british columbia

This is so not okay. RCMP in Kamloops, B.C. tasered an 82-year-old man in his hospital bed to subdue him so they could get “more important work to do on the street tonight.”

Frank Lasser, 82, appeared fragile Thursday when he showed the Taser marks on his body and talked about the ordeal he went through Saturday.

“They [police] should have known I had bypass surgery,” Lasser told CBC News.

Lasser has had heart surgery and needs to carry an apparatus to supply oxygen at all times. He was in the Royal Inland Hospital Saturday due to pneumonia but has since been released.

You can see pictures of the burn marks on Lasser’s body on the CBC article. In fairness, it appears that he became delusional and pulled a knife, and wouldn’t let go of it after police showed up. But for goshsakes, there’s got to be better ways to deal with this than overreacting by tasering an 82-year-old hospital patient. This is the kind of thing that kills elderly Polish immigrants who can’t speak English. It’s gone on way too long.

Hat-tip: Pam Spaulding at Pandagon

A couple of interesting tabs I’ve had floating around in my browser for the past couple of days, to slake your thirst for the time being, but hopefully whet your appetite as regards the future—all right, I’m done:

• From Failed Messiah: Ashkenazic chief rabbi of Israel: Real Haredim (ultra-Orthodox Jews) don’t abuse children; child abuse is a problem only among ba’alei teshuvah (naturalized ultra-Orthodox Jews). Reason? Haredi children don’t call their teachers by their first names.
• From the Slog: University of Washington College Republicans are holding an odious and racist event on Tuesday: ‘Find an Illegal Immigrant Tag’. Stated purpose: ‘to send a a “clear statement that we need to get serious and crack down on illegal immigration and secure our borders.”’ Unstated purpose: to be huge white-privilege racist dicks.
• From The Province: A good summary of the problems surrounding this year’s Vaisakhi parade and festivities in Surrey, B.C. A what point does it stop being a family-friendly religious celebration and start being political, especially when you throw photographs of Sikh men who committed violent terrorist attacks against Indians in support of a Sikh homeland into the mix?
• Finally, from the Onion:
  
  

  

  Mead Releases New Grad-School-Ruled Notebook

  The pages, in addition to having extremely narrow ruling, will be triple-perforated and seven-hole-punched, to meet the modern grad student’s requirements. I’ve been wanting something like this for years.

I am absolutely stunned by this story. It’s like something out of a deranged episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, Oy Vey. Except much darker. From the Canadian Jewish News:

An Israeli woman with two children is fighting deportation from Canada, claiming that she fears returning to Israel because a rabbinical court there has granted custody of the children to their abusive father.

Last week, one day before she was to be removed from the country, Renata Makias won a temporary stay from a Federal Court judge pending a judicial review of her case.

Judge Sean Harrington wrote that Mrs. Makias and the children “face imminent peril on their return” to Israel because the rabbinical order makes clear the children must be handed over to their father, Yossef Makias, immediately. …

The rabbinical court decision is at odds with a Quebec Superior Court judgment granting Mrs. Makias custody of the children and apparently does not take into account the fact that Mr. Makias was charged in British Columbia with uttering threats of death and violence against his family and with breaching a restraining order. …

Mr. Makias was charged with uttering threats to cause death or bodily harm to his wife, but he was released on conditions that included a restraining order that forbade him from having any contact with his wife or their children. He did not respect those conditions and was convicted of breach of the order. …

Harrington wrote that he finds it “disturbing” that, despite Yossef’s record and the decisions of Canadian courts, that the Regional Rabbinical Court of Tel Aviv has ordered that the children be handed over to him “immediately and with no further delay,” quoting the rabbinical court.

Or, the couple’s son, testified that he was afraid to go back to Israel because his father beat him and his sister frequently and “always used to threaten to kill” them. “He would run after me with a hammer in his hands to hit me with it.”

The boy also stated that his father “almost killed my mom once by throwing a very heavy cup of glass and he would throw stuff at her like cellphones and plates.”

And the bet din (rabbinical court) of Tel Aviv, just like that, handed sole custody to this crazy maniac. And who is the head of this court? Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, noted corrupt fundraiser, homophobe, and Haredi schmuck. He seems to be taking a hands-off approach to this ridiculous case that went through a court under his jurisdiction. I quote the always excellent commentary of Shmarya Rosenberg:

Rabbi Lau was the first haredi to become chief rabbi. He presides over the rabbinical court in question. From what I know of him, I don’t think Rabbi Lau likes this decision. But Rabbi Lau will never buck his haredi masters, and it is those masters who are responsible for much of the agunah crisis and for horrible cases like this.

