200 Anomalies

Posted on by Pete Cross

I have never been a conspiracy theorist. Never. I find most theories absolutely ridiculous, not to mention logistically impossible; and all require an unfathomable level of cooperation and silence. However, there is one set of circumstances which is now stretching my ability to not think something is afoot– to the point that I am beginning to wonder if there is a concerted effort, perpetrated by a relatively large group, to conceal a major truth and preserve an accepted narrative.

I am speaking of the Tk’emlups te Secwepema First Nation in Kamloops who in May of this year passed their third anniversary in the “investigation” of what they had portrayed as a massive burial site of Indigenous children; innocent child victims of the residential school system, whose deaths are all part of a master planned “genocide” of their culture and beliefs. It was a horrendous pronouncement. Over the past three years the Indigenous and their loyal proponents have tempered down their initial statements and their claims of “mass graves”. But it was those statements which caused Trudeau to take a knee, lowered the flags to half-mast for 161 days and sent the media into daily paroxysmal outraged headlines. The headlines completely designed to ignite “colonial” guilt. All the governments of Canada began stepping over each other in efforts to apologize and began bringing in policies to assuage that projected guilt. Everyone demanded a making of amends and our governments brought forward billions in funds in an effort to soothe those gaping wounds of what they declared as being the result of systemic racism.

The story and the outrage began somewhat innocently, with a ground penetrating radar (GPR) survey of the grounds around the residential school in Kamloops, all part of a study by Dr. Sarah Beaulieu. The Dr. through her survey, then publicly identified 215 “anomalies” below the earth’s surface. The Kamloops band and the media enjoined everyone to believe that these “anomalies” could only be the graves of tortured, mis-treated and abused defenceless children at the hands primarily of the Catholic Church. The story echoed world wide. There were even comparisons to the Holocaust.

Three years later, most reasonable voices have walked back the language. However, there are those that hold true to the original narrative. People such as Grand Chief Stewart Phillip still portray the history of the residential schools as “deeply disturbing” and that it was all a “horrible chapter in the racist history of Canada”, and that the schools were a “brutal tool of genocide”. The Kamloops Chief Rosanne Casimir is no less inflammatory in her statements and states that anyone disagreeing or doubting some of the historical “facts” she says is merely evidence of the “systemic racism and white supremacy as foundational to Canada as the very Federal laws that ripped our children away from their families.”

The conclusive evidence of this “genocide” was believed to be in easy reach, it was just below their feet in those unmarked “graves”. So how has the evidence gathering been going you might ask after three long years. How much progress has been made in the recovery of those remains? I am being somewhat facetious, as everyone knows who follows this story– not one “grave” has been exhumed in over three years. To date the Band has spent $8 million (they will not outline or detail how that money has been spent) but clearly it has not been spent on trying to recover the physical remains– which again, are the central pieces of verifiable evidence of their case, and the single irrefutable forensic piece of the puzzle.

So what are they doing? How is the obvious first step in this type of investigation been ignored? That question is not really being answered. The Chief of course assures us that the people involved in the “investigation” are doing a “very credible job” and that “the investigation continues to be carried out in compliance with Secwepema laws, legal traditions, world views, values and protocols” and that they “…are deep in the investigative work”. She insists that it is all being done with a “multi-disciplinary” approach; using archival and documentary research and analysis, “truth telling with KIRS survivors… archaelogical and anthropological surveys, …potential DNA and other forensic methods”.

That all sounds quite sophisticated although I am at a loss to understand “world views, values and protocols” but in the end, the results of their efforts to date are still unexposed, or at least have not been made public.

Meanwhile, over these past years, a contrarian narrative is beginning to mount and some experts have become suspicious of the Indigenous claims. A number of qualified and esteemed scientists and academics are starting to press forward and their investigations are revealing some interesting albeit controversial opinions. They are being ridiculed, branded heretics and racists, for even suggesting a different story. Although simply calling people names rather that attack the findings seems too easy, it seems lazy.

Some of these counter narratives and alternate findings do warrant further examination. Even at the risk of being branded a dangerous dissenter. For instance, we have now learned that at this burial site, in 1924, a septic field was built for the school, which consisted of 2000′ of trenches, 3′ deep, lined with clay tiles and running in an east to west direction. The GPR profile of the trenches would present a similar profile to the detected anomalies, which in essence is measuring disturbances in the earth patterns. (It should also be noted that Dr. Beaulieu has not publicly produced her detailed report on the “soil disturbances”)

We have also learned that Dr. George Nicholas a distinguished professor from Simon Fraser University Indigenous Archaeology Program between 1991 to 2005; in conjunction with the Band, conducted a study of the area which in essence found little of particular interest. One “alleged juvenile tooth” which was found was later proven to be not a human tooth at all. In light of this program, the list of 215 anomalies had to be reduced down to 200; because they have now determined that 15 of those sightings were actually shovel marks from that previous study.

The most extensive detrimental evidence which has now come forward comes in the highly controversial book “Grave Error”. The book has been reviewed and reported in the Dorchester Review. (The Mayor of Quesnel was stripped of his budget, and barred from Committees because of his very distribution of the book –because of a complaint by the Lhtako Dene leadership).

The authors of the book gathered data from the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation; the Library and Archives Canada; and the B.C. Archives Genealogy resources, for the period 1915 to 1964. In examining this data they found that 51 children were documented to have died during this period of time. They were able to find accounts for 49 of the 51. The cause of death was found in 35 of those cases. Seventeen had died in hospital, 8 had died on their own reserve from accidents or illness, 4 were subject of autopsies, and 7 were subject of Coroners inquests. Twenty- four were determined to have been buried on the Indian reserve cemetery and 4 on the Kamloops Reserve cemetery. This latter is the old community cemetery on the the other side of the Reserve near St Josephs church. Whether one accepts all, or any part of these numbers, one would have at least to concede that the findings do suggest that there was no ongoing effort of concealment or a hiding of these particular children’s deaths.

In addition in 1935 the Department of Indian Affairs set out procedures for the handling of deaths of students at residential schools. Upon any death there was to be an Agent present on an inquiring committee which included a doctor, and the principal of the school and that at one time the site would have had rudimentary grave markers that likely just disappeared over time. It is also now believed that the site might also contain priests and nuns who worked at the school.

So where does this leave us? When questioned about any excavation of the site in March of 2024, the Kamloops Chief will only say that it would be a “sensitive step”, and that they are still working on the “oral tellings”. Apparently they are still content to listen to decades old recounts of the things that happened at the school, stories which under normal circumstances have a tendency to to distortion, augmentation, or inaccuracy. All the while the only true indisputable evidence represented by the bodies lay beneath their feet.

Depending on how one measures the dollars being spent, this is also proving to be a very expensive “investigation”. The Band states that they have now spent $7.9 million on the investigation, but if you include periphery expenses, there is the $3.1 million for the Student Death Registry, and a total of $238.8 million for the Residential School Missing Childrens Community Support Fund, which expires in 2025.

In all fairness, there would seem to be little doubt that the schools were in fact set up to assimilate the Indigenous culture; however there is mounting evidence that this was not a conscious effort to eradicate cultures and customs. And lets face it the Catholic Church, has come under heavy scrutiny in the last number of years for the behaviours inside the Church and under the cover of religion. However, the residential schools as cultural genocide, as the Indigenous claim, seems very much open to debate. However, to date, no debate is to be allowed. No accountability for the findings and the monies being spent are being asked for or demanded.

So is this an investigation or is it a story? The popular and current narrative is definitely needed by the Indigenous to underline and stir the flames of a move to greater political power and financial independence. Is it possible that to maintain the story and its credibility that there has been a conscious decision not to excavate for fear that it would damage the story that lies at the heart of their claims? We will never know unless there is some level of accountability, or someone on the inside deems to come forward. Is it possible that no excavation may ever be done, as has already been proposed, that it simply become a memorial site? If that happens, you can be assured that this was never an investigation, nor was it ever intended to be one– that this was just a story, in fact it may have even been a fable.

Photo Courtesy of Flickr Commons and David Stanley – Some Rights Reserved

Another change in Seasons…

Posted on by Pete Cross

As we head into Fall and wind down from summer, it inevitably seems to be a time of imposed reflection. Fall traditionally signals an ending, a time of maturity and incipient decline. This Fall though there are some unusual stirrings in the political winds of Canada and to a certain extent around the world. It could prove to be a welcome breeze, especially for any person involved in policing or involved in the legal system.

Some pundits including Time magazine have called 2024 the “year of elections” . The results in many countries seem to reflect a growing conservatism amongst the democratic countries, a swing away from the socialist progressive agenda. This is fuelled in large part by the realization that there is in fact a defined need for the police, that there is room in a democratic society for enforcement of the existing laws. There is also a desire to remove the politics out of the governmental system and oversight of the legal arms of society. Unlike years past, this time, especially in Canada, the move to a more conservative ideology may be more long lasting.

Now, before those positioned on the far right of the spectrum get too excited, a possible swing to the right is in essence, in Canada, merely a move to the centre. It only seems drastic and is being portrayed as momentous merely because of the fact that the pendulum was so far left for so many years. That being said I do believe that the vast majority of Canadians would like to return to some sort of common sense middle ground. This shifting in sentiment is often hard to discern or measure, often disguised by the fact that they are such small incremental steps. However, it is becoming much clearer that the issue of law and order has once again risen to the top.

I live in Vancouver British Columbia, the wellspring of inanity, where we learn of another grotesque criminal act on a daily basis, for the most part being instigated by the homeless, the mentally disturbed and the drug addicted. The latest was another stabbing, in broad daylight and with no motive. One male stabbed to death, another male knifed and actually had his hand severed from his body. It was perpetrated by an individual who could be the poster child of the wrong headedness of our court system, another too familiar example of where the combination of mental health and criminality collides forcefully and is played out on public streets in broad daylight. All while citizens look on or stop to record it on their phones. This latest suspect male had over 60 encounters with the police, was on probation, and had a history of assault and assault causing bodily harm. His current probation conditions was termed as being “soft”.

The story fomented the usual media hype, the Mayor coming out quickly to assure everyone that this is a “safe city” –when those of us that live amongst the daily visions of unbridled mental illness and drug abuse clearly know better. The Vancouver City Police Chief Adam Palmer when sharing the podium, seemed exasperated and in his statement gave a not so subtle hint that the suspect should not have been out on the streets. The media as usual called for instant solutions to undo the years of policy mistakes, the biggest mistake being the closing of the local psychiatric hospital “Riverview” in 2012.

In the Vancouver and British Columbia political establishment the leaders are clearly taking note of the growing public discontent and it is now looming as the single most important political election issue. Along with this is that in British Columbia there has been a dramatic up-ending of the three political parties in the Province. The Liberal Party (who re-branded themselves the B.C United), they, who were the power brokers for many years in this Province, have simply given up; they have literally withdrawn from the next Provincial election scheduled for November 2024. They have surrendered the proverbial ghost and have freed their candidates to wander away into obscurity or go join the Conservative party. This leaves it a two party race, which is polling now as a neck and neck battle between the governing NDP and the Conservatives.

