Caring? Not Much

Victoria police were so concerned that Peter Lee would be a danger to his family that they met with Crown counsel to ask that he be denied bail.

Of course, the Crown knew better than the police.

Lee was released on bail and promptly butchered his entire family including his young son.

On Sept. 6, 2007, Peter Lee, 38, killed his estranged wife, Sunny Park, their son Christian, 6, and Park's elderly parents before committing suicide.

Now, as a coroner's inquest continues into this case, the simple truth emerges and is driven home -

No budget for domestic violence, Peter Lee inquest told

System could respond better, but only with more funding, probe into Oak Bay slayings hears

But we have our priorities.

Yesterday morning I pulled over to park in the 500 block East Broadway.

The new temporary signs are already up.

NO PARKING

February 4 - March 2

Huh?

Broadway and Fraser?

This is a major corridor to a Games event?

O.K.

Whatever.

In the meantime...

We have no budget for domestic violence.

All of which will of course evaporate in the swill of happiness and euphoria that descends upon us all from the glories of THE GAMES.

Family discord will come to an end.

Marital disputes will resolve spontaneously.

Peace on earth will prevail.

Right after the luge.

For What?

I suppose with all the bad economic turns in the journalism game not many reporters are flying these days.

How else to explain the "news" that senators and MP's fly business class a lot?

I routinely file past government freeloaders with their heavy black legal cases on the empty leather seat beside them as I head to the back of the plane for my apple box and cookie.

The good news is that I can usually find a chiropractor wherever I'm going to help scrunch the flight out of my bones.

On the other hand...

What is really news - and we have to ask why isn't it on the front page? - is that the Senate has quietly voted itself another travel perk.

Free international flights!

Liberal senator Lillian Dyck (write your own jokes, please) went to China last month on your money to visit her family's ancestral home.

I am feeling warm and cozy for her.

Now get this.

MPs and senators alike are each allotted 64 travel points a year, each point representing one free round-trip flight. They're allowed to use up to four points to visit Washington, but the rest are to be used strictly within Canada.

That would mean that Larry Campbell can fly free 64 times across the dominion.

Free, as in you pay for his privilege.

The senate should not be elected.

It should be closed down.

A start

Old bad joke:

What do you call 45 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?

A good start.

So the news that Transclunk has dumped 3 of their 28 highly well compensated executives is just that - a good start.

A headline like this every morning...

TransLink announces last stop for three well-paid VPs

Execs turfed after watchdog's critical report on spending

might make for a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Lord, will miracles never cease?

Will the day come to pass when the turnstiles are finally installed and people actually have to PAY FOR their rides?

Now, let's look forward to seeing the City drop entire departments and stick to some core activities that have something to do with civic responsibility.

Jungle bells, jingle bells...

Letter to a Friend About Hope & Cagney

These were two great creative performing geniuses.

There is almost nothing they could not do.

Cagney's performance as George M. Cohan in "Yankee Doodle Dandy" is absolutely in every way possible beautiful and unforgettable. The moment of his father's death is heartbreaking.

I was thinking about the range of people like this when I was watching a few scenes from "Whit Christmas" last night.

Danny Kaye, known of course as a great comic and song-and-dance man was so powerful in a made-for-TV movie that came out in the '80's. Based on a real life story, the movie is called "Skokie" and it is about a Jewish man who protests a neo-Nazi march in suburban Chicago in modern times. Slowly he reveals that he is a concentration camp survivor. The film and Kaye are devastating.

So many people cheered when the "studio system" was dismantled, but it was the studio system of teaching and learning and covering all bases that allowed already gifted people to shine even brighter as they polished one skill after another.

We had a small taste of that right here on Hamilton Street when the CBC was cooking on all cylinders.

Of course, we will always have great performers emerging to the front lines, but I doubt that we will ever again see the likes of such triple-threat stars as Hope and Cagney, Crosby, Sinatra, Garland, Mickey Rooney. I saw Rooney on stage in "Sugar Babies" with Ann Miller in San Fransisco about 25 years ago. Rooney was an encyclopedia of performance art.

Two Performance Geniuses at Play

Big Bad Wolf

Big Pharma - along with armaments, oil and illegal drugs, one of the biggest businesses in the world - has much to answer for.

Not the last of which is running its affairs often by bribe and collusion.

In pharmacies across Canada, the giant pharmaceuticals compete by paying pharmacies large rebates to stock their products. As a result, the biggest cost to manufacturers isn't manufacturing – it's paying those rebates, the cost of which is passed along to the consumer and pushes up the price of prescriptions.

Generics, while cheaper, are often harder to come by precisely because of the legal and not so legal tactics of the big name-brand manufacturers.

