“Like rats in a maze.” That’s how Ombudsman Andre Marin described the way that the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board treats the victims of crime. So much for “helping the victims.”

For those of you that don’t know already, the CICB is the body that administers the Ontario’s Victim Justice Fund. The CICB is mandated by law to provide compensation to victims of violent crime and their families. Sounds like a good thing, right? The problem is that only about 1 in 40 victims actually get anything, and those that do still manage to get screwed by the bureaucrats…

London, Ont., parent Aurelio Almeida, whose 5-year-old daughter Naiomi was raped and murdered in 2001, was challenged by the CICB to explain what his injuries were.

[…]

The mother of a woman who was decapitated had to provide a form in which a medical practitioner had drawn the location of the injuries on a diagram of a body.

Marin said the stalling and nitpicking was a deliberate attempt by the agency over the last decade to discourage claimants and stay within its budget as required by the ministry of the attorney general.

The OVJF gets its cash from victim surcharges — the extra money tacked on all provincial offences like speeding tickets and booze fines — that range from $10 to $125 until fine is $1,000 or more, when the victim surcharge becomes a flat 25%. That’s a buttload of money when you add it all up. So what DO they do with that money?

Among some of the bureaucratic asshattery that Marin found were:

• Staff at the board developed a “document fetish” and became so obsessed with having their lengthy application forms filled out perfectly that they rejected one man’s claim because he forgot to dot an i in his name.
• Attorney General Michael Bryant broke the law by directing the board not to issue payments to save money and stay under budget.
• Ontario’s Victim Justice Fund has an $80-million surplus that the government refuses to use to compensate victims of crime.
• A man whose five-year-old daughter was raped and murdered who was treated as though he was trying to scam the board of money to pay for her funeral.
• A mother of a murder victim “berated” for forgetting her file number.
• A blind retiree who had to chose between buying food and burying her murdered daughter.

As much as I appreciate his bringing this mess to the light of day, Marin loses me when he starts saying that “It had no money. It was starved and forced into this situation and so the first thing we need to do is fund it properly.”

Andre, buddy; the God damned thing’s got a surplus of EIGHTY MILLION BUCKS!! It ain’t cash-starved. 🙄 No; the problem here — like with so many other governmental bean-counting behemoths — is that the CICB and OVJF aren’t about helping victims at all. They’re about keeping a bunch of lazy, bloated, unionized bureaucrat parasites in jobs at public expense.

Don’t believe me? Well then, if I’m wrong, you’d expect the Fiberals to be hopping to get the damned mess fixed, wouldn’t you (after all, it is an election year)? Of course you would. But they’re not…

After the report’s release, Conservative leader John Tory called on [Ontario Attorney General Michael] Bryant to resign.

What Bryant should do is toss out the CICB chair and the rest of the board. But Bryant indicated he wants them to help implement the changes. 😯

Talk about the fox and the friggin’ henhouse. But do you know what REALLY pisses me off about all this God damned this bullshit? IT’S BEEN GOING ON FOR OVER A DECADE!! The McSquinty Fiberals knew about it and did nothing. “Chainsaw” Mike’s Tory government knew about and did jack shit. When the Dippers were running the show, Bob Rae was as useless on this issue as he was on any other.

Well, it’s hit the fan now and everybody’s gotten splattered with shit; so can we please knock it off with all the partisan prickdom? This one is EVERYBODY’S FAULT…

So quit the squabbling and FIX THE DAMNED THING!!

They’re here! They’re finally here! The waiting is over!

Um… no, I haven’t been drinking. Lent starts today, remember? No, what’s got me all excited is: the awards we’ve all been waiting to hear about have finally been, well, awarded.

Oscar who? No, not those awards, bonehead. I’m talking about the Teddies…

The Canadian Taxpayer’s Federation has come through once again with the Ninth Annual Teddies Waste Awards and let me tell ya, boys and girls, it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of trough-snouters. Here’s just a sampling of the list (WARNING: spoilers follow): 😆

“And the federal Teddy goes to Senator Colin Kenny, once again showing that the last institution to get the memo regarding Canadians’ demands for accountability from lawmakers is the Canadian Senate. Rest assured Senator Kenny, the days of unaccountable officials thinking they can fleece Canadian taxpayers with impunity because they’ll never have to face the electorate will soon be over,” said Ms. Batra as she unveiled the first Teddy of 2007, a beautiful golden sow.