The upcoming election, if nothing else, will allow the voters to distinguish between two distinct policy groups, the socialists or the conservatives, and should therefore provide a more accurate glimpse of the mood of the people. The Conservatives are predictably running on a platform of law and order and a greater move to private enterprise. They are in essence saying that they want the government to get out of the way. The NDP whose party base are traditionally the victimized and marginalized groups (you pick the group), the unions, and any and all members of the “learned” left. These “progressives” have the added advantage of massive support from the current media establishment, the Indigenous, government workers and the academic institutions. The NDP are remaining true to their ideology and are sticking with policies of all people being part of, by necessity, a fulsome government oversight apparatus. It has been a long time since there has been such a clear choice for the people going to the ballot box and currently it seems be an even battle.

It is always fun at election time to watch all the candidates feel bolstered and sharing their insights on all of the evident problems and the clear solutions that lay ahead. Solutions which they did not see while in power but have now attained a greater vision when in sight of a ballot box. What is equally clear is that it is always someone else’s fault.

When talking about crime and rampant lawless behaviour, the Provincial NDP who have been in power for the last five years in British Columbia (the California of Canada for all you Canadians who live in the east) quickly point to the Federal Liberals as the problem. And to be fair, the Feds are the governing body when it comes to the Criminal Code. The offended Feds in turn point back at the Provinces because they are in charge of Health Care and the current sitting Judiciary. The Provincial leaders then rebound and point the accusing finger downward to the cities as they are responsible for enforcement. Three levels of government, all with no defined action plan in terms of the daily carnage on the streets and apparently unable to find any solutions while in power, now telling everyone they now know the way.

As we in the West look eastward, Alberta has always been Conservative and the Prairies are very similar. Doug Ford in Ontario is now trying to get a Conservative election victory prior to any Federal Election. Newfoundland is the only true vestige left of Federal Liberal supporters.

The Federal NDP and their illustrious shrill leader Jagmeet Singh dramatically announced that he is “ripping up” his prop-up agreement with the Federal Liberals; while at the same time vowing not to be rushed into any confidence vote. It would seem that he has finally realized that the Liberals are circling the drain and he either goes down with them, or finally leaves the safety of the Liberal cocoon for the less than safe seats of his own party. His ratings are below Trudeau but he is hoping his chances will improve with a continuous socialist rhetoric of corporate greed. He is hoping that someone out there actually agrees with him, but his chances of disappearing altogether is growing. The policing fraternity are hoping that the NDP policies disappear with him.

Now Trudeau himself is another story. His actions to date only raise questions for me. As he reads the latest polls and gathers his troops in Nanaimo this week, is he being driven by pure ego? Does he think he can spend his way to a rise in the polls and another minority government? His strategy for a possible re-election is singular. He will continue to try and and will have to make Polievre turn into Trump.

Polievre for his part, will continue to try and avoid any major guffaws and keep his newly coiffed hair and refined look in place. He has to walk a fine line, because he certainly is not going to get any votes from the public service or those that depend on government contracts. The same foes of the BC Conservatives are the same foes for the Federal Conservatives. Let’s face it, what are the chances that members of the CBC vote for him?

Of course there is not a strong enough wind to blow all the usual problems off the headlines and the teleprompters of our television talking heads. In terms of specific policing issues, in the next few months the Surrey RCMP and the Surrey Police Service will continue to dominate the local BC headlines with the snail like place of getting officers on the ground and the equally slow moving RCMP in getting their officers out. The Indigenous will continue to dominate headlines with further demands and true to form, just recently tore up their latest signed agreements for a natural gas pipeline with TC Energy. There is little doubt that the RCMP will once again be manning the barricades in northern B.C.

Back east I have a growing interest in the Bill Majcher case, charged as he is with foreign interference and there are some interesting parallels to the Cameron Ortis case. There is a good chance that CSIS and the RCMP INSET (Integrated National Security Teams) may look bad on this one as they continue to struggle to be a meaningful service amongst the Five Eyes. So we need to keep our own eyes on that one. Their is evidence now coming forward that Majcher was throughout several periods of time , actually working for CSIS.

In a more general sense, the Mounties in Ottawa will continue to find themselves in an environment of increasing public suspicion. They seem to be floundering in terms of leadership and in finding their true reason(s) for being. The larger overall problems have been years in the making and it will be years in the undoing. They will however, continue to do what they still do best. They will apologize somewhere. The most recent was in Nova Scotia where they apologized to the African Nova Scotians for “historic” use of street checks.

There will be the usual public government pronouncements, the Federal government employees will continue to protest having to go back to work 3 days a week and will come up with any inane excuse they can find. Housing prices will stay the same, inflation will continue to hover around 3% and mortgage rates will have little effect on the supplies of housing. The media will continue to pump us full of doomsday proclamations; headlines about droughts, floods, fires, heat, cold, or anything they decide is “record breaking”. Our traditional news sources will continue to be decimated and their managers will continue to replace long time journalists with persons who are quick on the keys to Instagram, and Substack. Ukraine seems to be in military limbo and Israel seems to heading into the same horrendous stalemate in Gaza.

However, life will go on. Get ready, get your thoughts in order and be a little hopeful, as it is never as bad as it seems. Its only an ill wind that blows nobody any good.

Photo courtesy of Jeannine St- Amour via Flickr Commons – Some Rights reserved

Ronald MacDonald wants to go to court more…

Posted on by Pete Cross

Of course the title of this blog is not referring to that icon of our childhood, the “… Happy Hamburger Clown” of Golden Arches fame; although he has had his legal issues too (he was sued civilly for promoting child obesity.) No, this is in reference to Ron MacDonald, the current head of the Independent Investigations Office (IIO) for the Province of British Columbia. This is the group, with an annual budget of about $10 million, that is mandated to “conduct investigations into police-related incidents resulting in death or serious harm to determine whether any officer may have committed an offence”. There is a general consensus growing that the group is in trouble, it is not fulfilling it’s mandate, in fact many say they are failing and failing miserably. Mr. MacDonald himself has recently been speaking out on his own frustrations.

The police could not and should not investigate themselves was the repeated slogan coming from those of the political left of centre a number of years ago. It stirred the politicians to act in September of 2012. Like most political policy, it was the result of a political reaction to a rather immature and naive understanding of police wrongdoing. The theme had been pushed forward by a vocal minority, which in turn was then given an audience by the Davies and Braidwood inquiries, which looked into the deaths of Frank Paul and Robert Dziekanski respectively.

Paul was a 48 year old Mi’kmaq who Vancouver Police officers tried to book into the “drunk” tank, but they were turned away when the on duty Sgt said that he had only just released Mr. Paul, two hours before from cells and he wasn’t going to book him again after such a short period of time. So the officers took Paul away and returned him to the downtown alley. He was clearly still intoxicated and he subsequently died of exposure and hypothermia in the alley. However, after a total of five Crown reviews of the case, all concluded that “charges were not warranted” against the Vancouver City officers involved.

Dziekanski was a more widely reported incident where police responded to a disturbance in the Vancouver Airport, when Dziekanski a Polish immigrant who had just arrived, was wandering disoriented around the terminal and then began causing a ruckus. Four officers attended and tasered him saying they felt threatened. Dziekanski died of heart failure. The four officers believed they were both justified in their actions and within the limits of their training. Some of the officers were charged, but not for the death, but for perjuring themselves during the Braidwood inquiry. Judge Braidwood at the inquiry conclusion said that the officers “didn’t intend to cause his death”.

So what prompted the birth of the IIO was a political demand, which used as it primary evidence two cases– both of which showed there was no wrong-doing on the part of the police.

Irony aside, the first IIO chief was Richard Rosenthal, who left the job early to return to the world of academia and probably did not leave the best impression. He was then succeeded by Mr. MacDonald in 2017. MacDonald came from the legal world, he was a defence counsel for 6 years, and then a Prosecutor for 17 years and had a distinguished record. All of which makes his recent comments a little more perplexing.

In short Mr. Macdonald is now making a case and has gone public with his concerns about the lack of charges being approved in the IIO cases that were presented to Crown Counsel. What prompted his comments seems to have been, once again, a political reflex to some media pressure centred around two Indigenous cases.

One case involves a 38 year old Wet’suwet’en named Jared Lowndes, who during his arrest the police had to use a taser, a police dog, and then after ramming his vehicle, he was eventually shot in a Tim Hortons parking lot. The Crown in that case concluded and stated that they were “unable to prove that officers committed any offence in relation to the incident”.

The second case involved Dale Culver, a Wet’suwet’en and Gitxsan indigenous male who during his arrest was pepper sprayed and punched when checked by police who were answering a call where it was alleged that he was “casing vehicles”. During the course of their investigation the IIO went to three different pathologists all of whom identified the primary cause of death as “tiny blood clots in lungs”, but that the blunt force trauma by the officers was a “contributing factor”. The IIO felt that the officers should have been charged based on the “contributing factor”. The Crown in their review went to a fourth pathologist, who identified the cause of death as being “cardiac arrest due to the effects of methamphetamine”. So after seven years, the officer was given an absolute discharge.

During this time, the officer’s career has been put on hold and he had been subjected to death threats. The Union of BC Indian Chiefs, who clearly feel that they have not only the right to disagree and inflame the issue, but also feel that they should be the ultimate arbiters of any criminal case involving their own, issued a statement saying: “We have a system that says when you have a gun and a badge, you can kill any Indigenous person in any town in B.C. and not go to jail”. The stupidity of the statement went un-challenged by the government.

Mr. MacDonald regardless of whether these particular cases motivated him, says the system isn’t working. He tips his political hand a bit though when he states the people have “lost faith in the system..in particular Indigenous communities.” He may have lost faith, but far be it for me to point out to a lawyer an obvious truism. The Crown has always operated on the premise of “substantial likelihood of conviction”. They have a legal need to prove a case of guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt”. Does Mr. MacDonald not see the reasonable doubt in the Culver case?

The IIO has been on shaky ground since its inception. The mandate given from the beginning was much too broad, and this was pointed out even by Rosenthal in his departure. He said at the time that it was going to cause a backlog of causes when there was no ability to “triage” the cases.

There was also a large problem in the staffing this organization. The government of the day said that the overall intention, once established, was to have all “civilian investigators”. Remember the police could not be trusted in their theoretical framework. So they limited the ability of ex-officers who could apply, especially those from B.C. If you carry this logic forward, the thought was that investigating an “officer related shooting” did not require any policing experience or knowledge of police operational structures.

There were also internal problems in the beginning, which seem to be continuing today. In 2015 there were investigations into allegations of “bullying and harassment”, allegedly due to the culture clash from hiring former police officers. During this time 17 investigators, and five non-investigative staff left the organization, only a couple of years after its inception. Flash forward to 2023 and Mr. Macdonald began speaking out and complaining of the lack of investigative resources. By then there were only 19 investigators working and 17 unfilled positions. To add to the resourcing problems, officer related shootings had increased by three times from the previous years.

The IIO in 2023 had been called in 232 cases, of which 193 led to further investigations. At the time of the article, they had 90 open investigations involving 38 deaths. In 2023, 50% of the staff were still ex-police officers and Mr MacDonald and his management staff were in turn being internally and publicly accused of bad behaviour “which created a hostile work environment… with their “belittling behaviour”.

