It sounded like the sort of socially conservative stuff that fills talk-radio airwaves following events like yesterday's Boxing Day bloodbath north of Dundas Square.

"If you look at society in general, everything is breaking down," Jason Harrow said over the phone. "Simple things, like TV shows - certain language used to be available only after 9 o'clock, now you can hear it in the middle of the day. Raunchy sex is on TV, content of TV shows is just crazy 24 hours a day. Music - you can have a song, I mean, something stupid like Cisco's Thong Song or [the Black-Eyed Peas'] My Humps or whatever - you just have all this crazy material that's on 24 hours a day.

"I think the values and morals and standards that we have as a society are just going down, period. When the standards keep going down and more and more things become the norm, eventually we lose track of values and morals and eventually it just becomes a state of chaos where anything goes."

The thing is, Jason Harrow is no talk-show caller - he's Kardinal Offishall, the Toronto rapper riding a wave of positive buzz following a cross-country tour with 50 Cent, of all people.

Having watched Toronto's violence "get progressively worse and worse," the Jamaican-Canadian artist known as Kardi to his friends has taken it upon himself to speak out -- both on his acclaimed new album, Fire and Glory, and in interviews, including with the Post last week.

And the best reason to listen to him is that his answers don't fall neatly on to either side of the debate.

Liberal types, including other musicians, will bristle at his morality kick, and possibly his contempt for Paul Martin's proposed handgun ban.

But his methods for imparting better values upon youth will be anathema to those who favour a law-and-order approach and snicker at the notion that do-gooder government programs would have any impact on hardened youth firing guns at one another.

That the "code" that once governed the streets has all but evaporated, the Scarborough-bred rapper suggested, is largely a product of kids lacking any moral guidance at their most impressionable age. In part, that's owing to the oft-cited lack of positive male role models - something he's trying to correct, in his own small way, through positive messages in his music and a strong community presence. But more specifically, the phenomenon he's seen first-hand is one in which parents with the best intentions are unable to give their kids the attention they need.

"People are coming over here that will work whatever job they can in order to provide a better life for their children," he said. "Unfortunately, because they're working so hard, they're not able to give the parental guidance and love that they should. That's definitely a reason why there's some of the younger generation getting involved in B.S. - not because their parents are neglecting them because they don't love them, but because they're working hard trying to provide a better life for their children."

The result is kids - often from suburban, middle-class families, he says - lacking the values imparted upon him by his own parents, and succumbing to the worst possible influences as they navigate the streets alone. And that's where the public programs come in.

When he was growing up, there were the programs in schools and recreational centres designed to ensure that kids weren't running the streets after classes let out. There was the Fresh Arts program, a Toronto Arts Council initiative that helped young creative types like himself hone their skills. And there was the Rae-era Jobs Ontario Youth program, which subsidized employers to hire at-risk youth.

"Basically, it was the government that paid me," he recalled of his own time in the program. "But a lot of times, it's a cycle -- we're not able to get a job because we don't have anything on our resumes, but you can't get anything on your resume because you've never had a job." The danger, he suggested, is kids turned away from a litany of jobs and ultimately deciding there's no honest way for them to make a living.

That such programs have been slashed will sound like a poor excuse in the wake of yesterday's shootout. And there will be little appetite for Kardi's contempt of tougher sentencing in favour of "getting into the heads of these kids and having them not even worrying about shooting guns." But Toronto's crime problem transcends easy answers.

All year, there have been calls for those from violence-ravaged comunities to step forward, to lend their voices to the debate, to help steer troubled youth in the right direction. Kardinal Offishall has taken up that challenge. In so doing, the unlikely conservative has made a better case for intervention than a thousand bleeding hearts could.