Elect Bob Rae in Toronto Centre!

Monday morning went for a walk through Regent Park, the fifty year old public housing development. This on the Monday after four people were killed by gun violence, one of them an eleven year old boy caught in the middle of a gunfight at Jane and Sheppard. Michael Bryant says - once again - it's time for another government to get tough on guns and gun crime. Of course he's right, but my walk this morning brought home the second half of the mantra, "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime". Housing has become the great orphan of social and economic policy in Canada.

For me the hardest part about the Conrad Black trial has been explaining why it happened in Chicago and not in Toronto. Woody Guthrie famously wrote "some rob you with a six gun and some with a fountain pen". In the US at least it has to be said that prosecutors take white collar crime seriously. It is hard to reach the same conclusion here. Cases supposedly "under investigation" take forever, and nothing happens; when charges are laid the convictions are few and the sentences are light.