So now in 2024 Mr. MacDonald’s has further complaints which he recently took to the air waves on the local radio station CKNW. Mr. Macdonald is now complaining about the lack of charge approval which he says is leading to a failing in “police accountability”. In the last five years, the IIO has recommended 39 cases for charge, and only 18 were approved for charge. Even more startling is the fact that since the IIO inception in 2012, only 15 cases reached the court stage, and there were 0 convictions. There was no mention of the length of time for these matters to get through the court process, which the IIO is hesitant to speak about, at least on their own official website.

If one assumes these stats to be correct, there are only a few possible answers to Mr. MacDonalds problems. One being that cases without merit are being forwarded, or the investigations being forwarded are flawed and incomplete; and simply do not meet the charge approval threshold. Or b) the process itself is not working. If it is the former, then it also may be possible that in the vast majority of cases the police are in fact innocent, and simply doing their job and doing it properly.

If it is “the process” then there are significant layers to that problem. Understaffing is clearly one of those problematic layers, as there is no possible way that you can take on every referral with such limited staff and capabilities. So you need to cut the mandate or “triage” the files more expertly as was suggested by Rosenthal.

You also need to forget the “civilianization” of the investigative team. You need to bring in ex-police officers with high levels of expertise and with significant standing amongst other current police officers. They are out there, but you need to go and find them. Building credibility is absolutely key and they have not done that since their inception. Currently the IIO is fighting the police forces, or specifically their unions on two fronts; on the access to police notes and in the area of “lethal force experts” –who are usually ex-police officers brought in to testify. They should not have to fight these fights, and better quality investigators with greater credibility will go a long way in working through those issues.

The problems within IIO are not new. They are similar to the problems which in more recent times arose from the “de-funding” era. It is a fundamental failure in common sense. The IIO mandate and their make-up is clearly flawed and has been from the beginning. One may even have to conclude that the best people to investigate the police may be the police themselves. Whether the public perception changes and the media narrative becomes less inflammatory towards the police, or whether the government understands this, is quite another matter.

Photo courtesy of Flickr Commons by David Jackmanson – Some Rights Reserved

An Open Invitation

Posted on by Pete Cross

This blog issue is somewhat out of the norm–it is more of a request and an invitation. For quite some time I have been toying with the idea of reaching out to the readers of this blog for your assistance.

I have been thinking about this idea for quite some time, an idea which has grown from a couple of observations. Firstly, the numbers of readers of this blog has grown over the past number of years. Currently the blog is being read in all parts of Canada and there has even been a reader or two from overseas. On a strictly personal level, it has enabled me to connect with the past, officers who I worked with over the years, or people that I have met through these last few decades either by circumstance or situation. In all these meetings or conversations I almost always learn something new, or hear a story I have never heard before. The stories range in scope, much like the types of people who are telling them; some are comical, some are dramatic, and some are heart wrenching and tragic.

Secondly, I have also come to realize that there are a lot of individuals out there who have a way with words. They have literary talents in my humble opinion. So then the question became for me can we harness these talents, and is this blog a possible forum for those that would be inclined to share, and just as importantly are willing to put the thankless time and effort into writing?

Are there issues that need to be covered, are there stories which bear some further investigation and examination? Of course. This is a broad world and the theoretical and practical elements of policing touch on all facets of our society. Clearly, there are many subject areas which I know nothing about. I also find myself continually asking myself whether my ideas and thoughts have been made redundant by time. The basic principles of policing remain the same, but the experiences and perspectives are clearly changing.

So I am asking if anyone out there wants to send in their thoughts and writings to me to have them posted here?

The blog would thus take on a more open magazine format. I am imagining a like a “New Yorker”, not so much the “Blue Line”. The latter magazine clearly serves a purpose and they do a commendable job, but it is an industry magazine for policing. The publisher also publishes a magazine for firefighters, and cannabis producers. There are articles by police managers, articles on “note taking” and the “history of handcuffs” (in the latest edition) set amongst a lot of advertising for body armour or flashlights. The editors of the magazine have a background in publishing industrial magazines, not policing, and I think that makes a difference in what makes it into the pages.

I see this blog and this proposal as more of a call for an open literary forum, a town hall soap box if you will, covering a wider range of topics, more philosophical, more academic than opinion. I am curious and would like to hear from all the voices on the other side –those that tend to remain silent amongst the chaos around them. I would encourage all those voices to come forward; spouses of officers, civilians, members of the public, the trainers, the staffing officers, the executive ranks, and those in uniform working the shifts and guzzling the Tim Horton’s coffee. I would also like to hear from those that like to find things out, they like to investigate, research the topic, and then present their evidence. The policing world is by circumstance and by choice an opaque world, one where shining a light into the corners of the room is frowned upon, often discouraged, and sometimes punished. That needs to change.

Obviously, there have to be some rules to the game and what I am proposing.

a) First and foremost I will need to maintain editorial oversight, the blog is in my name, and therefore forms my reputation.

b) The written work should be no longer than 1500 words, and can be sent on Pages or Word documents.

c) You will need to identify who you are but you can ask for it to be printed anonymously, but I personally will need to know who is writing. I would correspond and advise anyone whose blog I would like to post ahead of time. All submissions would be stored and maintained in a separate and secure location.

d) The subject material should not be just a personal grievance, or a personal complaint, it should have a broader audience. Nor obviously can it be racist or derogatory, slanderous or a mere rant, as neither serves any purpose and is usually in the end quite boring. It does not have to be a positive comment, but any negative, or positive comment for that matter, should be presented with the evidence. It can be irreverent but not crass.

It can either be fiction or non-fiction.

The idea is to develop, present, and to orchestrate a dialogue. Ideally it will be different than what you have seen or read in the past, it will hopefully present new ideas, or open up fresh points of view, and hopefully also entertaining.

So let me know your thoughts. Do you think there is room for something outside the normal journalistic media or industrial magazine, something that is a more considered dive into the issues of the day? I will await your comments, and hopefully your submissions.

All submissions can be sent to: pjn2243@gmail.com

Photo courtesy of Cathy Stanley-Erickson via Flickr Commons – Some Rights Reserved

The Political Fires of the North Shuswap…and the embers of discontent

Posted on by Pete Cross

This is a blog which is more personal than most, it is about the small village of Scotch Creek, where about 1,500 people live scattered along the edge of Shuswap lake in BC’s interior. This is personal because this is a place where I lived for five years, felt that I was home there, although I am sure I never reached the status of being a “local”. I moved away about two years ago, but still feel an ill-defined connection to those that I got to know, and I often still linger and dwell when looking over my photos of that time and place. When I lived there very few people knew of the existence of this small village, but as you probably know it has now received national attention, and the expected dedicated fevered media examination, only because for the last couple of weeks, the people there have been fighting for their lives and their property, against two raging wildfires. The Adams Lake fire and the Bush Creek East fire, which came together and within twelve hours co-joined to create a seemingly indestructible inferno, a combined fire capable of travelling 20 kms in 12 hours, and then being able to surround the community of the North Shuswap.

It was a coming together for which government and the British Columbia Wildfire Service had no answer, and one where there attention had already been diverted to the more populous fires in Kelowna. But this turned into something other than just the fires, because it was also a collision between the socialist oriented BC government and to a lesser extent the Federal government, versus a small group of independent rural residents, more libertarian, more independent, and more self-reliant than currently found in most urbanized areas of the country. The BC government could not relate. In the current political mind-set, it seems that when the duly elected feel constrained, when others are not conforming to their beliefs, then they should be treated with derision. They even resort to labelling and name-calling, and always place them in the category of the far right.

For the last number of years, the citizens of British Columbia, like many in the rest of Canada have been gladly and willingly led down the path of government being allowed to control of most of our daily lives. Theirs is a utopian society where the government knows best, it is a government that will protect us, that will feed us, house us, and all the “un-housed”, and keep us safe from the mental stressors and complexities of the real world. We are to be bubble-wrapped. And when this government mind set doesn’t find like minded individuals, or when it stumbles or fails in its goals, then the general populous demand to know why; and demand to know what the government is going to do to fix it. The government continually re-enforces these beliefs and spews a constant mantra of being “there for you”. The citizens in return are expected to never question, never provoke, and the government hides behind the opaque wall of bureaucracy. We have created a population with hands continually extended palms upward, for an infusion of the always flowing monies, to hold us over, and to make all the pain go away. Money is never an issue under this regime, Provincially or Federally.

It is at least politically successful, until one hits a pocket of the public that doesn’t like the government, a group that don’t want the government making all the rules and regulations, and still exude a stubborn pride of place. It is in many ways a throwback to earlier times. Your car breaks down, you fix it, your sewer backs up, you dig the trench to fix it, and for the most part there is nobody else around anyway. This is in essence the character of the community of Scotch Creek, they are the square pegs that the government wants to try and force into the round holes of compliance.

So as these two wildfires came together, the government body charged with fighting it is the British Columbia Wildfire Service, along with the BC Emergency Management Minister, Bowinn Ma, and she in turn is backed up by the NDP Premier David Eby. The government spin during this time is too predictable “we are here for you,” “to save you”, “to protect you” from the fires. How were they going to do that? The first order of their business plan is that they are going to get you to leave, to run from the fires, and to leave everything behind, everything you worked for, everything that is your material tie to the world. Secondly the Wildfire Service will be there to “mitigate” the disaster, which in a lot of cases is not to fight the fire, but to try and “control” it. As the Scotch Creek residents watched and physically saw the flames barreling down on them, they were told to flee, but their instinct was to fight, especially when there was no sign of the Wildfire Service, in fact the Service did not show up for a couple of days. They were un-officially abandoned.

So a pocket of individuals, about 300 people reacted instinctively, they decided they were not going to lose everything without a fight. They were local, they knew the woods, the lakes, the winds and the force of the fires coming at them. They also knew with their access to boats and the lake that they could never be fully cornered, they had a planned escape hatch. And so they did fight, with every water pump, shovel, and mechanized device that they could muster. In so doing and with an inhuman amount of energy they managed to save a number of properties, and many parts of their community. It was a formidable battle, and in the end they still lost 170 properties that were completely destroyed or heavily damaged despite their efforts.

And what was their government doing? They were on the radio and the television and pronouncing in front of anyone that would listen that it was not “safe to defy evacuation orders”, that these people were “un-trained”, that they needed to leave or they would be “arrested”. When someone pointed out that they actually couldn’t be arrested, they pointed out that they could if they strayed from their own property and tried to help a neighbouring residence. The government was fully immersed in their “process” and their Command Centres issued press release after press release how these people were endangering the lives of the firefighters, these renegades were daring to disobey their direction. The media as they always do in today’s environment, echoed the government concerns almost verbatim, feeling free to chastise those that had dared to stay and fight.

The people on the ground paid no heed. But as they fought on, they were running out of diesel and water and some other necessities to survive. Their like minded residents from across the lake gathered at the Finz restaurant and marina, and they gathered together and rallied to deliver food and goods to those in the fight by boat, driving across the smoke filled lake. What was the government response to this outright defiance? They ordered the police at the road blocks to turn back the food truck, not allow it through, which one can only assume was in an effort to try and force the residents to leave by cutting off their supply lines.