In short, our high and higher and higher cost of health care in this country is powerfully affected - some would say controlled - by private, corpoarte special interests.

The Ontario Premier, Dalton McGuinty is setting out to fight these good folk.

We wish him well and ask when the other leaders across the country will step into the fray and show some real commitment to holding the line on costs.

Cutting seniors' care and MRI availabilities is not the way to go.

Son of a Friend Covers Dylan

Eyesore, Plain and Simple

One cannot argue with the self-evident and urgent need for aboriginal people to get a leg up wherever reasonable and possible.

And it is particularly encouraging to see native groups creating economic opportunities that are based on sound business models.

But, please.

The new electric billboard built by the Squamish Nation at the south foot of the Burrard Bridge is a bad idea badly executed.

It is big and flashy.

And it is flat ugly.

All over town local governments have actively discouraged bill boarding.

Our late good friend Larry Zelmer fought for years to maintain the billboard high atop the Lee Building at Main and Broadway.

He lost.

That sign was barely visible except to anyone but the cormorants compared to the garish glare of this new distraction amidst the trees and mountain and water views off the Burrard Bridge.

This is reverse discrimination of the most offensive kind.

Why this group and no others?

No doubt there are many great ways for the Squamish Nation to develop business opportunities that will serve everyone well.

This is not one of them.

Smoooooooth...

Comfort in the Cold

Names

B.C. has renamed the Queen Charlotte Islands.

The new name is Haida Gwaii.

This is fine with me.

But I admit I am a little nervous that sooner or later, someone will figure out that Captain Vancouver was sailing the ship "Tiger Woods," and may not have been the best fellow after whom cities should be named.

The only thing is will I ever learn how to say 'lyxwuwuwhakqulatchi-;ploutz?

Arrested Development

When will the border patrols, U.S. and Canadian, figure out the difference between vocal protesters and terrorists?

The latter are quiet and sneaky and under cover. They don't want you to know them until after the bomb goes off.

The protesters are right out there.

When will the border patrols, both sides, understand that protest and dissent are a central part of what makes a modern liberal democracy superior to fascism and its many cousins?

Or is all of this too much to ask of people who are "just doing their jobs?"

Olympic critic denied entry to U.S.; says she was interrogated for hours

Marla Renn was heading south to speak at anti-Olympic events

Oy.

Qualifications

Gary Mason, always readable, has contributed an interesting piece this morning about Carole Taylor possibly being the replacement for His Meanness.

With alternatives like Rich Coleman and Kevin Falcon, two bulldozers cut from the same cruel cloth as the Preem, you bet!

Mason offers that Taylor is the kind of fiscal conservative that the corporate community loves. He adds that "she was also seen as a left leaning democrat on social justice issues."

I resist these kinds of categorizations.

For my money, it' simply this.

Carole Taylor is blessed with a drop or two of the milk of human kindness.

Which makes her distinctly different from the current Iceman in charge, who most days seems by his decisions and his priorities to lack even something approaching decency.

Art Two

Last Monday, I wrote in this pace about my two favorite all-time art hoaxes - video and installations.

Now I am pleased to introduce you to one of the richest and most successful pullers of the wool of all time.

His name is Michael Snow and his entire oeuvre (OUCH! Dat hoits!) is video and installation.

In a review this morning, a gushing wet-panties writer tells us that "the crowning achievement in Michael Snow's new show is a 45-minute film of a curtain blowing in the wind. And believe it or not, you'll want to sit and watch the whole thing."

Well, I have a shocker for you, Sarah.

No.

I won't.

I'll be watching my own 46-minute film of a cat named Billy licking his paws.

The odd thing is I can't seem to get any of my friends to sit down with me and watch it.

I've offered popcorn.

Hot...buttered...

It's not Copenhagen

Crush

What would happen if Vancouver and VANOC and the IOC and the province all had the grace and self-confidence that should come with having that much power?

Perhaps they could find the chutzpah to just ignore little things that they don't like.

No.

Instead they must go tromping around, grinding their heels into any little oddity that doesn't quite fit in with the Big Plan.

Our weenie is bigger than yours.

That's all it comes down to.

Case in point, the piece of art shown above which has been hanging outside a local gallery.

The city has demanded it come down.

The city has called it "graffiti."

The decision maker here on what is art and what is graffiti is a nameless, faceless city inspector.

We pay this boob's salary.

How about inspecting farm vehicles with 17 worker-passengers and no seat belts? [SEE BELOW]

Now, this is odd behaviour from the City of Vancouver because Mayor Gregor Robertson has publicly declared that the city's “commitment has always been the protection of people's Charter Rights and Freedoms.”

