Archive for: May 2006

An article in the Freeps today outlines how the OPP, in cooperation with the provincial coroner’s office, has launched a website profiling hundreds of cold cases going back decades in the hope that it may generate new leads in some of the province’s oldest unsolved cases. The Freeps article can be found here, and the RESOLVE Initiative’s site can be found here.

Well, at least no one can say that they’re surprised. A couple of hours ago, AG Sheila Fraser has produced her annual report to parliament and, just like we all expected, it was a doozy. Click on the AG’s photo to see some of CTV’s coverage.

The taxpayer’s favourite parliamentary ass-kicker found that the hand-wringing Grits’ little white elephant not only went tens of millions of dollars over budget in 2004/2005 (with the government lying to parliament and scrambling to hide the overruns), but that it is virtually impossible to see us getting anything at all in terms of value for our money. In 2004, when the CFC realized that its money sucking had balooned out of control yet again, officials were told to find “an accounting treatment that would, if possible, avoid having to record all the costs,” which everyone knows is Gritspeak for “cover our asses.”

Among some of the other skulduggeries that the AG found in the CFC were:

* $21.8 million gobbled up in 2004-2005 but not charged to the centre’s budget.

* Not only is the CFC’s new computer registry three years overdue and running at triple its estimated cost ($90 million and climbing so far), but there is no way to know if it’s actually doing anything.

* Nobody checks to see if the info that gun owners give is complete or even accurate.

* The volunteers that verify owners’ firearms don’t go through background checks and nobody audits their work.

* For 62% Of the people that had their licences yanked in Q3 of last year, the CFC has no goddamn idea where the hell their guns are or what happened to them.

Now all we need to do is wait to hear from the Tories just how they intend to put this Grit fiasco out of our misery. Stay tuned, folks.

It’s almost here. The big day. I can’t remember the last time I was this optimistic about something happening in Ottawa. Tomorrow we get ourselves a good peek at just how bad the Grits flushed our cash on, amongst other things, the been-going-on-too-long gun registry, and you can bet your britches that the Tories will be finally zeroing in on what’s probably my favourite thing to hate and finally putting it out of our misery.

As for myself, and a whole lot of other folks I know, I had figured that this white elephant would have been taken out to the woodshed and shot before the guys on the hill could change the name on the sign in front of the PM’s office. But no, that didn’t happen. Because there’s so much opposition coming from other parties to trashing this monumental waste of your money and mine, Harper seems to have decided to leave this dogfight to the most feared and respected of all the parliamentary pit bulls. Yup, you guessed it: Sheila “your-sorry-ass-looks-like-milkbones-to-me” Fraser.

You probably remember her as the one that found, back in 2002, that the Grit government had been lying through their teeth about the cost of the registry and that it had, in reality, balooned to over 500 times (nope, that’s no typo) what they had said it would cost, with no sign of slowing down. The Grits had cooked the books so bad that she wouldn’t even sign off on her audit.

Come tomorrow afternoon, Fraser lifts the lid on the bowl that our money has been circling and gives parliament a good, long whiff of what dwells within. Granted, the AG doesn’t have the clout herself to put a silver bullet into this money-eating beast but her recommendations will give the Tories plenty of match grade ammo to unload on the usual chattering suspects that want to keep this shambling farce lurching through our wallets in the delusion that it actually does something to prevent gun crime. And if a little leak from the AG’s office is any hint, the pro-registry handwringers are up a well known creek with nary a paddle in sight: “In carrying out our audit of the Canada Firearms Centre, we noted a matter with significant implications for Parliament’s control of public spending.” I can’t wait.

There are some people though, who think that even with Fraser giving artillery support to the assault on the registry, the Tories are going to hold off on putting the last nail in the coffin because they think that Harper has his eye squarely on a majority government in the forseeable future. Here’s the logic that they use:

Folks that want the registry tossed into the dustbin of history already vote Tory and aren’t likely to change anytime soon. The ones that want it kept around, mostly urban voters in Ontario and Quebec, are the ones that Harper needs to get on the Tory bandwagon if he wants to form a majority in the next election (which most people agree isn’t as far away as you might think). Harper may have made killing the registry a major campaign promise, but he never set a deadline for it.

The way I see it, whether the Tories manage to kill it outright or if they just suspend all fees and declare amnesty for those that didn’t renew their registrations, this thing is deader than last week’s meatloaf.

And not a minute too soon, either.

