statism watch

Allan Woods, Toronto Star
Jun 14, 2008 04:30 AM

Call on lobbying watchdog to see if real estate firm tried to gain access to the government via Couillard

OTTAWA–Opposition parties want the federal lobbying watchdog to see if a Quebec real estate firm tried to infiltrate the Conservative government.

The call comes after suggestions Kevlar Real Estate Investments Inc., with offices in Montreal and Quebec City, used Julie Couillard to push its bid to lease office space to the federal government in the provincial capital. Couillard, the ex-girlfriend of former Foreign Affairs minister Maxime Bernier, and Bernard Côté, a former adviser to Public Works Minister Michael Fortier, is registered with the Quebec real estate board as being affiliated with Kevlar.

She briefly dated Côté around the time she obtained her licence in the spring of 2007.

Later that year, Kevlar co-president Philippe Morin introduced her to Maxime Bernier, the Tory MP for Beauce who was then the industry minister.

Bernier resigned his cabinet post last month because of a security breach. He had left classified government documents at Couillard’s apartment for five weeks earlier this year.

Côté quit this week after reports he was still associating with Couillard in September 2007 when Kevlar was competing for a $30 million contract to provide offices for federal employees in Quebec City.

Reports say Couillard raised Kevlar’s bid on the $30 million contract with both Côté and Bernier.

“There needs to be an independent inquiry that has nothing to do with the classified documents, but that has to do with problems that go much further than the self-styled reason for Mr. Bernier’s resignation,” said Liberal MP and foreign affairs critic Bob Rae.

A spokesperson for Michael Nelson, the Lobbyist Registrar, said the office investigates “all matters that are brought to our attention relating to allegations of breaches of the act or the Lobbyists’ Code of Conduct.”

The Department of Foreign Affairs is already probing any possible security breaches following Bernier leaving the documents.

The Commons public safety committee has launched hearings into the breach and will hear next Tuesday from Kevin Lynch, the Clerk of the Privy Council Office.

Bloc Québécois House leader Pierre Paquette said all the avenues of investigation must be explored, but the easiest way to deal with the matter would be for Harper, Fortier, Bernier and Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day to testify before the Commons committee, which they refuse to do.

Source | See Also: CSIS link in Bernier case | Government could have planted Couillard bug: former CSIS agent | Bernier quits cabinet post over security breach | Harper shrugs off new concerns about minister’s ex-flame

Tracey Tyler, Toronto Star
Jun 14, 2008 04:30 AM

As Toronto’s mayor calls for a handgun ban, America’s highest court is deciding the fate of a similar law south of the border. Canadian legal experts are watching closely

As Mayor David Miller and provincial leaders urge Ottawa to outlaw handguns, Americans are waiting to see if the United States Supreme Court will shoot down one of that country’s strictest gun control laws.

The court is expected to deliver its judgment this month in the case known as Columbia v. Heller, which challenges the District of Columbia’s ban on private handgun possession. At the forefront of the challenge are six individuals, including Dick Heller, 67, a Washington D.C. security guard who wants to bring his revolver home with him after work.

“Mr. Heller lives in a rough neighbourhood. There’s some bullet holes next to his door,” his lawyer, Alan Gura, said in an interview. “There’s been some shootings in the neighbourhood and it’s not the safest part of Washington.”

The case marks the first time since 1939 the court has turned its focus to the meaning of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which, in curiously awkward syntax says, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

Over the years, those words have been embraced by both sides of the firearms debate, most vigorously by members of the gun lobby as proof that individual Americans have an inalienable right to own guns.

But the court never actually went that far in the 1939 case, which began in Arkansas when two alleged gangsters and moonshiners, Jack Miller and Frank Layton, challenged a federal ban on the possession of sawed-off shotguns.

