"The root of the problems plaguing DTES is the concentration of poverty, homelessness, drug addiction, poor housing, prostitution, petty crime, and mental illness in the area."
Really?
And this honorable man has some good suggestions about housing mixes.
But he doesn't dare address why we have our famous "concentration of poverty, homelessness, drug addiction, poor housing, prostitution, petty crime, and mental illness in the area."
Can you say, "Values," boys and girls?
We are a do-as-you-will culture that dare not impose any acts of citizenship on one another.
So drug addiction or mental illness are no longer problems or conditions to be unhappy about, they are a right and a life style to be defended at all costs.
On an average day, driving my car the short distances it takes me to go about my quiet life, I must deal with at least three outrageous misbehaviours by drivers around me. Anything goes. Signals are a waste of time.
Addicts are patients and the homeless like living outdoors; they choose this lifestyle.
Uh-huh.
The DTES will remain the city's great social sewer and shame until the day we decide as a community that we'd like addicts to live clean and sober lives and we'd like the mentally ill and the homeless to find something resembling homes.
And the debt isn't his personally, but if you know Canada Revenue, you'll realize that they can make things very personal.
Don't worry.
His name is REID BIGLAND.
Deepen your voice to full announcer level and say that again. "Hi! I'm Reid Bigland. And you're not."
Reid is the President of Chrysler Canada.
You know, that other company whose cars and trucks no one buys.
Reid and his good friend, The Other Guy who runs GM Canada, are shopping in the Parliament window for a little $10 Billion hand-out.
"Hi! I'm Reid Bigland!"
Of course, if we don't give Reid and his friends more of our tax money so they can keep building really shitty big cars that no one wants, coffee shops and bridal boutiques in Oshawa will go tits up.
Like they weren't going there anyway. Like times don't change. Tell that to the village smithy.
Of course, as we are a mere branch plant of Washington and Detroit, we will give these tax dollars to these deluded leading failures.
We will blind ourselves to the fact that GM Saab just filed for bankruptcy in Sweden, that GM Germany and South Korea have just cried for givernment (that's not a typo) money and that GM is trading just barely above the penny stock level.
The auto and transportation industries are going through seismic, cataclysmic change.
Some things are dying and some new things will be born - green cars, shared cars, no cars, autobikes, rubber buses, your guess is better than mine.
But propping up the locked-in-step machinery that belches forth Ford Exploders and 12 passenger Dodge Caravans is hardly the most useful thing we could do with our tax dollars.
Does that mean cut them all off at the knees and watch people hurl themselves into the St. Lawrence?
No.
But it does mean saying to the arrogant, airhead BIGLAND's of the world, "O.K. Mr. Smarty Pants, show me The New, 'splain me your re-tooling plan, and tell me who else you're talking to about all those pensions and health plans because We the People are not in the business of supporting dying aardvarks and dodos."
The photo, by the way, is REID BIGLAND his own true fabulous suited self, showing off why he needs your money.
Like lots of Canadians are going to be buying that thing.
BC Health Officers Failure to Protect Drug Addicts
It’s troubling that BC’s medical officers passed a resolution at their biannual meeting in Prince Rupert that drug injection sites should be integrated into communities everywhere in BC.
Medical Health Officers are supposed to protect the health of citizens.They know or should know that drug injection sites will not protect the health of addicts, but instead allows their addictions to deepen, leading to their inevitable and unenviable deaths.Only 3% of addicts using Vancouver’s drug injection site are referred for treatment.
According to Ben Jenkins, President of the Drug Prevention Network of Canada,
“It is a concern to our organization that a professional such as an airline pilot, doctor or lawyer can obtain treatment for their addiction but that the poor are only shuffled off to the injection sites which only allows their addiction to continue.There is something palatably wrong with such a policy. It is also disturbing that 65 Vancouver policemen are stationed within a five-block area of the Insite to try to control the criminal element and also to escort the addict into the clinic. This can only mean to the addict that he has an entitlement to use the drugs.”
