Tuesday, February 11. 2020

Today's schedule is CDAB

C Block Criminology - Today we start with our first quiz in the course (on the history of criminology and crime statistics/trends). Your first order of business is to relax...you may use your note sheet and I'm certain you'll do fine. After I'll give you time to work on your three questions about crime trends:

1. Using pages 37 to 46 in the CRIM textbook outline and explain the crime patterns in relation to ecology, firearms, social class, age, gender and race.
2. What is a chronic offender and what is the significance of Marvin Wolfgang's discovery (why is identifying the chronic offender important)?
3. How would you explain the gender differences in the crime rate (why do you think males are more violent than females)? 

After a bit, if there's time, we'll talk about victims of crime. Every day we have specific routines we engage in. Many of these routines are tailored to preventing us from becoming victims of crime. We do things like lock our doors, watch where we walk at night, or avoid walking alone. We take these actions because at some level we are afraid of the possibility of being a victim of crime. Despite taking these actions people often fall prey to crime in Canada. So what do we know about victimization?

D & A Blocks Legal Studies - Today we'll finish sections 7 - 14 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (legal rights section). After, we'll talk about equality and look at section 15 of the Charter. We'll look at the difference between prejudice and discrimination. Equality is understood to
have four meanings:

1. Equal before the law
2. Equal under the law
3. Equal benefit
4. Equal protection

It may be surprising to note that this clause was one of the more controversial issues of the constitutional debate. Some provinces did not see the need for equality rights to be written into the Charter since provincially human rights codes were seen as protection enough.

The phrase "before and under the law" is significant because it means that not only do people have equal access to the courts and to equal administration of justice (the "before" part) but that the laws that are discriminatory will be struck down by the courts (the "under" part). So in Andrews v. Law Society of British Columbia, [1989] 1 S.C.R. 143 Mark Andrews met all the requirements to become a lawyer in British Columbia, but he did not have Canadian citizenship. Because he did not meet the citizenship requirement, he was not accepted. Andrews challenged the provincial law, which prevented him from being a lawyer, arguing that it was discriminatory since it treated non-citizens and Canadian citizens differently. The majority of the Supreme Court decided that the provincial law infringed equality rights, because it did not let otherwise qualified people practice law solely because of their citizenship.

This case was the Court’s first decision on equality rights. It has influenced the development of equality law well beyond the specific facts of Mr. Andrew’s case, because Justice McIntyre emphasized that section 15 of the Charter protects and promotes substantive equality of opportunity for all.

We'll also look at Aboriginal Rights in the Charter (Section 25). It's important to note that section 25 does not create any new rights but rather protects against the abrogation or derogation of existing aboriginal, treaty or other rights or freedoms

I'll have you work on questions 2, 4 and 5 on page 61 and questions 1, 2 and 4 on page 64 of the All About Law text

B Block Human Geography - Since we played around on Gapminder yesterday, we didn't quite get to look at the ideas of Thomas Malthus (Malthusian theory)

I'll have you fill in a chart on the various theories of population growth (Malthusian, Neo-Malthusian, and Anti-Malthusian) and we end with this question:

Paul and Anne Ehrlich argue in The Population Explosion (1990) that a baby born in a developed country poses a greater threat to sustainability than a baby born in a developing country because people in developed countries place much higher demands on the world’s supply of energy, food, and other limited resources. Do you agree with this view? Why or Why not?