So what are you still doing here? Get your butt over to the CTF’s site and see for yourself. 😛

Where, oh where, oh where do I begin with this one? Let’s face it, boys and girls, we all knew damned well that it wasn’t going to be too long before the Librano$ got to the point where the itch to get their hands back on the national till and back to the business of buggering up the country got to be just too much not to scratch. Lo and behold, in the Commons yesterday, the Fiberals got that collective hind leg up behind their ears and went at it like a 70-year-old viagra addict in a $2 cathouse with a fistful of fifties.

On the off chance that you’ve been either spelunking or in a coma for the last few days, here’s what happened: Greener-than-thou Steffy took his stiffy a little too seriously yesterday and led the Kyoto Kook parade even further off to the Loopy Left when they passed Bill C-ThroughRoseyGlasses (AKA Bill C-288), demanding that the Conservative government under HMPM Harper come up with a plan to meet Kyoto’s “why yes, the moon really is made of green cheese” targets by 2012 . . . within 60 days. Yup, two months. Bibbitty-bobbitty-boo; just like that. Come to think of it, I do know exactly where to begin with this! Now why in the world didn’t I think of it in the first place?? It’s so obvious…

Dear Santa,

Thank you very much for heeding my letter that I sent you back in November. I know that I asked for a Rae Bomb and I should have trusted in your judgement (after all, you’ve been at this a lot longer than I’ve been around). The gift of Steffy “no relation” Dion as national UberGrit is clearly MUCH better and more fun than a Rae Bomb would ever have been. I’ll never doubt you again.

Your friend,
Dennis

This really is an early Christmas present for a guy like me. And it fits in so nicely, too, with the theme that I was going to work on before I got so rudely interrupted there…

Just who the hell does little M. “Do You Think It’s Easy To Make Priorities” think he is, anyway? This little arsehole — along with the Blocheads and Taliban Jack!’s YGBKMP — actually has the gall to demand that Harper do in two months what his party, and he himself as environment minister, utterly failed to do in more than a decade in power: come up with a plan to implement Kyoto by 2012.

And if that didn’t get your bullshitometer up to the redline, try this one on for size: li’l Steffy himself said, on the record to columnist John Ivison, that there was NO POSSIBLE WAY TO IMPLEMENT THE KYOTO TARGETS WITHIN THAT TIMEFRAME and that “energy will be the next crisis for the economy of the world.” See for yourself (emphasis mine, of course):

Dion admits Liberals’ Kyoto goal impossible

National Post 2006-07-01 John Ivison

OTTAWA – Former environment minister Stephane Dion has conceded that a future Liberal government would be unable to meet its Kyoto commitment of reducing greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels.

Mr. Dion, a candidate for the Liberal leadership, said that if he became prime minister after an election next year, he would try to reduce emissions, which are thought to contribute to global warming.

“In 2008, I will be part of Kyoto, but I will say to the world I don’t think I will make it. Everyone is saying target, target. But … it is to be more than to reach a target. It’s to change the economy. It’s to have resource productivity, energy efficiency when we know that energy will be the next crisis for the economy of the world.”

Canada signed up to reduce emissions to 6% below 1990 levels by 2012, but government statistics suggest they are currently around 35% above that level. The Conservative government has said it will not be able to meet Canada’s targets for the first-phase of the Kyoto accord — an admission that has led Liberal critics to charge that the Tories have abandoned Kyoto.

The Liberal party maintains its climate-change plans would meet the 2012 deadline. Mr. Dion is the first senior party figure to cast doubt on that claim.

A spokesman for Environment Minister Rona Ambrose said Mr. Dion’s comments were cause for concern. “It is concerning that the Liberals were prepared to mislead Canadians on the Kyoto targets even though the former Liberal environment minister now admits the targets were unachievable.”

Mr. Dion defended the Liberal record on Kyoto by saying Canada signed on for far-tougher targets than many other countries. “If France does nothing between 1990 and 2010, their emissions are likely to grow by 4%. If Canada does nothing, emissions grow by 44%.”

He said the election of George W. Bush, and the subsequent U.S. decision to pull out of Kyoto, left Canadian industry, and some Cabinet ministers, uneasy with the government’s climate-change plan. [of COURSE! It’s all Bush’s fault!! Gimme a fucking break 🙄 -D]

Mr. Dion advocates binding commitments for industry to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions through a domestic trading system. Companies able to cut their emissions below target levels could then sell credits to less energy efficient businesses. He said he is also working on environmental tax reform and would put the environment at the centre of government. “All my ministries will be green. Maybe I’ll make one department of industry and the environment — a department of sustainability. That’s not a commitment, but if you want to change the mind, you have to change structures.”