A twenty person protest fringe group showed up at the roadblock, one particular day, and the police went to the media stating that these people “intended to overwhelm the police” at their roadblock. The BCWS immediately issued a social media notice that they too were leaving, it was too dangerous for them, that these twenty “protestors”, had issued “threats of violence against these safety officers”. Interestingly the media also began referring to these protestors as part of a “convoy”.

In the end, the panic was short lived. A short time later the police rescinded their concern, and the BCWS realized they over-reacted and pulled down the media post. The RCMP then felt it necessary to speak about how their officers were “well trained and de-escalated the situation quickly.” They apparently disposed of this “massive” protest of 20 people in an hour with “no violence and no arrests.”

Meanwhile, as expected the Premier was touring the sites, focusing primarily on the voters of Kelowna and the Indigenous, photo ops of comforting those that had lost their homes and belongings; Trudeau was in Kelowna as well, but was warned about coming to the Shuswap it was reported, because of the dangerous backlash that was going on there. The Vancouver media who had sent all their resources to this “climate crisis”, now wandered the evacuation centres, trying to find someone that would cry on record about having lost everything or get video of them staring through binoculars at the distant shore to see if their house was still standing.

The people at Finz, continued to say to the authorities, whether you like it or not, we are going to get help to our friends. Ever slowly, the Wildfire Service knew they were not going to win the publicity battle, the opinion tide was turning, and if there is anything the government pays attention to is the social media –so their messaging began to morph. Ms. Ma became less strident in her pleadings to comply with the government evacuation orders, never admitting they were wrong, but that they were now going to “fold these people into our operations”. They were going to co-opt these malcontents, train them in the Wildlife Service ways, and then they could begin to allow these now fully “trained residents” into the area. The extensive training by the way in the end was for one day. So in the end they were now able to supplement the 1600 “expert” personnel which they hire each year, a third of whom are summer students with the “trained residents”.

The Wildfire Service were now also facing some hardened questions. There had been a controlled burn that some folks in the area questioned as to whether or not it had aggravated the situation. The Wildfire Service denied this possibility, and quickly countered with another media conference where the controlled burn was described as being a major “… success and saved hundreds of homes”.

One may never get to the truth of it all for quite some time. The Shuswap region lost 170 properties and 137,000 hectares burned, the Kelowna region lost 180 homes or outbuildings. One would think that there need to be some questions asked, although one should know that to question firefighters is akin to asking the Pope to become a Baptist. They are to be celebrated at all times.

To date the government according to the BC Forest Minister has spent $585 million, but not to worry, “the money is there” and they are not concerned about running out of money, “whatever it takes to protect people and property”. No one pointed out in his news conference that that there are a lot of people that may tell them that they in fact didn’t do a a very good job of saving peoples property. But why quibble and distort the popular narrative.

When you look at some basic numbers, it is fairly obvious that this is about mitigation, not about saving all. There are currently about 377 wildfires burning facing these 1600 firefighters, which amounts to about 4.2 persons per fire. Clearly they are not going to fight every fire. The question is how it is determined when and where they will fight? At least 40% of their budget goes to “contracted” aviation services, 130 helicopters and 35 fixed wing aircraft. Is contracting these services the way to go? Are helicopters with their single buckets the most efficient way of fighting the fire? Firefighting is clearly a very lucrative business for some, and when large amounts of money are being expended, maybe someone should be auditing costs and the financial controls in place.

Throughout this process, it has been continually been said that these fires were “historic”, that they were the result of “climate change”. Well that is not quite true either. According to the Fraser Institute, and an examination of the data, “the annual number of fires grew from 1959 to 1990 peaking in 1989 at just over 12,000 that year and has been trending down since.”

“From 2017 to 2021 (the most recent interval available) there were about 5500 fires per year, half the average from 1987 to 1991”. The annual area burned also “peaked 30 years ago”. The Wildfire service now bends the statistics slightly, and now contends that this year, the number of fires is “six times the 10 year average”.

So the question that needs to be asked is whether the tendency for fires to become larger and more dangerous is as some claim, something that “can be traced to our approaches in forest management”. This is not a question for the individuals actually on the ground dealing with the fires, working 12 hours shifts and sleeping in pup tents, these questions are for the leaders of our government and the bureaucratic functionaries of this service. The BC Wildfire Service at the very least need to be audited in terms of management, resources and the expenditure of funds. Do I expect it to happen? No. Remember these are fire fighters.

So as the politicians slowly work there way back to their safe urban environments, the media in tow, maybe some should also realize that maybe evacuation notices should not be the only tool in their policy belt. Maybe, just maybe, they should listen to those that still project and protect their independence. They are a minority to be sure, their numbers are dwindling, but the government needs to think as to whether coercion and ignoring their input is the best policy decision. These people are in fact reminiscent of that dreaded “colonial spirit”, reflections of that “greatest generation” which for the last number of years your governments have decided need to be criticized and humiliated and spoken to as ill-educated and unworthy. The truth is that we need more of them.

And yes, they did save my old house, and I for one are very grateful for those “untrained” firefighters.

Photo courtesy of Flickr Commons by U.S. Fish and Wildfire Service – Some Rights Reserved

“Double dipping” for China?

Posted on by Pete Cross

There has been a new case surface in the last week or two, which caught the attention of these tired old eyes. It was when the RCMP made a grand national pronouncement that they had arrested and charged an ex-Mountie; William “Bill” Majcher , with two counts under Sections 22 and 23 of the little used Security of Information Act.

The story caught my attention on a number of fronts. First, I knew of Mr. Majcher, but only in passing; secondly, the investigation was done by the Integrated National Security Enforcement Team (INSET), and it was the INSET unit in Quebec, even though it very much sounded like the offences occurred in British Columbia. That seemed a little unusual and could only mean that there were others involved and there was a trust issue. For those that needed to be reminded, INSET is the RCMP agency which is the direct liaison with CSIS (Canada’s spy agency). Therefore one must always be aware that CSIS and thus INSET often work on “political targets”, and therefore their mandate is often at the direction of the government or with the approval of government. There is little to no police independence when talking about either of those entities. So we should also keep in mind that old adage that “one mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter.”

With this in mind, China and its alleged political interference in recent Canadian elections has been a dominant story and pre-occupation for the last few months in Canada’s mainstream media. The Liberals have been under a great deal of political fire for their handling of the information surrounding the election interference, and their lack of investigation of it. So it seemed slightly more than coincidental that this case against Majcher was brought to the forefront in terms of its timing, and the obvious question as to whether it was being done to ease the pressure on the Liberals. Adding to the suspicion, is that these cases were historical, in that they occurred sometime during the years from 2014-2019. They also had said that this particular investigation had nothing to do with the alleged election interference. INSET says that their investigation surfaced as a result of a “complaint” in 2021, and now in 2023 they were bringing forth charges.

The accused, Mr. Majcher, was a Mountie from 1985 to 2007, some twenty-two years, and “retired” from the Inspector rank from the now defunct Integrated Market and Enforcement Team (IMET); an investigative group which had been mandated to investigate criminal activity in the Vancouver stock exchange and other financial markets. I met Mr. Majcher when he was the Inspector in charge, and we met out of necessity as he was the overseeing officer for an internal investigation that I completed on a Vancouver Police Department matter. He didn’t really pay much attention to the details of my report and signed off the investigation with little to no question. My first impressions of Mr. Majcher stand out now– and have been echoed by many people who knew him during his career. He began by showing me around his rather sumptuous office down on the Vancouver harbour front, and it was impressive from any government employee perspective, with its two storey high windows and its unhindered view of the moneyed yachts. It all turned out to be part of his pitch to me to come to their section, as they were looking for an experienced team leader/primary file investigator at the time.

He was a pretty impressive salesman about the job, but he was an obvious salesman, in that stock broker, car salesman kind of way. I later found out that before joining the RCMP he had in fact been a Eurobond trader. (Eurobonds by the way were one of the first tools developed and marketed to aid in the hiding of funds offshore) He was also clearly intelligent, but his flaw may have been in believing that he was always the smartest person in the room. He was always talking, but not overly concerned with listening. I considered the job at the time because of my interest in economic crime (much cleaner than homicide), but then turned it down after researching it a bit, and learning that the section was having trouble getting their feet off the ground, due to a variety of reasons and legal complications.

As it turned out, Mr. Majcher later got himself in some hot water while with IMET, and he became the subject of an internal investigation in 2005. I was told at the time, that it had something to do with his continuing involvement in the stock market, but I never heard the full story. In the end, presumably rather than face further investigation he “retired”– the always tried and true option the Mounties go to when handling troublesome employees. The public material says that Mr. Majcher in 2006, had already moved to Hong Kong– clearly never one to let the grass grow under his feet.

Like every ex-Mountie who is looking for a double-dipping job, and populate LinkedIn, Mr. Majcher talked up his previous investigational work experience and touted himself as an extraordinary undercover officer who continually risked life and limb in pursuit of the bad guy. His resumé was clearly bloated, but Mr. Majcher in fact did do a good job as an undercover operator on a couple of investigations. In the roles he played he was always portraying “the money guy” — always the salesman. His most famous case was that of the case against Vancouver lawyer Martin Chambers in the late 1990’s. Mr. Chambers during his hey-day was a prominent Vancouver lawyer who was suspected of large scale money laundering for the Russians and the Hells Angels. During a staged video-taped meeting in Florida with Mr. Majcher playing his role of financial underworld figure, Mr. Chambers took possession of $700,000 cash, and provided offers to handle millions of dollars. Mr. Majcher was the primary undercover officer and had led Chambers to believe that he monies were coming from the Columbian cartels at the time. It was a joint FBI-RCMP sting, and it was successful, and Mr. Chambers was sentenced to 15 years and 8 months which he served in an Arkansas jail.

The Chambers case would be the case that Mr. Majcher seems to have used as his plank to build a spring-board into a position in Hong Kong. He described himself as a “risk assessment officer” for the investment banking community, and that he had moved there to “establish an international banking platform on behalf of Hong Kong merchant bank, representing a number of Chinese state owned and non-state owned enterprise clients engaged in overseas capital world activities”. Not only would he bring to the table his extensive investigational expertise, but they would be able to employ “military grade cyber technology” in the pursuit for their clients.

He later formed the company EMIDR in 2016, a “Hong Kong based cyber-security company”. In a video he described himself as “a hired gun to help either large corporations or governments to get back what is rightfully theirs”.

Now most of us can see the salesman oozing out of these marketing pronouncements. But, despite the clear aggrandizement of his capabilities and the obvious exaggeration as to what they could bring to the world of money laundering, nevertheless, Mr. Majcher was indeed tapping into or at the very least trying to tap into a potential gold mine.

And this is where it all gets rather complicated.

