Vancouver area which also includes many areas like White Rock and West Van that would have a much lower crime rate,"
Okay, uh, yeah. The Vancouver census metropolitan area had a 2001 population of 1.987-million; West Van (41,421) and White Rock (18,250) together have less than 60,000 people, or 3% of greater Vancouver's population. Factor them out if you please, and watch the greater Vancouver murder rate climb from 2.1/100,000 to 2.2, compared to 5.1 in Abby, as reported in StatsCan's Daily.
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