So, he does nothing, admits that nothing can be done, and then screeches like a shrill schoolmarm at the Tories for not waving the magic wand and making it all disappear. The Grits even try to accuse Harper of “act(ing) like an emperor” if he chooses to ignore their little parliamentary temper tantrum (which I think he should).

Hell, even Green Party Ubertreehugger Elizabeth May isn’t being fooled by this bullshit publicity stunt. I can’t help but wonder, though… Which do you think is going to get through the Fiberal-dominated Senate first, hmmm? The Federal Accountability Act (which would make the kind of corruption that is the Grits’ stick-in-trade one hell of a lot harder in the future), Bill S-24 (the Senate Tenure Bill), or this little Grit-spawned publicity stunt? Anybody feel like laying some money down on it?

All I can say is: Please, please, please let this trigger an election!! And let it happen BEFORE John Q. Canuck has the chance to doze back off again. Let it happen before the Canadian public can foget that Dion has flip-flopped on everything from Kyoto to Afghanistan to antiterror legislation. Real quick, in point form:

• Librano$ sign Kyoto (a pipe dream), do nothing, blame Tories
• Librano$ pass antiterror measures, now call them draconian
• Librano$ send troops to Afghanistan, now want to run away
• Librano$ to nominate candidates based on crotch plumbing, not merit
• Librano$ get to boot for Adscamâ„¢, Dion welcomes back scammer into the party fold

It’s one thing to be a populist; it’s another thing entirely to make a political career out of twisting in the wind of public opinion. I could go on, but why bother? The facts are that he’s out of touch with regular Canadians, he’s an elitist and he’s weak. The Grits picked everybody’s third choice to lead their party and, as the ads said, Stephane Dion is NOT a leader. Never has been and never will be. The little snot even mewled like a petulant child when someone pointed out that there really IS a problem with wanting to be the leader of one country while being a citizen of another!

Yup. Best Christmas present a little Rightwing nutjob like me ever got. Can we go to the polls now?

Well, I didn’t see this one coming. Usually this is the kind of common sense that you just don’t see from a Lefty but hey, truth really is stranger than fiction. According to the story currently floating about, it seems that some clever little bureaucratic buggers in Queen’s Park seem to think that they’re the second coming of Martha Stewart. They’ve taken it into their little taxpayer-funded heads to yank out and replace all the drapes in the Queen’s Park offices. Never mind that there’s nothing wrong with the ones that are there now; that would just confuse the issue.

That’s right: it seems that those nasty drapes just have to go. As much as this latest waste of my money irks me, it’s not what baffles the bejabbers out of me. Nope. What has me scratching my head damn near hard enough to make my scalp bleed is that the only one who seems to have stood up and called “bullshit” on behalf of Ontario taxpayers so far isn’t a Tory, like you’d expect. He’s not a blue Grit, either. He’s a… er, well… he’s a Dipper… 😯

Peter Kormos is refusing to relinquish his old office curtains for what he describes as an unnecessary and expensive window-dressing exercise at Queen’s Park.

The NDP MPP said he was told by staff that all draperies are being replaced to give the legislative building a uniform look from the outside.

“If Martha Stewart gets elected to the legislature maybe we could understand how this would be a priority,” Kormos told Sun Media yesterday.

Kormos said that when he pressed staff to justify the expense, he was told the new curtains are fireproof.

No one is allowed to smoke in the building, and the existing curtains are in good shape with no signs of deterioration, he said.

“It’s just silly,” Kormos said. “I said, ‘No way, I don’t want you touching my drapes.'”

Well ain’t that the damnedest thing you’ve seen lately? Guess that’s gonna leave ol’ John Guess-What-Party-I’m-With standing there with that “he stole my balloons!” look on his face.

I never thought I’d say this but, hat’s off to the Dipper…

Well, now; lookie here, willya? The Smoking Stasi have new marching orders. Check out what the Fiberals tried to do on the Q-T. It seems that the high-falutin’ Mr “I-Know-What’s-Best-For-You” Jim Watson (Dolt McSquinty’s Ontario Fiberal Minister of Health Promotion) has nothing but your best interests at heart when it comes to banning smoking. Unless you go someplace like a casino, where the Ontario government gets a cut.

Government-owned casinos in Windsor and Niagara Falls are allowed to build outdoor shelters for smokers, even though bars and restaurants in Ontario cannot do so under a provincewide smoking ban, Health Promotion Minister Jim Watson said yesterday.

The Smoke Free Ontario Act, which became law in June, doesn’t allow bars and restaurants to provide enclosed areas to protect smoking patrons from the weather, but Mr. Watson said casinos aren’t covered by that provision because their main business is not serving food or alcohol.