It gets complicated in terms of the story line, and it gets complicated in the list of characters who may be playing in the game. First and foremost, this story is about money laundering, at least on the surface. But it is also about the many layers and degrees of inherent corruption. It is a fact that mainland China has had numerous individuals remove monies from their country, contrary to their own laws, as well as ill gotten gains that were taken out of the country from illegal activities. By any measure it is estimated that they have lost billions of dollars over the last number of years. And as you guessed, there have been a few select countries which these suspect individuals have turned to in order to facilitate the laundering of those funds. One of course, high on the list, is Canada, and specifically Vancouver. (do you remember the Cullen Commission?) Another area was along the “Gold coast” of Australia and the city of Melbourne. Their were other locations of interest to these monies seeking a home and the luxury of anonymity such as New York and Chicago. Hong Kong which was a city designated as a special administrative region of China, was heavily involved in the movement of those monies wanting to escape from China, due to its geographic proximity and the lack of foreign exchange controls.

The people who have orchestrated these money movements are now considered by the Chinese government to be criminals. As a result China started two projects; Sky Net in 2015 and Project Dragon in 2019, to track down and try and get back those monies. The latter project focused on the gold coast of Australia and those funds that were being used to purchase real estate. China of course, as Majcher himself stated in an interview, needs to “walk a very fine line”, as to the perception of anyone working for a foreign government. So China smartly formed public/ private partnerships with various firms, who would assist them in tracking down individuals and finding the monies. As expected they went to those with knowledge of the host countries who advertised themselves as having “expertise” in that country along with their “investigative resources”. Enter Majcher and other similar firms, especially those firms staffed by ex-police officers. Mr. Majcher openly said during a television interview that “I have a commercial relationship with entities that are in themselves associated in some form or another with policing authorities in China”.

Of course, most of these ex police officers who have entered this private field, have little or minimal hands on experience, they are primarily being hired because of their “contacts” in policing. Mr. Majcher is not a cyber expert, smashing the keyboard, hacking the demographic data sites to find someone; he is likely just picking up the phone and calling persons in the policing world who do have that information at their finger tips, and are willing to assist them in finding people. Mr. Majcher worked for the most part in British Columbia, ergo his contacts will be in British Columbia and in particular Vancouver, this hot bed for Chinese money laundering in Canada.

Two ex-Aussi police officers, Jason McFetridge and Austin Whittaker, in the Melbourne Australia area who had a similar firm to Mr. Majcher were interviewed about how the plan to recover the funds would come about and how it would be executed. Both maintain that it was a completely legitimate pursuit to get their client’s money back. It was a simple plan, but one that bordered on extortion. They would identify the people with the apparent illicit funds, confront them, tell them they are on to them, and that they needed to sign over their properties to the ex-police officer company. They in turn would then sell the company and send the monies back to China for a fat commission. The obvious inference, should the accused not “voluntarily” sign over the money, was that there would be repercussions for their families back in China, or telling them they face jail time if they ever return to China etc.

Does China have a right to pursue criminals and money launderers? It would seem legally justifiable, but what becomes questionable is of course how they go about it. Do they have the right to have hired personnel threaten people and insinuate sinister repercussions–that strains legality. It would have to be at the very least an inference and not a direct threat. The Skynet project apparently identified over 3,000 people that the Chinese government felt had broken their laws.

It would be easy to say the Chinese are wrong, and this is a step gone too far. And of course, what if the people they are pursuing are not criminals?

Historically Canada, and in particular Vancouver, has a very murky bordering on sinister relationship with communist China.

In 2015 China tried to sign agreements with the CBSA and the RCMP to assist them in pursuing their people of interest. In the late 1990’s Lai Changxing was considered “China’s most wanted fugitive”, a man who had been implicated in several corruption scandals in China involving a large smuggling ring. He evaded arrest and settled in Vancouver, where he was arrested by Canadian authorities, went through a long extradition battle but eventually was sent back to China in 2011, where he was given a life sentence. So at one time, the Canadian government was participating in the very same thing.

There is the Meng Wanzhou matter where a high ranking member of the Chinese establishment and the Chief Financial officer for Huawei was arrested in Vancouver, on behalf of the Americans and was facing extradition. China retaliated by arresting two innocent Canadians as “spies”, Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig. Meng eventually reached a “deferred prosecution agreement” with the Americans, the charges were dropped, and she was returned to China after having been under house arrest for close to three years. During this time she was given VIP protection to and from court by the Lions Gate Risk Management group, a group also filled with many ex-police officers who also advertise their specialities in “Money laundering and Asset tracing”. Mr. Majcher during this time admits to also being contacted by China looking for some help and monitoring of the case against Meng.

And let us not forget the matter of the ex-Mountie, Ben Chang, who during the Wanzhou hearings refused to testify about his role in the arrest of Meng Wanzhou while an RCMP officer. Since the arrest time, Mr. Chang had turned his old foreign liaison posting with the RCMP in Hong Kong into a retirement job as a senior security officer in the resort casino Galaxy Macau. His last minute refusal cast doubt on the credibility of the government lawyers who maintained that the RCMP did not share any information on Ms. Weng’s computers and mobile phones. Somewhat mysteriously, the prosecutors did not subpoena Mr. Chang. The Galaxy group as it turned out is owned by Lui Che Woo, a Hong Kong businessman who served on the standing committee of an advisory group to Bejing. Mr. Majcher it has been reported to have been at one time Mr. Chang’s supervisor.

INSET has hinted that they are looking at other officers involved in Mr. Majcher’s case. One of the names surfacing is Ken “Kim” Marsh, another ex-RCMP officer, who has written a book about his exploits entitled “Cunning Edge”. Mr. Marsh who has been named as a co-conspirator with Mr. Majcher, but not yet charged, once cooperated with Majcher on cases; and Marsh identifies himself as his “Mountie friend”. In his book Marsh talks about being “hooked up” with Russian millionaire Vladimir Antonov for a “due diligence report” that he charged Antonov $500,000 to prepare. Antonov would later be charged with embezzling “hundreds of millions of dollars from a bank in Lithuania”. Marsh is now seemingly perplexed by his naming in this most recent Majcher investigation. As he says in the introduction to his book, “he gave decades of his life to his work, all in the pursuit of bringing bad guys to justice…for his clients…and society at large”. He doesn’t mention that it was also primarily to make money.

So what are the charges specifically? Section 22 is labelled “preparatory acts” and states in essence that anyone who enters Canada,… or retains or gains access to any information… for the benefit of a foreign entity, a terrorist group, or an economic entity… and then communicates that information to them is guilty of an offence. This section refers back to Section 16, 17, 19 and 20 which get more specific as to whether the information is designed to “harm Canadian interests…or is reckless with that information”. Section 20 deals with using the information in association with a “foreign entity” to “induce, by threat, accusation, menace or violence, any person to do anything or cause anything to be done”. Section 23 is just the “conspiracy” section saying that one can not conspire to do any of the above.

So there is three elements to these offences that need to be proven. Was Majcher working for a foreign entity? Did they obtain information that was being guarded by the government, and finally did they threaten anybody or coerce anybody to take some action on behalf of the foreign entity? In terms of the press briefing by Inspector David Beaudoin they say that the charges surround “preparatory acts for the benefit of a foreign entity and conspiracy”. As stated previously, they began their investigation in the fall of 2021, and it was for the time period of 2014-2019. There are going to be some significant legal hurdles. Does the government of China have the right to pursue persons they consider thieves and money launderers? Are private investigators, indirectly working for the foreign government allowed to make inquiries as to money laundering and attempt to find those persons? America, Britain, Australia and even Canada using various investigational instruments make inquiries constantly for this same purpose. The RCMP and Canada have directly participated in doing the very same thing, but of course they will argue that they and only they are the safe-guarders of that information.

If one is interested in this kind of thing and would like a full view of the extent of the problem, I recommend the book “Moneyland” which the Economist magazine called the “book of the year”, written by British journalist Oliver Bullough. It is a deep dive into money laundering and the people behind it, including the lawyers, bankers and governments that both front face the problem and are part of the problem. The city of Vancouver is featured as a sought after refuge for the kleptocrats from China, Russia, and south Asia and he outlines the number of groups trying to track them down, often frustrated by the lack of government action on the issue. It is such a broad and expansive problem that he argues that it is under cutting the pillars of western democracy.

There is one other aspect of this story that is intriguing. That is the media coverage of this story led by journalists like Sam Cooper changes the motivation behind China. Cooper who is never shy in trumpeting his investigative journalism skills on the subject of money laundering in Vancouver. As it turns out he has admittedly conferred in the past with Kim Marsh on stories such as the Cameron Ortis story; and it would be a pretty easy assumption that he has RCMP sources feeding him information. The interesting part is that his take, and therefore the apparent take of the RCMP is that China is “not interested in getting back their money…only interested in controlling the people in the country”. In other words it is all part of a conspiracy to control the Canadian government through spies and agents.

It is an interesting postulation, but there is little to no evidence to support it. There is no doubt that China has for decades searched out persons and politicians who would speak positively about China and possibly try to influence legislation. While in Security Service in the 1980’s and early 1990’s we were already watching the Chinese operatives in Canada trying to influence politicians. The problem is one of definition. In the U.S. for example, they simply call them “lobbyists”. Here, in this country there is not even a foreign registry set up, so how concerned or worried about it is the Canadian government? In Mr. Majcher’s case, there is much more evidence that China is going after the money, they have always been aggressive industrialists, and there is an abundance of evidence that there that there is a treasure trove of ex- Mounties who are willing to set their flexible ethics aside and give them a hand.

There is politics wrapped around politics in this investigation, and the timing is highly suspicious and of major interest will be who initiated the original complaint. In this new age of ingrained disinformation and when our media seems to have an agenda, it is increasingly necessary to question sources. But, when it comes to unravelling the mysteries of China and its cultural layers, one needs to be very careful indeed. The only aspect of this story that seems to bear out consistently, is that there are apparently plenty of of ex-cops willing to help– for a fee of course.

Photo courtesy of Images Money via Flickr Commons – Some rights reserved

Free Speech, not quite as free in policing

Posted on by Pete Cross

As everyone knows, under Section 2 of the Charter of Rights, everyone in Canada has the right to freedom of conscience and religion, freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression. The official document of the Canadian Charter of Rights has as a preamble: “Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of Law”.

One would think then, at first glance, in consideration of that “supremacy of God” line that you as a person would be free to join the “Church of Trudeau”.

Of course I am not referring to a real church, it is in fact a Youtube site created by and starring one of the police community’s own Brent Lord. However there has been a problem developing inside this pew-less church outside of the fact that Brent is a member of the RCMP currently assigned to Trail detachment. The problem is that it is a satirical site which went after Trudeau, mocking the Liberal policies, concerning all those hot take issues such as the Indigenous, Immigration and the financial spending of the Federal Liberals. Policies which can not be questioned in polite company.

There are two issues at play here, issues which admittedly have surfaced in other forms previously in the policing world. One is the basic rights and freedoms for free speech guaranteed to all Canadians, and the other is the limits that is put on police officers under their Code of Conduct regulations.

When the outraged public complained (this may have been only one person) the Mounties said they did “a fulsome review of the highly unprofessional offending materials was completed and administrative options are being considered”. This statement does not disguise their clear presumptions and equally indicates that their final findings were not ever going to favour the Mountie. But, lets leave that aside. We should also note for the record that the Constable never appeared or represented himself as a police officer on the site. This was a personal site and it was silly, more a rant than a detailed examination of any policies. One would have to question whether the Constable really thought this entertaining, it was political for sure, but whether it met the artistic threshold would be the real debate.