The court upheld the federal restrictions, passed in response to the St. Valentine’s Day massacre involving Chicago gang members in 1929, and offered a short, somewhat ambiguously worded judgment that seemed to suggest the Second Amendment gives people the right to own weapons only in conjunction with militia service – not a broad right allowing any individual to own guns.

This time, the Supreme Court is being asked to address the issue head-on.

…

Oddly enough, even if the court does strike down D.C.’s handgun ban, it’s unclear whether it would make any difference to the crime rate. After all, at various times during the 32 years it has been in place, Washington has been known as the murder capital of the U.S.

“The best judgment you could make is that handgun bans have no effect one way or another,” said Tushnet, who, for his book, examined research on the effectiveness of the measures.

“Gun control people say they reduce gun violence; gun rights people say they increase violence because people don’t defend themselves.”

…

A Big Tent

More than 60 organizations are intervening in the case of Columbia v. Heller, more than ever imaginable at an appeal before the Supreme Court of Canada. “The U.S. rules for interveners are even more liberal than ours, in large part because they are only allowed to make written submissions and not argue before the court,” said Kent Roach, a law professor at the University of Toronto.

Here’s a sampling of the groups and their positions:

• Pink Pistols and Gays and Lesbians for Individual Liberty. With chapters in 31 states and three countries, including Canada, it supports Dick Heller, arguing that most anti-gay hate crimes occur in the home. The right to possess firearms for self-defence is of “paramount importance” to lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgendered people, who are “disproportionately” affected by handgun bans.

• 55 members of the U.S. Senate and 250 members of the House of Representatives. (Vice- President Dick Cheney signed his name to this brief, distancing himself from the U.S. government position, which supports reasonable gun control regulations). To back their view that the Second Amendment was always meant to protect individual gun ownership, the politicians point to the “Freedmen’s Bureau Act,” which extended constitutional protections, including the right of gun ownership, to African Americans after the Civil War. (Slaves couldn’t own firearms, lest they revolt.)

• Eleven of America’s largest cities and the U.S. Conference of Mayors. They support the ban, noting in the past 30 years there have been 340,000 homicides in the U.S., more than 60 per cent from guns. Law enforcement officers are disproportionately victims of gun violence and urban dwellers are 60 per cent more likely than suburbanites to be victims of gun violence. In addition to the terrible human toll, there are “massive economic costs and losses due to the fear and danger associated with gun violence.”

• Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. They oppose the ban, arguing that many of the 70 million people killed in 20th-century genocides were victims of gun control laws or policies that disarmed them. The framers of the U.S. Constitution understood that an armed populace was critical in resisting state tyranny, which was also “amply demonstrated” in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising, in which Jews held off the Nazi military machine for nearly a month.

Full Story | See Also: Miller makes “concession” for shooting ranges, pushes ahead with gun ban | Municipalities Join Miller in Calling for Final Citizen Disarmament | Pistol Pendant Causes Airport Holdup | Youth Worker Subjected to Warrantless Raid on Secret Evidence | Miller wants shooting ranges shut down

Rick Westhead, Toronto Star
Jun 14, 2008

Our troops in Afghanistan are being gutted by post-traumatic stress disorder and experts say we’re leagues behind the U.S. in dealing with the crisis

SARNIA–After spending a muggy afternoon last July drinking beer and bickering with his brother during a round of golf, Cpl. Travis Schouten was in a sour mood when he returned to his mother’s well-kept bungalow on a quiet side street.

Belligerent from the moment he walked through the door, the 24-year-old Schouten agreed to take a nap and cool off.

He reappeared a few moments later.

“He ran into the kitchen, darting from window to window and crouching, acting like he was holding a gun, yelling out co-ordinates or something,” says his mother, Ann LeClair.

Schouten was suffering a flashback, another in a series of erratic, sometimes psychotic, behaviours that have included three suicide attempts, alcohol abuse, insomnia and delusions. He spent six months in late 2006 and early 2007 in Kandahar with the Royal Canadian Regiment’s Seven Platoon, Charles Company, a 38-soldier unit that took part in foot patrols in the grape groves and poppy fields west of Kandahar airfield.”Corporal Schouten, stand down!” his stepfather, Drew LeClair, barked. That snapped Schouten out of his state – for a moment.