It’s unfortunate that BC’s Medical Officers of Health choose to ignore the deep-rooted problems of drug addicts who need treatment, and instead, ignore their needs by recommending only the political expedient solution of providing facilities to allow these addicts to continue with their addictions.
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Contact:
Ben Jenkins, PresidentC. Gwendolyn Landolt, Vice President
Laila has left a new comment on your post "METRO POLICE":
David,I urge you to visit Surrey, so you can see what the press does not show about Dianne Watts and her methods. Come walk around my neighbourhood.
Come see the still not done and past due Olympic Volunteer centre that was approved by council -without her revealing to all of them that she had actually signed away the legal rights of the city and its taxpayers in the event of a dispute in the project- which could happen.
People worried about what happened to the Millenium project in Vancouver, and yet here in Surrey this project has missed one deadline and they are already planning for what they are going to do if it is not done by the next one - and possibly having to rent other community facilities out to VANOC to cover their failure.
The money spent on all of this would have paid for quite a few new cops here, but running the Olympic flag was more important.
Dianne Watts has never wanted a regional force- this is nothing new for those of us who live here.She thinks we have different policing needs because "we have more children in Surrey" - this reason and a host of others that make no sense to anyone but her.
One should be questioning not only why she refuses to consider this solution,but also questioning the flawed statistics and plans in her entire crime prevention plan.
It simply does not work.Given much more time with this situation left unchecked, Whally and Newton will be just as bad as the DTES - and this was just recently mentioned to me by an RCMP officer stationed here.
We have just as many, if not more, social agencies as the DTES, and yet the homeless,addicted and mentally ill are everywhere.Just as the DTES continues to decline, as do we.
The police shuffle all of them from one area to another in " Crime sweeps"- which is what has happened several times in Whalley. Crack down there, they all move to my neighbourhood -or the next one. Nothing is fixed, just moved temporarily.
I speak for many when I talk about frustration in getting her to address the real issues. This latest move is only the most public of them all that is getting noticed by people not actually living here in Surrey.
Her insistance of a community court without all the resources to back it up properly will be the next in a long line of decisions that will do little to solve the rampant crime that makes Surrey it's home.
The federal government and Vancouver have turned to the province to co-ordinate government services for drug addicts, the mentally ill, the homeless and the poor in the city's Downtown Eastside, Canada's most notorious slum.
If anyone at any level has shown the greatest resistance to doing anything meaningful or substantive about these plagues it has been the provincial government.
The Vancouver Mayor is looking to Rich Coleman or some other wise man in Victoria to lead the charge.
This could not be described as clear thinking based on past evidence.
At what point has the Campbell government shown an interest in these issues?
Was I out of town that nano-second?
Oh, I know.
During my surgery on Jan. 23d, I was in an anesthetic-induced white-out for 105 minutes. That must have been the time when Victoria took charge of Our Shame and invested million in treatment and so on.
I am surprised at and disappointed by Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts, who convened a meeting of Metro mayors the other day to discuss a regional police force.
"What we have right now is a good policing model," she said. "We will be working with what we have because it does work."
Huh?
What has made Watts such a rare and valuable politician in the past few years is that she has not been hide-bound to the status quo. She has shown repeatedly a willingness to move on to new approaches when the old clearly wasn't working.
How in any conscience can she claim in the face of the last two weeks of gang shoot-ups on our public streets that the current system of a dozen separate police forces is working?
Now read in its entirety Retired Justice Wallace Craig on the same subject.
TIME TO STOP BUCK PASSING
February 18, 2009
ON Oct.17, 2007, British Columbia’s inter-gang feuding went far beyond the pale of human decency.
Two innocent men, Ed Schellenberg and Chris Mohan, chanced upon an execution-in-progress and were immediately shot to death alongside four gangsters.
Premier Gordon Campbell and Attorney General Wally Oppal stood on the sidelines while the RCMP’s Integrated Homicide Team began a massive and glacially slow investigation that has yet to result in the arrest of any suspects.
