I mean, there should be punishment delivered before you even get to stealing your third car. Even if you down real bad you should still be able to afford bus fare before justifying theft. I’m not sure about mandatory minimum sentences but repeat offenders shouldn’t just be allowed to walk free stealing as many cars as they want.
They don’t steal the car for themselves, it’s organized crime and they ship the cars overseas to where they are hard to impossible to track and return. We want to stop this we need to stop organized crime, get the people at the top instead of the people on the street. We need to better support the people at street level so they don’t fall in with organized crime to begin with.
CBC did some tracking of stolen cars, many ship out of Montreal and end up in various African countries. Here is a good video on it.
There is a near unending supply of people that can be coerced or incentivized into car theft. There is, however, not a near unending supply of police, judicial and corrective resources. We really do need to make choices, and we should make the most effective ones.
You can attack the street level but it won’t make a dent in the problem, you will not be able to dissinsentivize theft with abstract ideas of future punishment for people who have concrete current problems of gang coercion or poverty.
So I suppose if you are interested in simply punishing a never-ending lineup of street level actors at ever growing expense to the country then sure, we can “deal with car thieves”.
I live on the Assiniboine near the Legislature, and see a fair number of people bike every day regardless.
When the river freezes deep enough, and they have the ice trail prepped like last year, there were lots. Depending on neighbourhood, it was actually quicker getting downtown in winter than in summer.
Remember to take into account different temperate zones when making blanket statements.
That’s just construction and maintenance cost data. That doesn’t change based on temperature zones.
In a city like Winnipeg where we historically have -20 to -40C temps for 6 months of the year
Iif you are using historical lows, Winnipeg has 7 months below -20°C.
bike paths aren’t used as much.
When I was in Yellowknife, it was just easier and faster to cycle in the winter than to plug and preheat your car. But I’m sure there’s a reason it can’t work in a southern city; I’ve never been to Winnipeg.
Even if bike paths are only being used half the year (and you ignore my earlier comment about public transportation) Winnipeg budgeted $155.8 M for road maintenance in 2023 (it goes up every year). So if people drove half as much, you would save $200 per Winnipeg resident per year (and that’s before provincial and federal injections). Where are my fiscal conservatives at!!
Here’s a fun fact no one mentions much, although CBSA is mandated to stop stolen cars from leaving Canada, they rarely persue it. I know, you’re going to say that CBSA caught X cars leaving in such and such year, but that’s just a tiny tiny fraction that is caught almost by accident. Have you noticed that all the stolen cars are caught by CBSA in the east, yet the Vancouver Port is the largest by volume in Canada and they’ve caught none? The issue is funding. You see in order to get a container from a dock, there are logistics and expenses. If I know a car is stolen and leaving and is sitting on a dock, I have to pay the dock fees such as storage and move fees( every time a container is picked up by a crane and moved in a stack or onto a chassis there is a fee), then I have to organize a truck to come get the container, that’s not free, then I have to find a warehouse and labor to unload the car. CBSA looks at all these costs and thinks well who will pay, obviously not the criminal gang exporting, maybe the insurance company, nah they just get their property back, so now CBSA is on the hook for 5-7grand of recovery costs.
I am not sure of the enforcement costs but I found this cbc story from a few months back quite telling. They found car lots filled with cars that still had their Canadian paperwork in the glovebox, and the authorities in Ghana claiming their Canadian counterparts ignored requests to stem this export/import of these types of cars into Ghana for their associated criminality.
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