With the death of Windsor constable John Atkinson, there’s been a lot of talk floating around about capital punishment, too much of it implying that those against it are either squeamish or “just don’t get it.” Not so, boyo. I’ve probably got the reddest neck east of Calgary and I have no qualms at all about admitting that there are people in this world (Clifford Olsen and Paul Bernardo come to mind) that deserve to be strapped down and kicked off the planet but I’m still against capital punishment.

Part of the reason is because of other names that come up when the topic is raised. Names like Guy Paul Morin, David Milgaard, Thomas Sophonow and Donald Marshall. Not to mention Steven Truscott, who was sentenced to hang at the age of only fourteen. I could say that I’m against it just because I’m Catholic, but the fact is that our judicial system, as good as it is, still is not perfect. The possibility of hanging an innocent man just isn’t worth it.

Also, contrary to a popular argument, capital punishment is not a deterrent at all. Never was, never will be. Try finding a murderer on death row (or anywhere else for that matter) who expected to get caught. The severity of a punishment is meaningless to those who are convinced that they will never be held to account for their actions.

So what to do with those who, to be blunt, just aren’t good enough to ever live among the rest of us ever again? The sane answer is clear: a life sentence needs to be just that. You walk in on your own two feet and get carried out 30 or 40 years later in a pine box. No parole, no faint hope clause, no conjugal visits – nothing. You go to prison to die. Let the bastards rot and kill ’em the slow way.

Good luck trying to convince a Liberal of that, though. They’re far too busy trumpeting the rehabilitative virtues of our “corrections” system.

Okay, I screwed up. I admit it. For some time now, I’ve been trumpeting on the net about how Canadian snipers are the best shots in the world. I didn’t get that part wrong, but I did flub the details; I told everyone that would listen that in March of ’02, during Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan’s Shahikot Valley, MCpl Arron Perry (hailing from Moncton and serving with 3 PPCLI) had set the record for the longest combat kill in history by taking out an enemy at a range of 2430m, beating the old record of 2250m held by USMC sniping legend Carlos Hathcock since the Vietnam war. I got it wrong.

Perry did set a record in Afghanistan, but it was for a kill from 2310m away, beating Hathcock’s record by 60m. Some days later, Cpl Robert Furlong (a son of the Rock also serving in 3 PPCLI) scored the 2430m kill. Those who want to know more can check out the May 15 issue of MacLean’s for more details. It’s a pretty good article that details not only their acomplishments in the field but also the shafting that they got when it was all done (also known as The Great Who-Pooped-On-The-Scumbag Bruhaha).

Canada had two sniper teams in the Shahikot Valley that earned the US Bronze Star, the highest award the American military can bestow upon a non-American soldier. The men on those teams were MCpl Graham Ragsdale, MCpl Perry and Cpl Dennis Eason on one team and Cpl Furlong, MCpl Tim McMeekin and American Sgt Zevon Durham on the other.

Cecilia Zhang’s killer has ‘fessed up in a Brampton court and will now be put away for second degree murder. Just how long that is, remains to be seen. But, believe it or not, it isn’t how long he’ll rot behind bars that has been on my mind lately; it’s Cecilia’s parents.

Yes, they finally have some answers, but I wonder, do they feel any better now than they did yesterday, before Min Chen admitted that he killed their little girl in a botched attempt to kidnap her for ransom? Or the day before that? Or any other day since that worthless piece of human filth murdered their only child for nothing other than his own greed?

There’s been a lot of talk about closure. I’m coming to loathe that word. It seems to get bandied about at the drop of a hat these days by all the usual feel-good suspects who think that we all need it and can’t get on with our lives unless we have it. Try this for size: it’s meaningless. Closure from having your only daughter savagely and irrevocably ripped from your lives and dumped in a ravine like someone’s garbage? There’s no such thing. People who have actually been through such things know that, people who haven’t, talk of closure.

It seems to me that when these nosey types say “you need closure,” what they really mean is “give me an excuse to stop thinking about this, it bothers me.” Cecilia’s parents will never see their daughter again, never see her grow up, never watch her fall in love, never see the joy she could have had through children of her own someday. All of that is gone now, thanks to a waste of skin named Chen. There is no “closure” from that. You don’t “move on” and you sure as hell don’t “get over it.” What does happen in time, if you’re lucky, is that you learn to live with it and someday, if you’re really lucky, the good feelings that you get from the memories of what time you had become stronger than the bad ones that you get from the empty days between that time and this. That, my friends, is all that anyone can really hope for.

(If anyone knows a link to the Cecilia Zhang Memorial Fund, please send it to admin@rightcrazy.com and I’ll post it here.)