Free at last: here's the text of that National Post column about murder rates in Edmonton. Rarely has something I've written inspired so much

EDMONTON - There is no question about it anymore: the City of Toronto has a problem with violence. And when Toronto has a problem, Canada has a problem. The whole country was shocked by the Boxing Day murder of Jane Creba, a 15-year-old who was checking out bargains on Yonge Street when she was caught in a gang firefight. The Prime Minister, whose political existence may never have been in greater jeopardy, was forced to spend the weekend on the telephone with Toronto's Mayor and Ontario's Premier. He seems to have made impromptu promises to overthrow major principles of criminal law, and amidst the panic no one seems to have entertained the possibility that someone else might be in office after the Jan. 23 election. But that's Toronto for you -- it turns instinctively for help to the Liberals even when the Liberals are arguably the authors of its troubles.

It's customary at the end of the year for cities to look back on their homicide counts as an index of peace and order, and nowhere is this being done more intensely than in Toronto. The city had 78 murders in 2005, a figure that has already been the subject of a gruesome online cyber-exhibit by the Toronto Star and the cause of a minor international scuffle about handgun smuggling between Canada and the U.S. In most other major Canadian centres, the dead are not stacked quite so high even when you adjust for population. There were just 16 murders amongst the half-million or so residents of the City of Vancouver, who have outsourced much of their criminal mayhem to the fringes of the Lower Mainland. Ottawa proper, with three-quarters of a million people, lost only 11 to violence.

But Toronto's 78 murders are not the most shocking Canadian crime statistic of the year, and the city cannot reasonably claim the title of Canada's murder capital. The icy, impassive City of Edmonton, which is a little more than one-quarter the size of Toronto, had 37 homicides in 2005. Calgary and Ottawa, each of which is more populous than Edmonton, reported only 34 murders between them. Even Winnipeg, a traditionally bloody municipality roughly Edmonton's size, did away with only 24 of its citizens. It would appear that according to the year-end murder counts, Edmonton's homicide rate exceeds Toronto's by about 75%.

The national press has not paid much heed to the fact that Edmonton is plagued with fatal violence worse than Toronto's. You won't see this Prime Minister shredding his agenda book to confront the problem. Our supposed ambassador to Ottawa, Anne McLellan, is too busy seeing National Rifle Association "operatives" around every corner to take public note of the numbers. Yet one must admit that neither Edmonton politicians nor provincial ones are ringing Martin's or McLellan's phones off the hook to whimper for help. Perhaps we are ashamed to call attention to the grim statistical truth.

Without doubt, most of us regard the anomalous violence as an unfortunate by-product of our oilpatch-driven prosperity. The sense I get -- living in one of the city's riskier neighbourhoods -- is that the inflated death toll isn't gang-driven; if anything, 2005 seemed like a quiet year for organized crime. The heavy lifting is being done by lunatics, party-crashing hooligans, booze-fuelled deadbeats and probably at least one serial killer of prostitutes. In the late '70s and early '80s, the time of Ralph Klein's still-remembered quip about "Eastern creeps and bums," prosperity brought drug traffic and rowdy transients to Edmonton. It's doing so again, and maybe we think it's inevitable. Maybe we even think it's an acceptable price.

But there are other social considerations here, too. As violent as Edmonton may be, it has not yet produced a Jane Creba. Gun deaths are bound to get more attention from a gun-obsessed government, and while 52 of Toronto's 78 murders were committed with firearms in 2005, only 13 of Edmonton's 37 were. And legitimately or not, we are helpless to resist making a distinction between the random slaughter of a teenaged girl browsing for shoes and the quiet disappearance of a teenaged street hooker peddling her wares. Few of us would like to say out loud that Jane Creba's life was worth more than, say, that of a drug addict who loses an argument in a crack den. We profess a belief in universal human dignity, and it's important that we do so. But the measures of the marketplace -- the column-inches in a newspaper, or the precious space in a politician's day-planner -- suggest unsettlingly that we are not all really created equal.

This piece attracted one intriguing letter to the Post denouncing my heartlessness. I won't reprint it here, but the upshot of the letter was that it was cruel--and somehow distinctively Western--to even consider comparing the lives and souls of the merely stabbed or beaten to those of the victims of gun crime.