As the LeClairs explained to him what had happened, Schouten ran out the back door, dropped to his belly, and crawled across the patio into the rose bushes, screaming he was under attack.

LeClair, a former teacher, knew that splashing water on the faces of special-needs students sometimes brought them out of distressed states. So the two hosed down their son.

“At that point, I’m crying and he’s bloody from crawling on the brick and the rose thorns,” LeClair says. “For the next five hours, he lay down on the sofa and I couldn’t put the lights off or leave him alone. Every time he started screaming, I started flicking water on his face.”

Schouten is one of a growing number of soldiers who are returning from Kandahar with hidden scars. The Canadian Forces says one in seven soldiers arrive home suffering from debilitating mental conditions.

They struggle to cope with symptoms such as severe depression, flashbacks, suicidal tendencies, alcoholism, drug use, angry outbursts, and sleep disorders. Some are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which did not formally exist until 1980, when the American Psychiatric Association recognized it as a combat-related illness.

Soldiers have always returned from battle with pent-up rage and haunting nightmares, dismissed in World War I as “low moral fibre,” understood as shell shock during World War II, and personified by the broken Vietnam veteran.

…

Life hasn’t become easier for Schouten. In November, the military began investigating his suicide attempt and Schouten was asked by an investigator to fax his account of the episode. Four times. He was repeatedly told his file had been misplaced, LeClair says. A Canadian officer involved in the investigation confirms that account.

“It’s shameful, the treatment he received,” says the officer, who does not have clearance to publicly discuss Schouten’s case.

…

‘Lacking moral fibre’

During the U.S. Civil War, some disturbed soldiers were sent to asylums and were prescribed opium.

From 1914 to 1918, 289 British and 18 Canadian troops were executed for cowardice. They were blindfolded, tied to a post with a piece of white paper pinned over their heart – perhaps to help their executioners take aim – and shot. Mostly privates who were in their 20s, those soldiers today would probably have been diagnosed with PTSD. The lucky ones were sent home to Canada with medical files that read “LMF.”

“I’ve seen charts that read, `Lacking Moral Fibre,’” says Seymour Frydrych, a Toronto doctor who treated war veterans for close to 30 years at Sunnybrook Hospital. It’s unclear how many soldiers received such a diagnosis.

By World War II, some doctors had found a new way to treat soldiers with “shellshock,” says Frydrych, by lobotomizing those who buckled under stress.

Doctors would tap two quick blows to the head to induce sedation, roll back an eyelid and insert a device slightly thinner than a pencil through the upper eye socket into the patient’s head. Doctors would then lightly hammer the device into the frontal lobe of the brain.

A watershed moment in Canada’s treatment of soldiers with stress and trauma wounds came late one night in April 2001.

Canadian General Romeo Dallaire was discovered drunk and passed out on a park bench in Hull, semiconscious from mixing prescription medicine and alcohol. A three-star general in the army, Dallaire had been sent to Rwanda in 1993 on a peacekeeping mission.

Dallaire had asked his supervisors at the United Nations in New York seven times if he could take action to prevent Rwanda’s Hutus from committing genocide against the country’s Tutsi minority.

In response, the U.N. cut his force from 2,600 to 450. He was told only to evacuate foreigners and was left hamstrung as 800,000 Tutsi were murdered in a span of 100 days. Bloated bodies literally log-jammed rivers.

In 2001, Dallaire entered therapy and began to speak publicly about PTSD. His story resonated across the country and helped eliminate the stigma faced by soldiers who are struggling from a mental illness.

Full Story

Kelly McParland, National Post
June 13, 2008

Here’s your government in action.