The RCMP in addressing the media said “The website and videos were not representative of the views of the RCMP, nor its employees as a whole, rather they were the expressions of an individual”. True. “The content and the viewpoints on the web site fell far short of meeting the levels of professionalism expected of our officers”. Probably also true, but one has to remember that the “professionalism” expected of our officers is a wandering goal post, not easily defined in this 21st century policing model.

Was Commissioner Lucki being political during the Portapique incident when trying to score some political points with the Liberal hierarchy. Was that “political”, was it “un-professional”? One must ask whether or not if this Constable had put up a supportive site for the Liberal policies and trumpeted the good deeds the Liberals would it have been measured with the same stick. Would have it been considered “un-professional” if instead he had professed a liberal progressive stance? It clearly would have been political but my guess would be that it would not have been declared un-professional. In fact, they may never have addressed the issue at all if it was about diversity or inclusion.

It is truly ironic, that we have reached a stage in this country where the right to free speech is being severely limited by the social progressive or “woke” perspective–a group that would historically have been associated with the rights of individuals and the freedom of expression. The evidence of this censorship is everywhere and it is frightening to anyone who believes that free speech is a right worth protecting. Take a look at the cases of Dr. Mathew Strauss in Kingston, Ontario who proposed some very anti-covid restrictions, or Terry Glavin who wrote an article saying quite obviously that there was no evidence of genocide in the residential schools as none of the grave sites had been examined. Recently Dr Jordan Peterson, who has become a bit of a global phenomena is being pursued by the Ontario College of Psychologists for some tweets he put out. They are ordering that he, the global academic with millions of followers, should undergo “media training”. Laughable, but apparently they are serious and threatening to take away his licence if he does not comply. Of course, it is the fact that he expresses views contrary to the current liberal regimes that have taken over our governments and their institutions that is the real reason they are going after him.

The allegation in all these free speech cases and the people involved that always gets put in the headlines is that they are discriminatory, racist, or un-professional. That is the go-to argument in every case. One person is offended, the world is offended. Stanford University, a school of world renown, in the heart of the California woke culture recently issued their proposed “Elimination of Harmful language Initiative” to address “harmful language in IT”. They found 100 words or phrases that they deemed to be “harmful”. Included are such words as “American” because it was “imprecise it should be “U.S. citizen”. To use the phrase “you guys” was deemed harmful, because it “lumps a group of people using masculine language and/or into gender binary groups which don’t include everyone”. Needless to say, this policy group have drawn some highly critical reviews. All of it simply demonstrates that maybe the pendulum is still swinging to the extreme left.

Closer to home, just today the Vancouver City Police made an announcement concerning the wearing of the “thin blue line badges”. No you can’t they said. These badges, which consist basically of a thin blue line through the red maple leaf insignia has been around since 2016 and seems to have started in Calgary. At that time, the badge was said to “recognize officers length of service to frontline policing duties” and to remember “fallen officers”. Seems like a pretty harmless thing, but apparently some from the very vocal left said that the symbol was being “co-opted by hate organizations in both the U.S. and Canada”. The evidence to back this allegation is weak and historically it was in fact an adaptation of the “thin red line”; which was worn by the red coated members of the Scottish regiment in the British army for standing ground against the Russian “foes”.

When you enter the theatre of the absurd in woke politics, the usual spokespeople surface. Grand Chief Stuart Philip who heads the Union of BC Indian Chiefs says wearing the thin blue line patch was the “equivalent to wearing a swastika”. Also laughable, but he does represent the outer fringe of the progressives and is a media favourite.

Currently if you want to wear the patch as a police officer you would have to join the BC Transit police as they still allow them to be worn. But you know it is only a matter of time before someone makes a complaint on that side of the house as well. Remember, it takes only one person to complain about having been offended.

Taking into consideration the rights of every individual including a police officer I must admit to being still firmly against politics being entrenched in policing. It is difficult to argue against the politicization of the RCMP and other municipal and provincial police agencies at the upper levels of management, which I have done in other blog posts, and then turn around and argue for police officers at the working levels to be allowed to be personally politicized. Politics is politics.

Let us consider and admit that politics is firmly embedded in the current police management culture. Are not the political policies of “inclusion and diversity” being practised in every government venue, by their very definition discriminatory. As a blatant example the CBC recently offered up their “Anti-racism, diversity and Inclusion plan”, which in its affirmative action seeking goals is offering positions in their organization, or training opportunities, to only those deemed to be under-represented. Even the recruitment process of most policing agencies is now in fact one of discrimination. They are based on race or gender and that decision to implement this policy is a political decision at its heart.

Robert Reiner wrote a book in 1985 entitled “The Politics of the Police” which explores all the problems that are intertwined when the police get political. Jack Young, a British sociologist described the police and politics as being “terrible twins”. Politics and the principle of free speech is indeed a difficult issue, not easily defined in the policing world. We are living in an age when police officers are being offered up greater freedoms in terms of health, clothing, and even grooming, while at the same time they are trying to further limit the right to speech and opinion. The upper levels do not seem to have any problem with the RCMP management in Surrey celebrating and supporting the politics of Brenda Locke, who is trying to restore the Mounties in Surrey, but these same managers do not want you to wear a badge which many regard as simply supporting fallen officers.

Wendell Holmes a famous jurist while on the Massachusetts Supreme Court said in 1892 that “a cop has a constitutional right to talk politics but no constitutional right to be a cop”. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed stating that police officers right to free speech was a “narrower free speech right”. Police officers “should not be able to make statements in their personal capacity that undermine their ability to maintain the trust of the community they serve” according to the RCMP policy.

There are extreme viewpoints at both ends of the spectrum. There was a picture recently of a police officer in Miami wearing a support Trump mask while patrolling a polling booth. Clearly this should not be allowed as you can easily draw the straight line from support to intimidation. But if cops are participating as members of the general public and are speaking out on “matters of public concern” it gets a little stickier.

There have been 13 off duty cops who were protesting the recent U.S election and participated in the march on Capitol Hill. All have been suspended or charged. Put aside all the anti-Trump bias, should police officers be allowed to march in a political protest? Should an off-duty officer be allowed to march in a Black Lives Matter march? Or a march in support of the LGBTQ community? Make no mistake about it, they would be both political marches, both are political commentary. My guess is that there would be no action taken. In fact don’t the police try to get into every Gay Pride parade wearing their full uniform and it is applauded by every news site and mainstream politician. On the other hand, the RCMP is investigating officers who supported the Freedom Convoy protest in Ottawa. Clearly it depends on which side of the political spectrum one lands as to whether you are going to be in hot water with your bosses. The politically held views of the Convoy protestors were on the wrong side of the political spectrum not to mention on the wrong end of the Emergencies Act.

I’m not a betting man, but I firmly believe that most police officers are not in favour of Mr. Trudeau and his cohorts policy decisions and initiatives. However, they are not allowed to express those opinions publicly and they were smart enough not to join the “Church of Trudeau”. Do you remember when the Police Chiefs in the United States supported candidate Trump.

Clearly, everyone’s outrage or lack of outrage depends on the current and direction of the political winds. Clearly, police officers, in the course of their duties need to maintain some level of neutrality, their whole reason for being and the core of their support depends on the appearance of fairness and a balanced viewpoint. It is just hard for the ground level to understand this when their supervisors and heads of their organizations have become extensions of their political masters. Freedom of speech and the practise of it are the most fundamental of rights. We must preserve it, guard it, and use it wisely. And it needs to apply to everyone in policing.

Photo via Flickr Commons courtesy of Newtown grafitti – Some Rights Reserved.

Here’s to you and all the things we take for granted…

Posted on by Pete Cross

It is traditional that when this time of year comes around, we are supposed to pause, to reflect, to gaze into the mirror, to whittle away at the perplexing issues of life, big and small, and the changes that were both great and insignificant. It is a time of re-assessment.

We remember some of the headlines, some of the stories of interest and the stories that got scant little attention but meant something to us personally. In the past year there has been a cavalcade of digitally formatted information, both good and bad, some of it judgemental and some of it merely misinformation. The headlining messages are always bundled as “news, or “breaking news” when it is in fact old, history just merely repeating itself.

We seem to be in a cycle of loudly expressed frustration and immobilizing constant stress, however, we also need to remember that this is also a time of great exaggeration. We are being inundated with the latest apoplectic event, a rain storm is now an “atmospheric river”, a snow storm “a polar vortex.” The press has become irresponsible and driven purely by a need to inflame and agitate, to warn you of constant impending doom or crisis. It is clearly an effort to remain relevant to the phone obsessed and relevant to the attention deprived general population. We as humans have allowed ourselves to be transformed, we are now an extension of those phones and logically therefore under the command of the persons that control them. Children in strollers now work their little fingers on an i-pad with the dexterity of a programmer, a constant presence disguised as a babysitter.

It is indeed a confusing time, a time where the economics doesn’t seem to add up, a downturn in the economy and upward inflation apparently not affecting the Xmas shopping, the lines at the airport, or the constant updates on Facebook by all those booked into the the all-inclusive sunnier climes. The look-at-me beach pictures are juxtaposed over longer lines at the food banks and growing tent cities. A recession predicted, but it does not deter Federal employees from threatening action over having to go back to the office, clearly not concerned for a loss of those jobs. The teens and the early 20’s now boycotting all the lesser paying jobs, somehow able to be comfortable with not working at all. Inflation not seen since the 1980’s not deterring every unions demand and every government in response giving greater pay raises then ever seen before, thus fuelling the same inflation. But the over-hanging cloud of complacency may be the most un-settling; a careless disregard combined with un-precedented narcissism.

This Christian holiday period is our time of escape, our safe room, despite most of us being non-practising Christians ironically or not Christians at all. But it does give us this chance, when we should try and look below or above all the overflowing narratives. To be thankful in our ability and outright luck to live in the 1st world. It is also time to thank those people who are continuing work with dedication and resolve regardless of acknowledgement or thanks. Also to those that live and who still gain pleasure in giving and receiving the simpler things.

In this vein I do have some random thoughts and general wishes.

To those past officers, who policed in different times, and have now left us. You were part of a disappearing policing history, one that seemed simpler, one which seemed to be more about human interaction and less about modern tools of containment and restraint. I salute you and will always remember that there were others that went before.

I hope that one of these days we can find the humour in life, to not take everything so seriously, and able to withstand minor slights. Humour is all around us and it will often provide greater insight than that found in the academic journals.

I do hope that soon we will be able to announce people without including their gender or race as a primary descriptor and that we return to some level of measurement by merit.

I hope that common sense becomes more fashionable.

I hope that someday everyone will be open to try and see the other side of the issue, to understand that every view has a right to be heard, as I truly believe that our very democracy depends on it.

To those that I took aim at over the past year– those policing senior managers such as Commissioner Lucki, those sometimes unfathomable politicians such as Justin Trudeau, and Chrystia Freeland, and other entities such as the National Police Federation, and the Indigenous; to name just a few of my favourite targets. I hope you too have a good Xmas. Most of the people behind these issues are well-intended and even though I often heatedly disagree with the policies, or what they are proposing, or the job that they are doing, I do not dislike them as individuals. In the end I am only trying to report, trying to propose or unearth facts, nothing else.