Yeppers. If you slide on in to your local pub (maybe run by a guy having almost as much fun making ends meet as you are) and you feel like a smoke while you’re there, you gotta stand outside in the elements and get soaked, freeze your arse off, or whatever. That’s because, under that lovely little thing called the Smoke Free Ontario Act, that the Grits decided to beat us over the head with, bars and restaurants aren’t allowed to provide even semi-enclosed areas to protect smoking customers from the rain, snow, sleet and other things that aren’t supposed to bother mailmen.

But HEY! Guess what? If you wanna go and blow a bunch of your hard-earned dough in some slots joint where the back-scratching swine from the Big Smoke can snout up to the trough, you get to light up in a jolly little “outdoor covered structure” with walls and a roof and probably ashtrays, too.

Can you say “bullshit,” boys and girls? I knew you could. As the Freeps put it in their editorial page today:

Uh-oh.

This sounds like trouble, smells like a rat and looks like one rule for the government, another for the private sector. To be sure, it’s an injustice of the highest order for Ontario’s hospitality industry.

It’s cynical, it’s hypocritical, it’s a betrayal and it may mark the point at which Ontarians finally lose all faith in the provincial Liberals.

Well, okay. Maybe something good will come out of all this two-faced sanctimony, after all.

We were told, in the most melodramatic of tones, by the Fiberals that the smoking ban was being brought in to protect workers from the Great Plague Of Western Civilization, second hand smoke. The latest HypoGrit hyperbole is that these little smoking pits are all fine and dandy because, Watson has barfed, employees will not have to enter these shelters.

HEY, ASSHOLE: pub and eatery owners were saying the same God damned thing over a year ago when you saddled them with your little bullshit law in the first place!! They also told you that if make going out a pain in the ass for smokers, places like them were going to lose money. Could it be that you’ve finally gotten it through your thick skulls that smokers are going to go to some other place to smoke… and take their money with them? Just like bingo halls and charities said they would.

The casino plan quietly received the green light as revenues plummet because of the tough, new no-smoking law.

Well, DUH! The Grits hooted away that there would be no such drop in revenues because, with all those nasty smokers out of the way, non-smokers would start coming out in droves and smokers would still keep coming out, anyway. Well, that never happened, did it?

News flash, HypoGrits: I smoke. It’s MY CHOICE. And I don’t like going to places where I can’t. Given the choice between a) going out and having to freeze my ass off and b) staying in and having a few friends over to watch the game, have some brews, scarf back some BBQ, whatever… I’m choosing B 9 times out of 10. I used to go out a lot; not anymore. And that’s why so many pubs and restaurants are closing, even though you boneheads said they wouldn’t. You assholes annoyed a bunch of us and cost plenty of other people their jobs.

And, come election day, we aren’t going to forget that.

Well, it was only a matter of time before this happened, wasn’t it? It seems that immigrants — and, more importantly, citizens of convenience — aren’t going to be able to clamp onto the entitlement teat anymore. Hell, they might even lose their precious little citizenship security blanket! Whenever they bugger off back home again, they’re going to have to have their passports date-stamped:

The tracking policy surfaced two weeks ago after officers at Pearson airport were sent a memo from Ottawa ordering the mandatory stamping of the passports.

Anna Pape, of the Canada Border Services Agency, said the stamping policy has always been in the rule book.

“The stamping of permanent residents’ passports upon entry to Canada is nothing new,” Pape said in a statement. “It ensures the effective delivery of immigration programs.”

She said the dates help officers determine if an immigrant should still be here, since a person has to live in Canada for two of the last five years to remain an immigrant.

As you can immagine, citizens of convenience and their mouthpeices are all in an uproar about these ingrates losing their lifetime Get Out Of The Frying Pan Free card:

“This is outrageous,” Immigration lawyer Mendel Green said yesterday. “This will mean people will … be harassed on their return home.”

Well, I guess that depends on where you call “home,” doesn’t it? Back in July, the country was stunned to find that there were somehow FIFTY THOUSAND “Canadians” in Lebanon, all wailing for the government to come and get ’em the hell outta Dodge. I wonder how many of them would still be “Canadians” if that “two of the last five years” rule above — which has been on the books for decades but ignored by the Grits — was actually enforced?

My guess: about 2500.

You want to call yourself Canadian? Then you be Canadian. That means you spend most of your time here, contributing to the rest of the country. And if you’re not willing to do that, then you’re not good enough to live in my country! Get the hell out.

Don’t like that? Tough shit.