There is a darkness in Zion and it is destroying us.

(The agunah crisis has to do with women who are not granted a religious divorce (get) by their husbands and therefore not able to remarry under Jewish law. Liberal strains of Judaism—and even some left-leaning Orthodox strands—allow a rabbinical court to issue a get in the husband’s absence to ameliorate this problem. However, these women are still screwed over in traditional circles of Judaic jurisprudence.)

This is the kind of shit they don’t tell you about in Jewish schools when brainwashing teaching you to vote Likud love Israel. Canada must grant this woman and her family asylum immediately. Any legal recourse to a civil lawsuit in Israel would be futile, since the law grants a high degree of autonomy and privilege to religious courts in such matters. The ‘darkness in Zion’ is indeed a destructive one—but not only is it destroying us, certain of us are bringing it on the rest.

I have long thought that the Pacific Northwest (i.e. Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Idaho, Montana, and some of northern California) possesses the most ridiculous place names of anywhere in North America (and possibly the world). Much of this is a product of local Native languages, as it is all over North America, but some of it is just human silliness. Some of the pronunciations are reasonable (enough), but some are maddeningly unintuitive and therefore—rightly or wrongly—employed as shibboleths to identify ‘true’ PNWers from everybody else (mostly Californians, even those who moved to the area years ago and are now locals).

If I’ve left anything off this list that you feel merits inclusion in such a, uh, worthy list, please leave it in a comment.

Silly-sounding place names

• Agassiz, BC (pronounced ag-uh-SEE)
• Aloha, OR (pronounced uh-LO-uh)
• Boring, OR
• Champoeg, OR (pronounced sham-POO-ee)
• Chehalis, WA (pronounced sha-HEY-liss)
• Chilliwack, BC
• Cle Elum, WA
• Coos Bay, OR (pronounced so that coos rhymes with goose)
• Coquitlam (and Port Coquitlam), BC
• Ekalaka, MT (pronounced ee-kuh-LAH-kuh)
• Estacada, OR (pronounced es-tuh-KAY-duh, like the name Kay)
• Esquimalt, BC (pronounced ess-KWAI-malt)
• Issaquah, WA (pronounced IZZ-ah-kwah)
• Klickitat (and Klickitat County), WA
• La Center, WA
• Moscow, ID (pronounced MOSS-koo)
• Nisqually, WA (not to be confused with Old Nisqually, WA)
• Onalaska, WA
• Osoyoos, BC (pronounced oh-SOY-yooz)
• Owhyee, ID (pronounced oh-WHY-yee)
• Pe Ell, WA (pronounced like the letters P and L)
• Puyallup, WA (a true shibboleth: pronounced pyoo-AL-up)
• Sequim, WA (pronounced skwim)
• Skamokawa, WA (pronounced ska-MOCK-a-way)
• Snohomish and Snohomish County, WA (pronounced snow-HO-mish)
• Snoqualmie, WA (pronounced snow-KWAL-mee)
• Sprague, WA (pronounced spreyg, in one syllable)
• Steillacoom, WA (pronounced STILL-a-koom)
• Squamish, BC
• Wahkiakum County, WA
• Walla Walla, WA
• Whatcom County, WA
• Willamette and the Willamette River, OR (another classic shibboleth: pronounced to rhyme with dammit)
• Yreka, CA (pronounced why-REE-kuh)

However, the one Cree village in Québec definitely deserves to be on this list too: Whapmagoostui, PQ. Also, Woonsocket, Rhode Island, is pretty good.

When I was a first-year undergraduate, one of my friends, also a first-year who had Ideas And Opinions, tried to reform the student body elections system to conduct the voting according to the Single Transferable Vote system. I believe it succeeded, and it was still being used at the institution in question, largely because inertia is such a powerful force and nobody really wanted to deal with this guy on a personal level. There are two major problems with STV: one, it’s horribly complicated, compared with your standard first-past-the-post system, and two, it’s sort of hard to tell what happens to your vote without intimidating mathematics and figures. This is largely why the BC-STV system, proposed by the B.C. Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform, failed when put up to a referendum in 2005. This editorial in today’s Vancouver Sun advocates for the adoption of the BC-STV system, as well as support for funding an educational campaign to counter the general ignorance that alternative systems of voting even exist in the first place.