I hope that sometime during this season you too are allowed some time to be alone with more gentle thoughts, or to just be allowed to take it all in. It seems trite, but I hope that you and your loved ones are healthy. Vaccinated or un-vaccinated, I don’t care.

I would like to thank those of you who have been faithful readers of the blog, allowing me to vent and tolerated me when I sometimes overstepped the line. You know who you are.

Lastly, I would like to thank those police officers who on Xmas morning find themselves sipping on the bitter 7-11 coffee, in the quiet hours around sunrise, too early to head back to the office, when the only distraction is the crows bouncing around the parking lot for that tossed wrapper of grease. Enjoy that time, you’re only one call away from it possibly getting worse.

So a Merry Xmas to all of you, thanks for reading, thanks for being at the other end of this blog.

We will see you in the New Year….when we will go back to all those other issues.

All the best,

Pete

Photo Courtesy the Library of Congress via Flickr Commons – Some Rights Reserved

Breaker, Breaker…got your ears on Justin?

Posted on by Pete Cross

I will admit at the outset, that anything that tends to shake up the political minions of Ottawa, usually makes me feel a little better. Don’t get me wrong, I like Ottawa, went to University there, strolled the Sparks Street mall with the polyester suited crowd of government workers on lunch. Enjoyed the tax funded parkways and museums.

Ottawa is the leading “government town” in this country where roughly 40% of the employees work for the Federal government. It is therefore a town that caters and kneels at the feet of the Liberals. This week they are shaken, scared by the coming to town of the dishevelled, those unwashed “anti-vaxxers”.

The government mandarins are usually safely ensconced in their Ikea designed home offices, family dog at their feet, who are in no hurray to actually go back to work –are now feeling “threatened”. Those damn incessant horns disturbing their Apple watch controlled sleep patterns.

They are our 21st century landed gentry, while the honking truckers represent the medieval farmers storming the barricades. During this Covid shutdown, their productivity sliding, this Federal government work force has actually grown in size. Some of them have actually obtained pay raises; unimpaired by the pandemic restraint on others, their economic well-being never being threatened, their safety guaranteed by being able to live in their new bubbles.

It was ok to make a vaccine exemption for the truckers, for two years, when the initial threats against the food chain delivering your loaf of bread and the steady same day delivery of Amazon packages were being threatened. But now, the political thinkers surrounding Mr Trudeau and Mr Biden in the U.S., now they feel the time is right, now is the time to impose further restrictions. All while the rest of the world is going in the opposite direction.

How dare a group of outsiders (meaning middle income mostly rural working class people and farmers) challenge this current and righteous aristocracy. After all, they are the enlightened, they are the believers in science, a science only which they can properly interpret. They who are now demanding vaccines for children less than five; they who are open to the idea of fining anyone who dares to show up at a hospital having not been vaccinated; and they who want to limit those that don’t vaccinate from the ability to function in daily life. No restaurants, movies, no ability to travel, or special events for you. And if you are working for the Federal government you will be fired unless you agree to let the government inject you with a vaccine. How dare anyone question the logic of restrictions and their haphazard and diverse application.

The overall justification for three years of lockdown is to protect us, but the justification for the vaccine is vacillating. It now protects you from getting really sick from Covid. It doesn’t stop you from getting Covid.

Ignore the mental health concerns, the increasing rate of suicide, the losses of years of education, the thousands of cancelled “elective” surgeries. Ignore it all.

Make no mistake about it, this convoy of largely blue collar workers has touched a nerve. They are pressing on the accepted and acceptable narrative nerve. How dare they challenge these enlightened that form a minority government in Canada. How dare they confront the social democratic changes which Canada is now undergoing and the massive growth in government oversight and regulation. The government now tinkering with control of the message and forms of communication and ones ability to speak freely. Think of Bill C-51.

“Public safety” is our new God. A risk free society the ultimate goal.

So to the barricades the Liberals march, the dutiful media close behind, relaying their portrayals of the ignorant protesters, seeking those afraid of the bellowing air horns, believing it plays well to their albeit quickly disappearing audiences. The Liberals don’t want to fight as they are really not good at confrontation, they are after all appeasers by heart and by trade.

The media on the other hand welcome a fight, they raise the January 6th storming of the Capitol as a comparison, after all nothing draws viewers like violence led by clearly evil minded people.

Ironically and a point often missed is that the “anti-vaxxers” who are being portrayed as right wing radicals, uneducated, ignorant, fringe members of society, daring to drive their big rigs into the heart of woke society in Ottawa. They are not actually anti-vaccine. The vast majority of the people involved have been vaccinated. This misstatement of the issue on a continual news loop is disheartening and dishonest.

The convoy is about “restrictions” and the imposition of those restrictions which is having an adverse affect on their ability to work and to feed their families. It seems to be a legitimate gripe, at the very least it seems to be a discussion worth having.

But the Liberals and their supporters have made a call to arms, there is no turning back, they have already determined that these protestors are not worthy. They have established their position and they are not going to sway from it. After all, they are not Indigenous, they are not members of Black Lives Matter, they are not protesting members of the LGBTQ community. They have no standing like these other groups. Clearly, they are also not likely Liberal supporters, so they are patently irrelevant.

So how do the the Liberals and their followers do battle? Through innuendo, false narratives of impending violence, searching out the fringes of the movement for the ill-advised comment, the inappropriate flag carrier.

They are searching out the outliers knowing that the fringe of any group is always off-side, ill-tempered and wanting to foment upheaval. That is why they are called “the fringe”. The larger group tolerates them, but ignores them for the most part.

The police reaction to all of this?

First and foremost one must understand that if you want to find a “woke” police department, you probably came to the right city in Ottawa. You could have picked Toronto, or Vancouver as well, but Ottawa has to be the most firmly entrenched group of the politically like-minded. The police chief and those surrounding him immediately took the side of what they surely believed was the side of the righteous.

The language of those in government went straight to inflammatory, and the Ottawa Police Chief followed suit with Chief Peter Sloly espousing his “surge and contain strategy” to stop this “very dangerous protest”.

“This is putting our city and our residents at great risk”.

He intimated that there was “reason to believe that money from the U.S. is helping the anti-vaccine mandate”. The Ottawa Deputy-Chief Trish Ferguson, before the convoy even arrived in the city, said that they were “preparing for a range of risks” from “counter demonstrations” and “interfering with critical infrastructure” to “criminal activity”.

As of this writing the Chief clearly languishing in his 15 minutes of fame is saying that he may call in the Army to dispel the protestors. He is continually calling on an increasing police presence, more Provincial police, city police, RCMP and the RCMP Emergency Response Team. There is constant oblique references to domestic terrorism, funding from the outside, social media disguised as intelligence. No evidence is ever presented.

The Prime Minister of our country was not “going to be intimidated” by the protestors. This after having being “moved to a safer location” for security reasons. Trudeau continues to refuse to meet with the protestors saying that they are “an insult to truth”. They are a “fringe minority” although no explanation as to how this fringe raised $10 million GoFundMe dollars in a couple of weeks.

For two days the media searched out the radicals, the violent among the protestors, there big discoveries the unfurling of a single Confederate flag and the fact that someone had put a ball cap on the statute of Terry Fox. They hit the jackpot when someone raised a Nazi flag.

As it turned out though the protestors were using it as an illustration of the Nazi’s mistreatment of the Jews as similar to their rights being removed( not a good comparison for sure) but the media outlined it as Nazi’s being involved in the protest. The baseball hat on the statute of Terry Fox was a desecration according to the apoplectic media commentators equal to the burning of a cross on a front lawn.

There was a story that some people danced on the Tomb of the unknown soldier. Not a good image, but there was little coverage of the the fact that convoy members then formed a ring around it to keep out some of their “fringe” players.

So Trudeau marched to the podium, armed with the latest media evidence. Trudeau grasped and gasped at the “…Nazi symbolism, racist imagery, and desecration of war memorials… “.

Let us compare this to other protests.

When 2,000 aboriginal protestors marched on Ottawa on December 12, 2021 making demands under the “truth and reconciliation commitment” as part of the “Idle no More” movement; saying that “we are not going to back down” to the gathered media, what did the government do. They agreed to meet with the protestors, saying they “are constitutionally entitled to” meet with the government. The media reported that the march “remained peaceful” even though it too had “shut down a major downtown street”.

When Black Lives Protest hit Ottawa, Mr. Trudeau waded into the crowd, and then took the opportune photo moment to take a knee with the protestors who had as a rallying cry the defunding of the police.

When more recently the Mohawks in Ontario and Quebec stopped and burned rail lines there was nothing but talks of conciliation.

As this becomes a week long protest, as sympathetic demonstrations are happening throughout the country, the media breathlessly awaits the confrontation. In Vancouver today, the media is warning people of the threat of violence, before a supportive convoy from Langley to Vancouver had begun; saying that the convoy would be driving by three hospitals. The hospital unions began warning their staff, not to wear their scrubs in case they be singled out for violence. The absurd inferences almost laughable.

This is first and foremost a convoy of ordinary people. An ordinary people who are completely frustrated, alienated and trying to struggle with the proper words when faced with a barrage of microphones and cameras. They go to work, go to the local Tim Hortons for the “double double”, and maybe even the local bar at the end of the day. Their lives are not glamorous, their social calendar was once filled with taking kids to soccer fields or hockey games and for the last two years we have robbed them of their ability to lead those lives, and even more importantly their chance to financially survive. At times they can be rough around the edges but they are also what keeps this country going, even during Covid. They don’t like Trudeau though, but then again he doesn’t like them.

Mr. Singh for his part is for the working man, just not these workers.

Mr. O’Toole flip flopped on the convoy issue, part of the reason he lost his job this past week. There is no other voice for the protestors.

This is not a fringe element. The GoFundMe page, which the government and the police pressured to shut down was the 2nd largest raising of money in Canada since the tragic Humboldt bus crash in Saskatchewan.

So we have a government and their supporters; in favour of censure; in favour of restricting individual and collective liberties; in favour of a controlled media message (bill C-51); and in favour of police actions which reflect their wishes. Does it sound vaguely similar to other countries.

Could it be any clearer that we are at a dangerous place right now and the police are in a even more dangerous place?

The police management in this country are now fully politicized. No longer the neutral upholder of laws, now the perpetrators of selective enforcement. The target of that enforcement fully determined by political winds and and the social media that drives it. Police normally survive on good faith and a sense of fairness and being a neutral arbitrator. Under this generation of police leaders they have badly strayed.

All this could have been averted, de-escalated at the very least by Mr. Trudeau. The protestors are Canadians and the very least he could do is listen to what they are trying to say. Meet with them. Don’t be scared. They also have a constitutional right to be heard.

The decried polarization of the U.S.-between the right and the left, urban versus rural, disadvantaged versus advantaged, the educated versus the uneducated is now being grown in the little petrie dish of Canada. I am not so sure Canadians in general have thought this through.

And for the citizens of Ottawa, when night falls, put your Ipods on and listen to some soothing water sounds of the Rideau canal, it will help you sleep and awake fully refreshed for another day of Team calls and committee meetings.