O.K. Gregor.

Get on your bike.

Go down to your favorite 'hood, the DTES, and put the painting back on the wall.

The mid-town sillies are so busy celebrating the past ( A hint of Woodward's old food floor has returned to the new re-development. Man, you would think this was the only city in the world that had a big old food department downtown.) that they are not noticing the present and the future being sold for a down-hill run.

KISS - Keep it Simple, Stupid

Here's the basic idea.

After numerous failed attempts to reduce crime among their youth, native leaders and communities in Manitoba and Saskatchewan are proposing aboriginal school boards, a controversial idea even among first nations.

Some argue that this will get native kids up and moving and away from street crime.

Others suggest this will be a return to the nightmares of residential schools.

This polarization is not helping.

The truth and part of the solution to an ongoing tragedy in our midst lies, as it often does, somewhere in the middle.

Here and there, a few individual projects have been showing some glimmers of hope.

Winnipeg's Children of the Earth is a high school that seems to be helping aboriginal young people do better work.

Good.

If it's working support it. Fund it.

But do not leap to the conclusion that we now need a network or consortium or government institution of encrusted aboriginal separate schools.

The last thing that will possibly help alleviate what is and should be seen as a national disgrace (Have you visited Manitoba or Saskatchewan lately?) is a new bureacracy of any kind, let alone native education.

Look not for silver bullets and big sweeping changes, but for many modest LOCAL solutions.

Where aboriginal students are succeeding integrated into public schools, great.

Where they are not and someone is prepared to put together an alternative that may do a better job, fine.

But please do not go off madly re-inventing the wheel.

Scabby Parks, Shabby Leader

Writing in yesterday's Province, Ethan Baron has added fuel to my post of yesterday about the Premier's charming lack of regrets.

Something stinks in our provincial parks, and it isn't just the toilets

Liberals spend more on PR than people

By Ethan Baron, The Province

The thrust of the column is this:

B.C.'s crown jewel — our provincial park system — has fallen into a disgraceful state, victim of funding cuts by a government that spends more on its own spin machine than it does on parks.

Read it and get clear about your politics.

Shame

Are some women in the Canadian labour force still treated like slaves?

Yes.

Are they still disposable?

Yes.

Crash that killed three farm workers ruled 'accidental' by coroner's jury

By Darah Hansen, Vancouver SunDecember 10, 2009

In 2008, police recommended 33 criminal charges be laid against both the driver of the vehicle involved in the crash, Harwinder Gill, and her husband, Ranjit Gill. But the charges were not approved by Crown counsel. Instead, Harwinder Gill pleaded guilty to four lesser charges under the Motor Vehicle Act and was fined $2,000.

“It was literally a slap on the wrist,” Jim Sayre, lawyer for the victim’s families, said Thursday.

“It was a demonstration of disrespect in their view for the lives of their loved ones. That that was all those lives were worth,” he said.

The Gills were also fined $69,000 following an investigation by WorkSafeBC. But that fine was never paid.

The jury heard earlier in the inquest there were 17 people inside the van at the time of the crash. Only two had seatbelts, including the driver and a frontseat passenger. Gill was not properly licenced to drive the vehicle. Meanwhile, the van itself was in poor working condition with balding and inadequately inflated tires.

* * *

The day after this sickening and completely avoidable tragedy, my friend, Jim Sinclair, BC Fed President went out to the Gills' farm and watched as more indentured poor were badgered into unsafe vans without seat belts.

Lay all of the blame here at the provincial and municipal governments who refuse to pay inspectors in adequate numbers to police and enforce even the most basic working conditions - like drinking water and sanitation.

When it comes to some areas we are not "the greatest place on earth."

We are a corrupt and self-indulgent third-world slum.

Oh.

And, by the way.

Gord has no regrets.

Main Reason to be Scared, Truly Scared

Non, je ne regret rien.

No Edith Piaf, he.

But Gordon Campbell tells us that he has no regrets.

“You never have difficulty sleeping when you think you’ve made the right choices.”

His modesty is exemplary...and touching.

He means, of course, "when you know you've made the right choices."

Let's see now.

The Monumental Premier has spent billions on one road and one event, while cutting schools, libraries, the arts, social programs, and health care programs among others.

He has been consistent and insistent in helping the Big Guys and shutting out the little and the ones who have little.

But he has no regrets.

And he has no regrets.

We could line up on the legislature lawn and sing out our regrets all in a minor key.

But let's save the time and energy and simplify for the hard of hearing.

Our regret, sir, is you.

We will welcome a new administration whomever it may be and as soon as it may thankfully arrive.