In the immediate aftermath of the killing of Schellenberg and Mohan, the premier and his attorney should have acted swiftly to deal with this absolute circumstance: that gangsters in British Columbia are contemptuous of police and the judiciary; that they go about their dirty business with impunity with only the slimmest chance of being apprehended, convicted and ending up with a long and hard jail sentence.
Since October 2007, it has been business as usual for the street gangs with their feuding kept on simmer. But the heat was turned up between Feb. 2 and Feb.12 with a spate of shootings and shootouts,some of them involving the use of automatic weapons.
On Feb. 6, in Langley Township, a gangland shooting in a mall aroused the ire of Mayor Rick Green. “In some respects, you feel helpless, but Lower Mainland mayors have got to try and raise the level of our voices. We’ve got to absolutely stand up and say enough is enough,” said Green, who believes that federal legislators must write tougher laws.
In the same report in the Vancouver Sun of Feb. 9, Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts said that the violence throughout the Lower Mainland “shows how brazen these individuals are.”
After nine shootings in the first two weeks of February, Premier Gordon Campbell finally woke up to reality and talked tough. Flanked by two top cops, Vancouver Chief Const. Jim Chu and RCMP Deputy Commissioner Gary Bass, boss of B.C.’s massive E Division, Campbell promised 168 more police officers and a handful of prosecutors.
This magnum-force, Dirty-Harry impersonation by Campbell, coming just three months before an election in May, should be compared with his inactivity before and after the murder of Schellenberg and Mohan in October 2007.
The way I see it, Premier Campbell has ignored the solemn commitment in section 2 of the Police Act of British Columbia “to ensure that an adequate and effective level of policing and law enforcement is maintained throughout British Columbia.”
Campbell seems oblivious to the dysfunctional coupling of two distinct police models in the patchwork of municipal parochialism in the Lower Mainland – a coupling incapable of dealing with free-ranging street gangs.
And Campbell seems oblivious to the precarious state of the RCMP, so badly managed by an inept command structure that it must now endure the ultimate ignominy of working under the direction of a civilian commissioner.
Viewed through the lens of gang activity and rampant drug activity, we are revealed to be a metropolitan community that is far short of adequate and effective policing and law enforcement.
Compare the way policing is carried out in the cities of Vancouver and Surrey using two different models, and make your own assessment.
Surrey, policed under contract by the RCMP:
·no control over hiring, firing and disciplining of officers;
·a detachment commander who does not have the independence and authority of a chief constable;
·all members subject to the authority of the Deputy Commissioner in charge of E Division and the ultimate authority of the Commissioner of the RCMP in Ottawa.
The Surrey detachment is not bound to comply with the provincial Police Act and its complaint process; nor can the municipality govern it with an independent police board; and it is not responsible to the provincial minister in charge of policing in British Columbia.
Vancouver, policed by the Vancouver Police Department under independent command of Chief Const. Jim Chu:
·all constables in the VPD including its chief constable are hired, promoted and may even be dismissed by the Vancouver Police Board;
·the command structure is in constant change with promotions from the lower ranks;
·the force is firmly rooted in Vancouver and is capable of generating short and long term analysis of criminal activity in Vancouver, and the manner in which the justice system deals with offenders.
In keeping with an essential and traditional aspect of his responsibility and duty as chief constable, Chu is proactively engaged in public comment and debate on anything that interposes between his force and their goal of maintaining adequate and effective policing in the City of Vancouver.
My prediction is that mayors and councillors of Lower Mainland municipalities, policed by RCMP detachments, will continue to whine and complain about murderous gangsters while they cling to the status quo. The alternative is too tough for them to manage: to venture where they have never been before and work together to institute a metropolitan police force.
One thing they should do is to constantly remind themselves of the horrific murders of Ed Schellenberg and Chris Mohan by placing a small sign on their desks: The Buck Stops Here.
The budget for security for the Games has been a secret.
Now, the federal government has announced that the figure is five times what it was originally declared to be. The number quoted is $900 Million.
Of course, none of that is to be believed.
When all is done and if the accounts are ever shown, the final tab will be well in excess of One Billion Dollars.
