Archive for: December 2006

Well, I’ll be danged, Rick Mercer went and did it again… If this keeps up, with him slamming the Librano$ as hard as he was the Tories for so long, I’m gonna start thinking that ol’ Ricky’s not so much biased as he is an equal-opportunity exasperation.

Too bad for the piggies, though; they’re gonna get real tired if that happens… 😆

Some people don’t need to be told some things. Some people just already know things like: water is wet; fire is hot; if you run nekkid through a blizzard, you’re going to freeze your twig and berries off… stuff like that. Other folks, though, need to blow a buttload of taxpayers’ money to figure out whether or not a bear craps in the woods. And that‘s just what they got in Nova Scotia, following the 11-month inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the tragic death of Theresa McEvoy (right), who was killed by 16-year old Archie Billard as he was fleeing, stoned, at high speeds from police through the streets of Halifax in October of 2004. Billard was already facing 27 charges related to a string of car thefts.

And guess what the conclusion they reached was? That the YCJA is TOO DAMNED LENIENT!

HALIFAX (CP) – Canada’s youth justice system must be tightened to protect the public from dangerous teens whose lives are “spiralling out of control,” a Nova Scotia inquiry has concluded.

Well, DUUUHHH!!! Figured that out all by themselves, did they? The rest of us have known that since the damn thing was passed. Some of the recommendations in retired judge Merlin Nunn’s 381-page report are [all emphasis mine]:

• make it easier for judges across Canada to detain teenagers before trial
• changes to the definition of “violent offence” in the Act to include conduct that endangers or is likely to endanger the lives and safety of others
• staff at the Windsor courthouse should be provided with “adequate and working telephone, facsimile, printing, computer equipment, and e-mail communication,” along with access to the province’s online justice information system
• allow judges to detain youths if they show “a pattern of offences”
• slash the time lag between when a youth is arrested and they first appear in court [average 175 days in NS] to “within one week of arrest“
• more Crown attorneys and a fully staffed attendance centre where youth who are released on bail will be forced to regularly meet with probation officers before their trial

In a prepared statement, the former judge said the title of his report – Spiralling Out of Control: Lessons Learned from a Boy in Trouble – was chosen to reflect the fact that Billard’s life was headed into a “remarkable crime spree.”

“None of our responses seemed to be effective in stopping him,” Nunn wrote. “They should have.”

Personally, I think we need a hell of a lot more than that but I suppose this is as good a start as any. Now look for the usual handwringing suspects to start popping out of the woodwork to bemoan that those advocating stronger measures “just don’t understand the real nature of the problem” and all the other usual pap.

Dundas Street is closed yesterday between Clarence and Richmond streets while police investigate a mysterious shooting spree. (MORRIS LAMONT, The London Free Press)

Well, it’s been a day now and cops in London are still fiddling with the jigsaw puzzle of what the hell happened on Dundas between Richmond and Clarence on Sunday night. About the only thing that’s known for sure so far is that two guns likely means two shooters. Onc source tells me that cops found two types of casings at the scene: .45 ACP and 9mm Parabellum; two of the most popular calibres from the top 10 of the scumbags’ hit parade.

While it’s bad enough that these malcontents seem to think that it’s fine and dandy to turn the middle of the city into the damned OK Corral, but the local citizenry doesn’t seem to be more interested in being part of the problem than in being part of the solution:

None of the street-level witnesses contacted police.

“It takes more than police to make a community safe,” Chief Murray Faulkner said. “Absolutely no one has come forward to tell us why this thing started. Nobody.”

[…]

Officers arriving at the scene arrested five people at gunpoint on Clarence. Investigators later determined they weren’t involved in the shooting and were released.

Four of them, however, were charged with obstructing an officer. “There was a big skirmish,” Pfeffer said.

Gee whiz, isn’t that just jolly? Cops haven’t even had any luck finding a victim (if there is one) yet. For those keeping count, this is the second shooting in downtown London in as many months. The sooner the Harper government passes its “reverse onus” legislation the better. Maybe then we can finally get these buggers off the streets and keep them there… 🙄

[UPDATE]
It seems that the cops have finally hit paydirt, after a fashion.

Most people that pop by here, even just every now and then, know by now that I’m something of a fan of conservative journalist, publisher and editor (not to mention regular contributor to the Calgary Sun) Ted Byfield. For those not familiar with him, Ted has a great way of hitting the nail right on the head sometimes and often — though, I suspect, purely unintentionally — manages to come up with articles about topics that have been on my own mind lately; some of which I’d been working on writing about myself. The bothersome bit about it is that he damn near always does it better than me. He went and did it again yesterday…

Tinkering left society’s institutions in tatters

Those who predicted the consequences were dismissed as being out of touch with reality.