Since 9/11 airlines and airports have been buried under an avalanche of new charges, regulations and security demands that have turned air travel into a nightmare. Ottawa imposed a “security fee,” supposedly to pay for the heightened security viewed as necessary in the wake of the attacks. Draconian new measures intended to ensure the safety of flying led to absurd precautions that served to increase delays and frustration levels for everyone involved. Elderly women in wheelchairs have to remove their sandals to prove they haven’t somehow laden them with plastic explosive. Little kids sucking on plastic bottles have to abandon them for fear the purple pop might be cleverly-disguised nitro-glycerine. People are patted down, fluffed up, X-rayed and manhandled on the off chance they may terrorists cleverly disguised as a tired family on their way back from holiday. A Toronto university student was ordered to remove her pendant by a dimwitted security officer in Kelowna airport because the little silver bauble on her chain was shaped like a pistol.

So now that the government has ensured the whole process has been made suitably miserable (and horrifically expensive thanks to the escalation of heavily-taxed gasoline), what does Ottawa do? It passes a motion calling for an “airline passenger bill of rights” to protect travellers from “inconveniences.”

Gee, thanks.

Source | See Also: Pistol Pendant Causes Airport Holdup

BBC News
Saturday, 14 June 2008

Governments in the European Union are exploring what to do after the Irish Republic’s rejection of the Lisbon Treaty to reform the expanded EU.

France and Germany have described the “No” vote as a serious blow but urged the EU to press ahead with the project.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said ratifications must carry on so that the Irish vote did not “become a crisis”.

But Czech President Vaclav Klaus said the treaty was finished, since any further ratification was impossible.

His is a lone voice among EU leaders, but his views will probably resonate with many European voters who did not get a say in a referendum, says the BBC’s Oana Lungescu in Brussels.

The third failed referendum on an EU treaty in three years can only be seen as a serious blow to the EU’s credibility at home and abroad, our correspondent adds.

‘Take their course’

Voters in the Irish Republic rejected the Lisbon treaty in a vote by 53.4% to 46.6%.

The 27-nation EU requires all its members to ratify the treaty but only Ireland has held a public vote.

A referendum was mandatory in the Republic as the country would need to change its constitution to accommodate the treaty.

The European Commission says nations should continue to ratify the treaty, designed to streamline decision-making.

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said that Ireland remained “committed to a strong Europe”.

“Ratifications should continue to take their course,” he added.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said the UK would press on with its ratification.

Lisbon is supposed to replace the European constitution, which was rejected by French and Dutch voters three years ago.

The treaty, which is designed to help the EU cope with its expansion into eastern Europe, provides for a streamlining of the European Commission, the removal of the national veto in more policy areas, a new president of the European Council and a strengthened foreign affairs post.

It is due to come into force on 1 January, 2009.

Fourteen countries out of the 27 have completed ratification so far.

Long weekend

European governments will spend the weekend trying to chart a way forward for the EU, the BBC’s Jonny Dymond reports from Dublin.

Ireland has thrown a spanner deep into the EU’s machinery and Europe’s leaders have just a few days before they meet for their summer summit in Brussels, to come up with some credible ideas as to how to move forward.

The most obvious course of action might be to tinker with Treaty and then ask Ireland to vote again.

But Thursday’s “No” vote was more than the usual anti-European suspects, our correspondent says.

The No campaign successfully increased its vote in the Irish Republic and asking a population to vote again is a trick you can only pull so many times.

The weekend will be a period of deep reflection for many governments across the EU, our correspondent says.

Source | See Also: Defiant Ireland set to quash Europe-wide constitutional moves | Ireland Set To Vote On EU Dictatorship | Irish PM Accuses EU Constitution No Vote Coalition of ‘Sheer Inaccuracy and Absurdity’ | Ireland Only Country to Hold Referendum on Contentious EU Constitution | EU Looking for Presidential Candidates | European Parliament Members Revolt Over Treaty of Lisbon