So anyway, on Monday, there was an election in Alberta, and nobody noticed. The Conservative Party won their eleventh straight majority, picking up 73 of 83 seats in the provincial legislature. However, there was only a 43% turnout of registered voters, and of those votes only 52% went to the Tories. However, because of the way the votes were distributed and because of the low turnout, this translated into an 88% yield on seats. This was made possible because of the first-past-the-post electoral system, in which whichever candidate gets a plurality of all votes cast wins the election. The Sun editorial theorizes that had an STV system been in place instead, the results would have been something like 44 Conservatives, 22 Liberals, 7 from the NDP, 6 from the right-wing Wildrose Alliance Party, and 4 Greens. A far cry from 73 out of 83 seats going to the Tories, as it has been for the last several decades. Sure, they would have still had a majority, but it would not have been of the unreasonable 88% completely dominant majority type that we’re going to see again in Alberta.

When you have multiple significant parties several of which share similar platforms, such as, say, the Liberals and the NDP, or the Conservatives and the Wildrose Alliance, or (in the States) the Democrats and the Greens, you might want a way to be able to vote your conscience as well as vote pragmatically. STV allows you to do that by letting you vote your number-one preference for, say, the NDP, and your number-two preference for the Liberals. Or in whatever order you prefer. The standard first-past-the-post system pigeonholes you into exactly one of a few categories of opinion, and in doing so, penalizes small parties or small candidates. The effects of this can be far-reaching: for example, if you don’t have any safe way to vote for Ralph Nader, your vote for him is an unsafe one, because it might have gone to your second-choice candidate Al Gore, but without that vote to count towards his total, George Bush will win your state’s votes in the Electoral College. With STV, this scenario can be avoided because if you marked Ralph Nader as your first choice but Ralph Nader did not accumulate the necessary number of votes to pass a round of electoral counting, your second choice vote will go to Al Gore and tally up in his column.

At any rate, B.C. should adopt the BC-STV system in 2009 when it comes up for another vote, and this sort of lopsided elections mathematics can be avoided. All it takes is a little effort to understand, and a willingness to commit to the rights of all people to choose the parties and the people that will represent them.

B.C. Ferries, the semi-private corporation providing ferry service throughout British Columbia, has changed its mind and decided to display a portrait of the Queen on all ships in the fleet after all. The company had been surreptitiously removing the monarch’s likeness from ships while they were in refit; nobody had really noticed until the Monarchist League of Canada raised a big stink:

The argument was that displaying the portraits was no longer appropriate once B.C. Ferries was divorced from government in 2003, but that explanation failed to mollify traditionalists (as well as those who point out that taxpayer-owned B.C. Ferries is about as private as Britney Spears’ personal life). The Monarchist League of Canada detected republicanism by stealth. The corporation’s phones rang off the hook.

“We have had strong public response today,” said company spokeswoman Deborah Marshall late Tuesday. So, in a display of flexibility rarely seen in such a monolithic enterprise, an executive decision was made to not only restore the portraits to the refurbished vessels, but to place them on new ferries, too.

Excellent. Good for them. The country’s involved in a war in Afghanistan that’s threatening to bring down the government, the national budget is in crisis and is also threatening to bring down the government, and people are worried about twenty-seven eight-by-ten colour glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one is to be used as evidence for the continued existence of the monarchy in Canada.

Over the last weekend, the rules for crossing the Canadian-American border changed: Canadians must now present a passport at the border to enter the United States. Previously, they’d let you across with nary a second thought, sometimes not even demanding to see your driver’s licence or any other form of identification: if you were driving a car with Canadian plates and appeared non-threatening, they would simply let you pass. This happened to me several times; usually they just asked me (on the American side) where I was coming from, where I was going, and waved me on through. I am given to understand that when you work in a profession like one with U.S. Customs and Border Patrol or the Canadian Border Services Agency, or even security in general, you develop, over time, something of an eye for what might be trouble, and what will probably be fine. Now, of course, much of this is—consciously or otherwise—probably based on some underlying profiling (you’re white and drive a car in reasonably good shape? excellent, you’re neither a terrorist nor a drug smuggler), but that’s life, I’m told, in this kind of a world.

The one exception to this rule, in my experience, has been the crossing at Point Roberts, a small exclave of Washington State that was created when the border was determined to lie at 49° north latitude, but before they had done the mapping to see what was out there (besides Vancouver Island, which was accounted for separately in the treaty). There are only two (major) reasons Canadians go to the Point: (1) cheap(er) gasoline and (2) visiting the U.S. post office or some other shipping outlet for sending or receiving purposes. Therefore, when you enter and leave the Point, they usually know what you’re on about, and therefore the litany of questions is very specific—if it even gets asked at all.

