Alberta Gets It Right

The Canadian province of Alberta is basically the only place in all of North America that gets it right across the board.  Legal age limits there are as follows:

• Alcohol:  18
• Tobacco and Vaping:  18
• Cannabis:  18
• Gambling:  18
• Guns:  18
• Voting:  18
• Run for office:  18
• General age of majority:  18
• School leaving age:  16
• Driving:  14 for learner permit, 16 for GDL, and 18 for full unrestricted license
• All other age limits:  similar to the rest of Canada and the USA overall (at or below 18)
• Curfew:  None at provincial level, only locally in a few towns here and there (usually 15)

In other words, 18 is the age of majority, and once you are an adult, you are an adult.  Period, full stop.  Some age limits can be lower than that, of course, as there is much room for nuance, but no age limit can ever be higher than that, at least not without extraordinary levels of justification.  And guess what?  The sky didn't fall in Alberta.  No seriously, it really didn't.  Alberta still has yet to get the memo about the supposedly catastrophic effects of full adult rights combined with "underdeveloped" 18-24 year old brains.

In fact, the Alberta Human Rights Act explicitly prohibits age discrimination for anyone over 18, except for senior citizen privileges for people over 55.

That is really how it should be everywhere, regardless of what exact age limit is chosen for age of majority (which is 18 in most of the world and most of the USA).  It's really not a difficult concept to grasp, as a child can easily understand it, but too many chronological "adults" seem to be unable to do so.  Anything else is a slippery slope, and such slopes are much, much slipperier than they appear.

And for alcohol, tobacco, and cannabis, while underage possession and consumption is illegal, for all three it is basically a mere ticket-level offense with no criminal record.  Unlike many US states have.  And parents are allowed to give their own underage children (but no one else) alcohol at home (within reason), as many but not all states currently do.

The driving thing is of course probably the most jarring one of all to the rest of the world, so allow us to explain.  The global outlier young age limit of 14, rivaled only by South Dakota and a few other rural states, applies ONLY to the learner permit, which is similar to an American style learner permit, with only supervised driving allowed among other restrictions.  To get a GDL (probationary) license, i.e. what Americans often call a "junior" license, you need to be at least 16 and also have had a permit for one year or more, and pass the basic road test which is harder than an American road test.  There are some restrictions to the GDL, such as no more passengers than there are seat belts, and a zero tolerance limit for both alcohol and cannabis, but no night restrictions.  And to graduate to the next level, the full unrestricted license, one must have had the GDL for at least two years regardless of age, be suspension-free for the final year of two years, and pass an advanced road test, the latter of which is being phased out in favor of simply making the basic road test more difficult and more like the advanced road test.  Honestly, making the American road test more difficult would probably be far more effective than any age-based restrictions ever could be.

Alberta in recent years has had one of the lowest overall traffic death rates per vehicle kilometers traveled in Canada, and lower than the USA, so they must be doing something right!

And DUI laws are quite strict there regardless of age as well.  There are swift and certain penalties of immediate but temporary administrative license suspension and vehicle impoundment for BAC as low as 0.05% (or 0.00% if GDL), in addition to any criminal penalties if above 0.08% and/or obviously impaired.  Note that the zero tolerance for GDL is regardless of age.  For DUI cannabis they are also quite strict as well, and we at Twenty-One Debunked think TOO strict since hard per se limits (let alone zero tolerance) don't really make sense for a substance with such complex pharmacokinetics and long detection times, and generally less impairing than alcohol.  At the very least, in the interest of simple justice, they really need to set the testing cutoff for positivity high enough to prevent false positives or innocent positives. 

Thus overall, Alberta is a good model for America to follow.  So what are we waiting for?

Oh, and they also have the best and largest shopping mall in the entire western hemisphere, the West Edmonton Mall.  It makes the even the vaunted Mall of America look a bit "meh" by comparison. 

Case Closed: Curfews Don't Reduce Crime

Curfews, especially youth curfews for people under an arbitrary age limit, have long been a solution in search of a problem.  They have been touted as a panacea for all sorts of social ills, most notably street crime.  And the evidence for that has been very weak at best, with plenty of evidence against it in fact.

In fact, a 2016 literature review of 7000 studies finds that "juvenile curfews do not reduce crime or victimization".  Proponents of such illiberal policies can cherry-pick all they want, but the hard data are pretty damning against the idea of curfews.  As Ronald Reagan said, "facts are stubborn things".

But now we have the strongest "natural experiment" with the extreme, unprecedented, all-ages COVID lockdowns, curfews, and other restrictions in 2020 that did not exist in 2019 and prior years.  If curfews and similar policies actually reduced crime, we would have seen a sharp decrease in crime in 2020 relative to the average of previous years.  So what were the results of this yearlong natural experiment?

Well, you might wanna sit down before reading this.  Turns out, crime actually went way up in 2020 compared to the past few years, particularly homicides.  Data from the 2020 put the per capita homicide rate in the USA at a 23 year high (highest since 1997).  And of course, plenty of rioting as well.  Even mass shootings and hate crimes are up as well, and have persisted through both 2021 and 2022, well after such restrictions were finally lifted.

Even the supposedly good news about reported rapes being down in 2020 needs to be qualified.  Given how the vast majority of rapes occur behind closed doors and go unreported even in a normal year, the apparent decrease in 2020 may simply be an artifact of an increase in underreporting due to lockdown, especially since domestic violence and child abuse both appear to have increased significantly during lockdown.  The NCVS also shows a decrease in 2020 and 2021 as well, but given the secular downward trend since 1993, and the fact that survey data gathering may have been disrupted during the lockdowns, that needs to be qualified as well.

Reversion to the mean after the #MeToo movement crested and faded probably also played a role in the 2018 spike in self-reporting followed by an even larger crash.  The downward trend continued well after the lockdowns were over as well, so it is unlikely that the lockdowns actually reduced rape.

Back in April 2020, anecdotal evidence of course suggested that crime was down in some areas.  But clearly that decrease was short-lived, and then the opposite occurred.  Whether it is due to pent-up rage, restlessness, boredom, unemployment, fewer "eyes on the street", destruction of community, or all of the above, these sorts of authoritarian and illiberal policies clearly do more harm than good on balance.

So let this be the final nail in the coffin for lockdowns, curfews, and similar restrictions.  If curfews are to ever be used to fight crime and/or civil disorder, they need to be very limited, local, nuanced, and short-term--if they are to even be used at all.  And they certainly should NEVER be used to fight an airborne respiratory virus, as that is a major category error.

QED

P.S.  None of the above criticism of course precludes getting tough on REAL crime.  That is, any crimes that objectively harm the person or property of nonconsenting others.  That should really go without saying, but we will say it anyway.  "Catch and release" is every bit as dumb when it comes to real criminals as it is for fish, completely defeating the purpose.  Ditto for the equally boneheaded idea of "defund the police" as well.  Baby, meet bathwater.  Focused deterrence actually does work when done properly.