Blaming children: youth crime, moral panics & the politics of hate

• Published in: Journal of Canadian Studies 1999, Vol.34 (1), p.184
• Main Authors: Schissel, Bernard, Andrew, Edward
• Format: Review
• Language: English
• Subjects: Children; Foucault, Michel; Ideology; Law; Legal status laws etc; Media coverage; National identity; Parents & parenting; Police; Politics; Spouses; Theme; Youth
• ISSN: 0021-9495; 1911-0251

Mounties, Moose and Moonshine is also concerned with the relationship of law and custom in outport communities. Norman Okihiro, with his training as a sociologist and his marriage to an outport Newfoundlander, combines the advantages of insider and outsider; his attachment to a way of life is balanced by sociological detachment. The theme of Okihiro's study is the RCMP's attempt to repress the production and sale of moonshine, or distilled alcohol, and fisheries officials' and game wardens' attempts to stop poaching or enforce conservation policy. Okihiro agrees with John McMullan and David Perrier's conclusion, in Crimes, Laws and Communities, that poaching is inherent to Atlantic Canada's community life (although Okihiro's outport poaching is for subsistence, while the latter deal with Nova Scotian "business poaching"). His study also confirms Spiertz and [Melanie Wiber]'s studies of woodlots in New Brunswick and fisheries in the Maritime provinces and northeastern U.S. fisheries with respect to the tension between private property and common property. Mounties, Moose and Moonshine could have more useful maps and the comment that outports are "closer to London than Vancouver or Los Angeles" (5) might have been more striking if Okihiro could have written "closer to London than Montreal." Carolyn Strange and Tina Loo's Making Good: Law and Moral Regulation in Canada, 1867-1939 examines the role of law in making Canadians good citizens, workers, churchgoers, wives and mothers, husbands and providers. This readable book looks at governmental attempts to promote efficiency and hygiene, to construct a civic identity and to repress subversion and violence. These attempts may be connected, but are not reducible, to the forging of moral virtues. According to George Grant, conservatives and socialists are willing to use the state for moral purposes -- the construction of good citizens -- while liberals are ideologically indisposed to doing so; the liberal state does not define the good life; its function is limited to securing individual rights and providing fairness or an equal opportunity for individuals to pursue their own personal life plans. Strange and Loo are historians, not political theorists, but they seem to espouse an anarchist or liberal debunking of the role of the state as an agent of moral reform. (Liberalism is just anarchism for the rich and police for the poor). One would like to ask them when the Canadian state was acting legitimately according