But now, an American law passed in the wake of 9/11 is mandating that everyone provide proof of citizenship (i.e. a passport) when entering the United States by sea and, more importantly, land. As of last January—over a year ago—the rules changed to mandate passports from all passengers entering the United States by air, which people appear to have dutifully followed, taking it as one of the many necessary of unnecessary changes that have taken place since 9/11, and for better or worse, going along with it. And carrying a passport for flights between the U.S. and Canada is a good idea anyway; it simplifies matters when you go through customs and immigration control—remember, they really are two separate countries.

I’ve been using the word passport relatively interchangeably with the phrase proof of citizenship; I should clarify that what is actually required is proof of identity and citizenship. A passport proves both those things, but so do some other things, which are listed in the NPR story linked to at the beginning of this post. A NEXUS card, for example, will serve these functions just as well as a passport, though I once tried to use my NEXUS card as identification in San Francisco Airport, which though totally legal, didn’t quite work because the agents I was talking to had no idea what it was. The other relatively new—and potentially quite scary thing that you will soon be able to use is an enhanced driver’s licence, which are now being rolled out in both British Columbia and Washington State. I will skip lightly over these except to note that people of the privacy-advocating sort are worried that these licences are the first step toward a national ID card in both Canada and the United States. But this is a discussion for another time.

What is amazing, though is that what with all the new regulations on the books, the U.S. border guards are not enforcing these policies. Let me repeat that: these new laws say you have to present a passport at the border, but those guys who work for the Department of Homeland Security will not turn you away if you don’t have a passport. They’ve pushed back the date on enforcement of law by at least eighteen months, meaning that it will come into effect in July 2009 at the earliest; until then you can expect to receive ‘an educational flyer’ when you cross the border sans passport. There appears to be some question, furthermore, as to the next step—that is, whether or not to press on with the regulations at all. Leading the opposition are three U.S. Senators: Chuck Schumer (D-New York), Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), and Ted ‘Series Of Tubes‘ Stevens (R-Alaska). These politicians all come from border states, surprise, surprise—guess whose economies are going to lose money if cross-border traffic is hindered further than it already is.

But one of the most salient objections I can think of—and one that, to my knowledge, hasn’t really surfaced yet—is that we’ve been hearing from the Bush administration, for years and years, how insecure and unsafe America’s borders really are, and how desperately needed are new measures to strengthen border security. Well, the new measures just came into place, and guess what? Bush’s own government isn’t enforcing them! What blinding hypocrisy and idiocy!

The crown attorney general in British Columbia, Wally Oppal, is appealing the conviction of Robert Pickton, who was tried and convicted for the murders of six women in Vancouver. The crown maintains that numerous errors were made, such as Mr. Justice James Williams having refused to allow the crown to pursue convictions against all twenty-six women Pickton is alleged to have murdered, as well as having failed to uphold the law by allowing the jurors to find Pickton guilty of second-degree murder rather than first-degree murder. This comes in advance of Pickton’s lawyers filing their own appeal by the deadline on Thursday, which apparently will make many similar allegations against the judge and the trial proceedings.

When I first heard this news on the radio this morning, I thought it was a misfire by the prosecuting team, and I could not for the life of me understand why they were appealing a conviction. Sure, they didn’t nail him for all twenty-six murders, and they didn’t put him away for first-degree murder, but they still put him behind bars for twenty-five to life, didn’t they? Why would they risk throwing this away; why not simply hold a second trial for the other twenty women? I’m kind of proud that I managed to work out the answer on my own before looking it up on news, but a little ashamed that it took me the whole day to do it: if Pickton’s lawyers appeal and the crown does not, and the appeal is granted, the crown will only be able to try him on second-degree murder charges. This way, by virtue of having filed its own appeal, the prosecution leaves open the possibility that Pickton will be retried for first-degree murder.

More likely, in my judgment, is that all the appeals will be thrown out and the crown will proceed with a separate trial for the remaining women. Nobody wants to deal with the time, to say nothing of the expense, that would be involved in retrying a man so he can be put in prison for life again. At least, I hope that’s what happens, because we—and the families of the murdered women—so don’t need another year or so of waiting around to see if the crown can actually put away a murderer after years of inaction and a hiccuping justice system.