Whatever the numbers, this is clearly the largest amount of money ever spent in Canadian history on a peacetime security measure of any kind.
Now there is a photo on page 3 of today's Globe that I cannot find on the net to reproduce for you.
It shows elated and cheering Musqueam Chief Ernie Campbell (Don't get m started!), Gregor Robertson and Gordon Campbell are going mad-happy on the ice at the new Olympic curling rink near Q.E. Park.
My first reaction to the picture was I wanted to throw up.
Now that I marry that picture to the news that the tab for security will be in excess of a Billion Tax Dollars...well, now I really want to throw up.
Many of us will find ourselves watching the demise and self-destruct of Canwest Global with decidedly mixed emotions.
On the one hand, it is sad to see a large and once-healthy Canadian business go to the dogs. It is especially sad to see so many good journalists looking for other kinds of work.
On the other hand (as Tevye would say), it is hard to summons much sympathy for the Asper heirs who have been arrogant and unapproachable to say the least.
I don't know how I managed to miss the passing of one of my alltime favorite acting heroes in March of last year.
A most interesting man, he was the exact opposite of so many of the characters he played on film. He was a cultured, quiet and learned man who detested guns and violence and he was famous for playing wacked out psychotic killers.
Below is an IMDB bio.
Richard Widmark established himself as an icon of American cinema with his debut in the 1947 film noir Kiss of Death (1947) in which he won a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award nomination as the killer "Tommy Udo". Kiss of Death (1947) and other noir thrillers established Widmark as part of a new generation of American movie actors who became stars in the post-World War II era. With fellow post-War stars Kirk Douglas and Robert Mitchum, Widmark brought a new kind of character to the screen in his character leads and supporting parts: a hardboiled type who does not actively court the sympathy of the audience (although Mitchum's hangdog demeanor marked him as the most endearing of the three). Widmark was not afraid to play deeply troubled, deeply conflicted, or just down right deeply corrupt characters. After his debut, Widmark would work steadily until he retired at the age of 76 in 1990, primarily as a character lead. His stardom would peak around the time he played the U.S. prosecutor in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) as the 1950s segued into the 1960s, but he would continue to act for another 30 years.
Richard Widmark was born on Boxing Day (the Day After Christmas) in 1914 in Sunrise, Minnesota. He says that he loved the movies from his boyhood, claiming "I've been a movie bug since I was 4. My grandmother used to take me". The teen-aged Widmark continued to go to the movies, and was thrilled by Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931). "I thought Boris Karloff was great", Widmark said. Although he loved the movies and excelled at public speaking while attending high school, Widmark attended Lake Forest College with the idea of becoming a lawyer. However, he won the lead role in a college production of, fittingly enough, the play "Consellor-at-Law", and the acting bug bit deep. After taking his bachelor of arts degree in 1936, he stayed on at Lake Forest as the Assistant Director of Speech and Drama. However, he soon quit the job and moved to New York to become an actor and, by 1938, he was appearing on radio in "Aunt Jenny's Real Life Stories". He made his Broadwaydebut in 1943 in the play "Kiss and Tell", and continued to appear on stage in roles that were light years away from the tough cookies he would play in his early movies. After World War II, he was signed by 20th Century Fox to a seven-year contract. After seeing his screen-test for the role of "Tommy Udo", 20th Century Fox boss Darryl F. Zanuck insisted that the slight, blonde Widmark - no one's idea of a heavy, particularly after his stage work - be cast as the psychopath in Kiss of Death (1947), which had been prepared as a Victor Mature vehicle. Even though the role was small, Widmark stole the picture. 20th Century Fox's publicity department recommended that exhibitors market the film by concentrating on thumbing the tub for their new anti-hero.
"Sell Richard Widmark" advised the studio's publicity manual that an alert 20th Century Fox sent to theater owners. The manual told local exhibitors to engage a job-printer to have "Wanted" posters featuring Widmark's face to be printed and pasted up.
He won a Golden Globe and an Oscar nod for the part, which lead to an early bout with typecasting at the studio.