Photo courtesy of Zarina Petrova via Flickr Commons – Some Rights Reserved

Start taking down the tents…

Posted on by Pete Cross

For some time now, there has been a large tent set up at 134th and 104th Ave– Surrey City hall.

The tempest under the tent is about the nascent Surrey Police Service and it brings to mind the three rings of Barnum & Bailey. Jugglers, hire wire acts, trumpeting elephants, and clown cars all featured as part of what makes up Surrey civic politics.

This show under the big top has been going on for awhile now, it was 2018 when Mayor McCallum and his Safe Surrey Coalition were voted in, under two main election promises; cancel the contract with the RCMP and secondly the further extension of the skytrain. At the end of this month, the new SPS is to actually begin patrols, in coalition with the RCMP, as this plodding along transition carries on. Many are predicting disharmony, resentment, and at the very best an awkward moment or two. 

The transition process has met with infighting, personal barbs and innuendo, even allegations of assault and intimidation have been echoing off the walls of the city council chambers. In the last few weeks it seems to have reached a crescendo of inanity and misinformation. Those of us who once policed this burgeoning municipality of five police districts were often want to say in those days “only in Surrey!” This disparate community has always seemed willing to defy the expected norms of a civil society. 

A multi-cultural community of distinct areas, a diverse populace of haves and have-nots, abject poverty and street level violence versus one acre mansions of multi-million dollar homes. Whites, south east Asians, blacks, all forming up in their distinct neighbourhoods of Cloverdale, Newton, Whalley, South Surrey, and Fleetwood. 

It should not be assumed that they are living in harmony. In the nineties we patrolled the high schools which were even then being inundated by racist fights between south east asians and caucasians, each group not allowed to enter into the school property of the other. This is to say that there is nothing singular or cohesive about Surrey and there never has been an honest discussion of the many problems which afflict it. 

It is a unique area to police and it is where an eye for an eye tooth for a tooth mentality is visceral.  Often police officers having worked in Surrey have seen it as a badge of courage having once survived the posting and then moved on. And they almost always move on. 

So who are the people in this three ring circus, all vying to drive the clown car?

On the one side is the irascible Mayor McCallum, a curmudgeon, smug, wily, and of long standing. Mr. McCallum has never liked the RCMP, and vice versa. The animosity has always been well known but never publicly stated. This uncomfortable relationship is now coming to a head as the exasperation builds on the part of the Mounties who are about to be booted out and those seeing themselves as pioneering a new police model for the city. Ironically, the people sweeping the place with a clean broom are actually hiring a bunch of ex-Mounties to lead and aid in the takeover.

On the other side is a group of disgruntled and pushed from power politicians, a new union head for the RCMP, and the media who doesn’t like McCallum who continually refuses to be party to their reporting. 

Neither side ever reach a point where the real issues could be debated. Both sides continually throwing up illogic and misstatement as their campaigns wage war, and it has reached the stage of the whole exercise being a bad punch line. 

The current opposition to the quickly advancing police service is made up primarily of three groups; the National Police Federation with self-appointed constant spokesperson Brian Sauve; the Keep the RCMP in Surrey group and those behind the highly publicized petition entitled “Surrey Police Vote”. 

These groups in turn have the political support of the likes of Linda Annis, Brenda Locke, and Jack Hundial. All three of these politicians have a particular political axe to grind. Annis, was the sole politician who survived the purge of the once in control Surrey First group started by Diane Watts. Her antipathy to McCallum has reached a very personal level. 

Brenda Locke is also a long standing Liberal, once a Provincial Cabinet Minister and MLA , she too now thwarted by a largely Provincial NDP stronghold in Surrey. Also ironically she, along with Jack Hundial got elected on the coattails and under the banner of Mayor McCallum and the Safe Surrey Coalition who proclaimed the need for a separate police service. Clearly, since then there was a falling out with the mayor and she and Mr Hundial left the civic party and became independents. 

Jack Hundial was a police officer with Surrey for 25 years. When McCallum announced the people he had picked for the tripartite transition team, Mr. Hundial found himself left out, out in the cold despite his Surrey policing background. Since that time he has been an outspoken critic of the motion to form a city force even though he, Locke, Annis, and Steven Pettigrew had all originally voted for it. 

Knowing Mr. Hundial personally, I was somewhat taken aback at this reversal and his current support of the RCMP after having had many conversations with him about the dysfunctions of the Federal Force which had nursed him and now provides him with a pension. Politics clearly does make strange bedfellows.

All the parties explain their reversal in support because of the “secrecy” they allege about the transition, and the hidden costs they believe are forthcoming. They extoll the fact that the Fed’s subsidize the Mounties to the tune of 10% each year– therefore in theory they are correct, they are likely always going to be a cheaper alternative. The transition costs they allege are skyrocketing and is a harbinger of dangerous over-spending to come. 

The current transition costs are estimated to be at $63 million, going up since 2019 when they were estimated to be $45 million. What the councillors don’t often say is that is the estimate is spread over the next five years. Surrey’s current overall budget to offer some perspective, is $1.2 billion with its 600,000 residents., and this year Surrey will be borrowing about $150 million to meet those expenses. The councillors often rant about the costs of transitioning all these officers, but usually do not mention that the vehicles, equipment and station buildings are already owned by the City of Surrey. 

The NPF has been quite vocal and has been spending the union dues of their RCMP members to fight against the transition. They often pretend it is an issue of defending their members. They bought and paid for ads, lawn signs, and polls to firm up their position. They continually quote that “84 % “ of Surrey residents have a “favourable impression” of the RCMP and that “76%” say the transition should be “halted”. 

The Surrey Safe Coalition headed by MaCallum show their own polling and say that their polls indicate people that only 6% of the Surrey residents prefer keeping the RCMP and their “cardboard cutouts”. 

How does one get such disparate polling results. Its all in the questions you ask. Neither poll from either side should be seen as anything more than political posturing. 

The NPF has clearly got a reason to fight the situation. They do not want to lose the largest RCMP detachment in Canada and they are clearly worried about these thoughts of policing independent from the Federal force as a possible trend. (Alberta has recently talked about getting rid of the RCMP—and there is a great deal of conjecture that if Surrey falls, there will be renewed consideration for a Lower Mainland Regional Police service –or some version of it). It should also be noted that the new SPS will also be unionized under CUPE. For them, this is a union fight.

So this assembled group of dissenters then added a couple more tactics to their arsenal by introducing a petition to call for a referendum in Surrey utilizing the Referendum Act which flows from Elections B.C.  Those that follow this kind of thing would shake their head a bit at this, as it is a momentous task to force a referendum; wherein one is required to obtain 10% of voter support in all the ridings throughout B.C. 

 Do the people of Castlegar, or Radium, concern themselves with the Surrey police issue? Highly unlikely one would think.

The petition went ahead in any event, entitled the Surrey Police Vote, and it was primarily fronted by the Keep the Police in Surrey group. (Interestingly, this group bragged about raising $10,000.00 for their cause but would not comment how much money came from the NPF)

Somewhere in the process, once they realized that this could never be pulled off Province wide, the group concerned itself with only going after Surrey residents on their petition. 

They enlisted Darlene Bennett to head the Committee and Eileen Mohan to be a spokesperson. Both of whom will be remembered as being victims of violence themselves. Darlene’s husband Paul was killed mistakenly in his driveway (still unsolved) and Eileen’s son was killed in the infamous Surrey 6 file. Both horrendous cases, both generating unspoken grief.

However the arguments for retaining the RCMP by these two women although emotional, lacked specifics and quite frankly make little sense. Definitely nothing that could contribute to the debate. Being a victim of crime unfortunately does not necessarily translate into knowing about policing issues. However this group felt that by exploiting their personal agonies it would draw out the petition signers. Quite frankly it was manipulative and crass.  

Nevertheless, the petitioners, in a November 15 press conference, publicly proclaimed that they “did it” and held up a sign saying they had raised 42,000 signatures, representing about 13% of the population. 

When asked why they think this would succeed, as clearly it did not meet the referendum guidelines, they prevaricate, and dubiously argue that they are asking that the Provincial government to take into consideration the results regardless of it not meeting the current criteria. They are asking that the Provincial government in effect reconsider and change their rules. 

During the search for signatories the rhetoric and nonsense escalated. The group argued that they were being harassed by Bylaw enforcement and that they were being victimized by he slow turnaround at Elections B.C. Paul Daynes of Keep the RCMP in Surrey called McCallum a “little tinpot fascist dictator”.  McCallum in turn banned seven members of the Keep the RCMP in Surrey group from the city council meetings.

Then there was “Toe Gate” on September 4th.  In the normally placid South Surrey enclave of the well off, McCallum confronted some petitioners who were using the Save On Foods parking lot as a place to rally the troops. A verbal argument ensued between one of the petition organizers, Ivan Scott, who was sitting in his car, and McCallum who was standing outside it. After going back and forth and Scott demanding McCallum resign, Scott drove off, and McCallum argued turned the car in such a way as to hit him in the hip and drive over his toe. McCallum contacted the police and made allegations of assault. 

The RCMP somewhat surprisingly, within a week then swore out a search warrant for CTV video footage of the interview of McCallum, under the auspices of a possible public mischief charge, clearly implying they did not believe McCallum. Having worked in Surrey for many years, public mischief is not usually a first step, so there is good reason to believe that this too is politically motivated. As a result, the Provincial government has had to hire a Special Prosecutor to look into it. We are still awaiting that judgement and the Keep the Police Surrey movement needless to say is hoping to see McCallum led off in handcuffs. It seems unlikely.

Where is Commissioner Lucki in all this? Should we assume she is under some sort of gag order from the Liberals? 

However, the comment about the “cardboard cutout” mounties stirred the harnessed wrath of Assistant Commissioner Brian Edwards, head of the Surrey RCMP, who called the remark a “deliberate attempt to undermine public safety”. That the tweet was “disrespectful” by “ending public confidence in policing at the current time”.  Really? 

The coalition group responded “in spite of the efforts of a bitter minority surely the indignation that he has voiced today equally applies to these groups organized efforts to de-stabilize and de-moralize our city’s incoming police force”.

And where is the Provincial NDP government in all this? Well they are busy reviewing the overall structure of the police in B.C., by examining the structure of the Police Act to: “examine systemic racism and modernize laws in alignment with UNDRIP (the U.N declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples)”.  

To sum the issues up which are facing Surrey residents is in fact quite easy. Do the citizens of Surrey wish to have a more accountable police department? If so, how much are they willing to pay for it? There is no doubt among the current officers of Surrey detachment that the RCMP, in its many and varied forms is suffering—at every level. 

Would or should the cost savings mean more to Surrey residents than being subservient to Ottawa and susceptible to the vagaries of Federal policies–which seem more intent on gender identification than the property crime rates in Whalley? 

No need to worry about the officers in Surrey. They will be just fine, they will move on to other details, other detachments and other policing challenges; and Ottawa might finally get the message of growing discontent and the need to reform.

The citizens of Surrey clearly voiced their opinion once before and decided to elect McCallum and his platform.

It is clearly time to undo the tent pegs and bring down the circus tent.

Time to move on.  

Photo courtesy of Steve Parker via Flickr Creative Commons – Some rights Reserved