By TED BYFIELD

There’s an old saying that if you castrate the stallion, you shouldn’t complain that he no longer sires young.

I think of this when I see modern society frantically trying to replace the institutions, it has been diligently castrating for the last 30 or 40 years.

Take the family, for instance.

First we decided that divorce should be made easy, then stood back alarmed when we discovered so many couples breaking up, often leaving women to raise children without a father.

At the same time, we came to deplore women whose main career aspiration was to have babies and raise them to adulthood.

We called their lives wasted. Then we were aghast to see our birthrate descend to levels so low our culture and society cannot survive.

Again, we decided women should really have a career, earn good money, and not remain “chained” to the household. But then we were horrified to see the spectacle of “latch-key children” whose parents were not there when they came home from school, and began getting into trouble.

The complete article is here.

Here’s some more crap that I don’t need; and neither does anyone else who lives in this city.

At least my weekend went off pretty well: I got to spend some time with my boy as we worked on a school project he’s doing on Juno Beach. Not a bad way to spend my time, I think. So, Monday notwithstanding, I was in a pretty good mood this morning as I hopped on the bus to get to work.

The LTC sardine can, with its cargo including yours truly, boogied on down Dundas just like it does every day until it got to Wellington; then it turned right, made for Queens and headed west again.

“Oh, fer [badword]’s sakes,” I thought. I had been assuming that construction season was supposed to be over, at least until Wiarton Willy tells us how much longer we can play hockey outside. So I hop out at Queens & Richmond — about 50 metres from where Ahmed Moalin–Mohamed decided to scratch his itchy trigger finger on Thanksgiving weekend — and started walking the extra two blocks that had been added on to my way to work today. On the bright side, my adjusted route took me past a Timmy’s and, let’s face it, a little Timmy’s on the way to work never hurt anyone.

No luck with that either, though. No sooner do I get to D&R then I’m stopped dead in my tracks by the cop on the far side of the yellow police tape stretching clear across Dundas Street.

“Sorry folks, but the street’s closed,” the cop said, in the most polite voice that a guy freezing his butt off and wanting to be someplace else can be expected to muster. “There’s been a shooting.”

Several of us were then informed that getting to work on time this morning was something that we could just save ourselves the trouble of worrying about; the street was closed from Richmond to Clarence and nobody was getting in. Period. Which led to the next natural question: closed for how long?

“Hopefully, we’ll be all finished here within the next three hours or so,” advised the officer, managing the difficult feat of simultaneously conveying both a courteous demeanour and the unmistakable impression that this was something that he was absolutely not willing to be screwed with about.

It turns out that about ten or so shots were squeezed off (not fifty feet from where I work) sometime in the wee hours of the morning today, likely around 02:45, by at least two shooters and once again, we’ve got a couple of gun-toting scumbags running around London:

Police arrived and arrested five people, but said early today those arrested are in custody on “unrelated matters.”

Dundas Street between Clarence and Richmond is still closed as police investigate.

I can remember, not so long ago, when things like this just plain didn’t happen in London. Now, it’s getting to be more and more like TO has been becoming for some time now. If this crap keeps up, we’ll have our own “year of the gun” soon enough…
More on this later.

Okay, I’ve kept my trap shut on this one for a bit because, to be blunt about it, I never saw this one coming in a million years. For both of you that haven’t heard yet, Stephane Dion is the new Grand Grit, crowned in Montreal yesterday.

Now, you might be forgiven for sitting there going, “Stephane who??” Don’t feel bad; I sure as heck didn’t pay a lot of attention to this guy during the race. Me, I was hoping the Librano$ would drop the Rae bomb and nuke themselves in the next general election.

But never in my life would I have guessed that the Fiberals would have gone with Dion like they did. To be completely honest, even I didn’t think that the Liberals were that dumb. Let me see if I’ve got this straight or not. The federal Fiberals — driven from office by the stench of sleaze and corruption emanating mostly from the party’s Quebec wing — think they have a plan for getting back in the saddle:

1. Elect a leader from Quebec who is virtually unknown in the ROC and speaks the worst English since Jonny Cretin
2. ???
3. Form another majority and get back to robbing the national till again

Who’s running this outfit, anyway; the Underpants Gnomes???

Is it just me, or does anyone else wonder if poor Stephane just might end up being the dog that caught the bus: okay, he’s got the damned thing… now what the hell does he do with it?