Widmark played psychotics in The Street with No Name (1948) and Road House (1948), and held his own against new Fox superstar Gregory Peck in the William A. Wellman's Western, Yellow Sky (1948), playing the villain, of course. When he finally pressured the studio to let him play other parts, his appearance as a sailor in Down to the Sea in Ships (1949) made headlines: "Life" magazine's March 28, 1949 issue featured a three-page spread of the movie, headlined, "Widmark the Movie Villain Goes Straight". He was popular, having captured the public imagination, and before the decade was out, his hand and footprints were immortalized in concrete in the court outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.
The great director Elia Kazan cast Widmark in his thriller Panic in the Streets (1950) not as the heavy - that role went to Jack Palance - but as the physician who tracks down Palance, who has the plague, in tandem with detective Paul Douglas. Widmark was establishing himself as a real presence in the genre that later would be hailed as "film noir".
Having proved he could handle other roles, Widmark didn't shy away from playing heavies in quality pictures. The soon-to-be-blacklisted director Jules Dassin cast him in one of his greatest roles, as the penny-ante hustler "Harry Fabian" in Night and the City (1950). Set in London, Widmark's Fabian manages to survive in the jungle of the English demimonde, but is doomed. Widmark was masterful in conveying the desperation of the criminal seeking to control his own fate but who is damned, and this performance also became an icon of film noir. In that same year, he appeared in Oscar-winning writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz's No Way Out (1950) as a bigot who instigates a race riot. As the 1950s progressed, Widmark played in Westerns, military vehicles, and his old stand-by genre, the thriller. He appeared with Marilyn Monroe (this time cast as the psycho) in Don't Bother to Knock (1952) and made Pickup on South Street (1953) that same year for director Samuel Fuller. His seven-year contract at Fox was expiring, and Zanuck - who would not renew the deal - cast him in the Western Broken Lance (1954) in a decidedly supporting role, billed beneath not only Spencer Tracy but even Robert Wagner and Jean Peters. The film was well-respected, and it won an Oscar nomination for best screenplay for the front of Hollywood 10 blacklistee Albert Maltz.
Widmark left Fox for the life of a freelance, forming his own company, "Heath Productions". He appeared in more Westerns, adventures and social dramas, and pushed himself as an actor by taking the thankless role of "The Dauphin" in Otto Preminger's adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan (1957), a notorious flop that didn't bring anyone any honors, neither Preminger, his leading lady Jean Seberg or Widmark. In 1960, he was appearing in another notorious production, John Wayne's ode to suicidal patriotism, The Alamo (1960), with the personally liberal Widmark playing "Jim Bowie" in support of the very-conservative Wayne's "Davy Crockett". Along with character actor Chill Wills, Widmark arguably was the best thing in the movie.
In 1961, Widmark acquitted himself quite well as the prosecutor in producer-director Stanley Kramer's Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), appearing with the Oscar-nominated Spencer Tracy and the Oscar-winning Maximilian Schell, as well as with superstar Burt Lancaster and acting genius Montgomery Clift and the legendary 'Judy Garland' (the latter two winning Oscar nods for their small roles). Despite being showcased with all this thespian-firepower, Widmark's character proved to be the axis on which the drama turned. A little later, Widmark appeared in two Westerns directed by the great John Ford, with co-star James Stewart in Two Rode Together (1961) and as the top star in Ford's apologia for Indian genocide, Cheyenne Autumn (1964). On Two Rode Together (1961), Ford feuded with Jimmy Stewart over his hat. Stewart insisted on wearing the same hat he had for a decade of highly successful Westerns that had made him one of the top box office stars of the 1950s. Both he and Widmark were hard-of-hearing (as well as balding and in need of help from the makeup department's wig-makers), so Ford would sit himself far away from them while directing scenes and then give them directions in a barely audible voice. When neither one of the stars could hear their director, Ford theatrically announced to his crew, that after over 40 years in the business, he was reduced to directing two deaf toupees. It was testimony to the stature of both Stewart and Widmark as stars that this was as far as Ford's baiting went, as the great director could be extraordinarily cruel.
Widmark continued to co-star in A-pictures through the 1960s. He capped off the decade with one of his finest performances, as the amoral police detective in Don Siegel's gritty cop melodrama Madigan (1968). Watching "Madigan", one can see Widmark's characters as a progression in the evolution of what would become the late 1960s nihilistic anti-hero, such as those embodied by Clint Eastwood in Siegel's later Dirty Harry (1971).
Im the 1970s, he continued to make his mark in movies and, beginning in 1971, in television. In movies, he appeared primarily in supporting roles, albeit in highly billed fashion, in such films as Sidney Lumet's Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Robert Aldrich's Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977), and Stanley Kramer's The Domino Principle (1977). He even came back as a heavy, playing the villainous doctor in Coma (1978). In 1971, in search of better roles, he turned to television, starring as the President of the U.S. in the TV movies Vanished (1971) (TV). His performance in the role brought Widmark an Emmy nomination. He resurrected the character of "Madigan" for NBC, in six 90-minute episodes that appeared as part of the rotation of "NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie" for the Fall 1972 season. Widmark was married for 55 years to playwright Jean Hazlewood, from 1942 until her death in 1997 (they had one child, Anne, who was born in 1945). He lived quietly and avoided the press, saying in 1971, "I think a performer should do his work and then shut up". "Los Angeles Times" critic Kevin Thomas thought that Widmark should have won an Oscar nomination for his turn in When the Legends Die (1972), playing a former rodeo star tutoring 'Frederic Forrest'. It is surprising to think that Kiss of Death (1947) represented his sole Oscar nomination, but with the rise of the respect for film noir around the time his career began tapering off in 70s, he began to be reevaluated as an actor. Unlike Bogart, who did not live to see his reputation flourish after his death, well before he retired, Widmark became a cult figure.
Mayor Gregor Robertson is rightly putting himself in front of a growing crowd demanding that we wise up in this neck of the woods and implement a regional police force.
Clifford Olson was caught one month after a retired RCMP officer went public and decried the lack of cooperation between local forces.
The Vancouver Mayor - for whom I did not vote and who is to date proving to be one of the best we've had in a long time (look at the excellent results he's managed with his homeless initiative) - is pressuring anyone he can, including other Metro mayors and the Preem, to cut the crap and get in line with the obvious.
A Metro Police Force is a necessity now and foot-dragging from any of the invested neanderthals will be seen for what it is - territorial childishness at public expense.
History will not be honored, at least this year in Quebec.
The planned reenactment of the Plains of Abraham battle that occurred 250 years ago has been cancelled because of threats of violent protests by separatists.
Lovely.
What was the point of building a modern Canada if it is to be intimidated by thugs?
I am the organizer and moderator for a monthly series of debates held at the Vancouver Public Library, downtown branch. Tonight at 7:30 we are discussing the STV electoral reform that will be on the May 12th provincial ballot.
I really wanted to schedule a hearty debate about the real costs of the Olympic Games.
Of course, I have had to abandon all hope of doing that.
You know why.
Because no one from the provincial government or VANOC will argue openly in public about the real costs of the Games.
Turns out no one in the provincial or federal governments will even reveal the true costs of the Games in any forum.
Take yesterday's provincial budget, please.
Olympics security tab under cover in budget
In spite of persistent questioning from many members of the press, Finance Minister Colin Hansen would not say a word on this expenditure of your tax dollars.
Nor will the feds.
This is called Taxation Without Representation.
It is a fundamental violation of the ideals of democracy.
These are the $300,000/year CEO's of the various Health Authorities that soak up enormous portions of our health spending.
They know nothing about addiction problems.
But they are fond of uttering the high-sounding convenient catchphrase of the past decade" "continuum of care."
As soon as I hear this slur on common sense, head for the hills.
As soon as I hear this assault on reason, I know that someone wants to give more addicts more places to shoot up because they are too lazy and frightened to help the addict quit.
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