Obfuscated Thoughtlessness Inversed

It isn't that the provincial police used in Ontario, Newfoundland and Quebec are any better than the RCMP. However, the enforcement of the criminal code is jurisdictionally a provincial matter in Canada. Why is it that the BC Attorney General continues to pretend he has no control over the policing of our province.

The BC office of the Police Complaints Commissioner has had a rocky ride since its inception nearly ten years ago. A limiting budget and a more limited mandate from the start got much worse when the courts over ruled the first significant Public Hearing into the riot at the Hyatt. I remember the police's actions that night vividly and a public hearing was absolutely warranted. The courts however, stated that the commissioner acted without jurisdiction in calling for a hearing. Although Commissioner Morrison was eventually successful in overturning this ruling, 4 years had now passed since the incident. Morrison himself was finished as commissioner long before there was a final outcome. Now, a series of suggestions for improving the complaints process have been brought forward by Justice Wood.

From Opininon 250:

• Strengthening the oversight powers of the Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner (OPCC) to ensure that serious complaints are properly investigated and resolved.
• Shifting from the current model where the OPCC oversees a complaint after police have investigated it, to contemporaneous oversight where the OPCC can be involved throughout the handling of a complaint. This would involve the use of new software to track complaints across all municipal police departments.
• Increasing the police complaint commissioner's powers to include the ability to provide advice or direction to a police department during an investigation; the power to issue guidelines that are binding on police; and statutory responsibility to monitor non-lodged or oral complaints (complaints made by a member of the public who does not want to commit the complaint to writing).
• Compelling police by law to co-operate both with internal and external investigators, including providing a statement and submitting to an interview. Failure to co-operate would constitute a new category of discreditable conduct under the Code of Professional Conduct regulation.

Of course, no Canadian can forget how much worse the RCMP's Public Complaints Commission is. Their handling of the complaints related to the injured protesters at APEC will go down in history as a massive blunder almost as bad as the actions of the RCMP in the first place.

For those of you who don't live in British Columbia, or who do and don't follow policing jurisdiction closely, I should give some background. The RCMP is a federal police force reporting to the federal government. The BC Government and all but a few BC municipalities contract the RCMP to provide policing. This arrangement is used instead of provincial police forces in much of Canada. Cities like Surrey, Kamloops and Kelowna don't have their own police forces. Many smaller cities, districts and municipalities do, like Central Saanich and the District of Oak Bay. It gets weirder though, districts like the UBC endowment lands and the Naval Base at Esquimalt are policed by the RCMP on contract but surrounding areas like the Esquimalt municipality and the City of Vancouver have their own policing arrangements that don't include the RCMP. Federal legislation stops any kind of real oversite of the RCMP by the provincial governments, civilians or municipalities. However, the option exists to negotiate a new policing regime or simply do away with municipal and provincial policing duties by contract with the RCMP.

Today's call from the BC NDP Opposition that all communities should benefit from improvements to police complaints requires extending a new kind of civilian over-site to the majority of the province is one I hardily support. The RCMP can no longer operate by a different set of rules than the rest of the police in BC.

If Stockwell Day and the RCMP continue to insist they should have their own set of rules; then we should simply call their bluff and stop using the RCMP in BC.

Labels: alternatives, bc blogs, bc ndp, cons, copwatch, day, democracy, human rights abuse, link, ndp, opinion, rcmp

Thanks to the 929 visitors who made this blog what it is this month. I failed to meet my 1000 unique visit dream, but each one of your unique visits means just as much to me as if I had. Your return visits not so much. Obfuscated Thoughtlessness Inversed had way more of those.. 2652 or an average of 2.85 visits per visitor.

I couldn't have done it with out you. I cherish your visits, especially from the several folks who work for the Department of National Defense, and the repeat visitors from Human Resources and Social Development Canada and even the one guy who visited once from the Government of Nova Scotia. At least the RCMP didn't visit this month, like they did last month. Then again I didn't make fun of the commissioner this month, like I did last month.

On the plus side staff at the Council of Canadians, War Amps of Canada, COPE 378, BCGEU, CBC, Sierra Club of BC, BC and Federal NDP Caucus and federal NDP staff all visited. I like being noticed by them. Also, those of you who I called idiots who then proved that you are fast learners, thanks to you too. The IE ratio dropped from nearly 50% to 38.3% and beyond that Firefox came in on the month at 39%-just slightly ahead. Yay!

On the corporate side of things, the coolest-non-ISP-.com-to-visit award goes to Agilent.com. Whereas the award for creepiest Human Resources/Evil doers inc. award goes to PSI Limited. May PSI never get asked to psych my brain out for corporate profit.. From the PSI website:

International Leadership Assessment:

Assessing the competence of existing and potential international leaders contributes to both selection and development processes. In selection, assessment helps evaluate the suitability of leaders for particular assignments. In development, it helps identify areas of potential leadership growth and feeds into personal and career development processes. It can also contribute to succession planning. The tools used in assessment include PSi’s Standard and International TAISs (a psychometric profiling inventory) and our web-based International 360° and International Leadership 360° profiles, as well as other psychometric instruments.

There isn't much difference between these two companies. .com's really aren't usually cool. After I looked up the anonymous IP of PSI's internet gateway, read their website and digested the above, I ran away shrieking like my dog after getting stung by the bee she just ate.

(Reality check: I wasn't actually shrieking and the dog usually only eats bees during the summer and then she kinda half-mumbles half cries, and that's the northern hemisphere summer some time away still, oh and the word just is somewhat of a loose time measurement. I suggest longitude and latitude for those of you who are into measurement. For regular readers, my dog, refers to the brown one you often see on this page in little photos. Alright this is getting way to random and nothing like a reality check, close bracket:).

True to my promise I will not post dates, times or actual IP addresses of these visits. Hopefully your network admins are not bored or crazy enough to pull up the logs to bust you for looking at my blog.

Ok, that's enough navel gazing. On to a new month and more near exponential growth in readership!

Labels: annotation, bc blogs, internal, personal story, tools

This site is still up. Fuckers. I haven't held office as Chairperson for the UVic Students' Society since 2000, but these anti-choicers are still suggesting you e-mail me and tell me how wrong-headed I am.

To top it all off, you guessed it, they are the ones who are wrong.

They lost a democratic vote of the membership to establish the policy, another in 1999 to protect it and apparently it was revisited for the third time recently and the idiots lost again.

The issue was simple. They thought the student society shouldn't have any control over itself and e-mail the The University President's Council to that effect. They also thought policy set by democratic meetings of over 500 people should exempt them for no reason.

Oh how my e-mail box used to whine under the barrage of their incessant insanity.

Happy Pro-Choice Blogging Day everybody!

May the anti-choicers shrivel and die soon... if not here is some Bill Hick's to live by:

"If you're really pro-life, here's what you do. Don't block med clinics. OK? Lock arms, and block cemeteries. Let's see how fucking committed you are to this premise!
'She can't come in.'
'She was 96, she got hit by a bus, what?'
'There's options.'
'What? stuff her? What're you talking about? She's dead!'
'We're pro-life; get her out of that casket! Get her out! We're pro-life, there will be no death!'
...look, a three-month old baby in a woman's belly is not a human being, OK? It's just a congregate of cells. You're not a human being, 'till you're in my phone book." - Bill Hicks

Yay for Roe v. Wade!

Labels: alternatives, bc blogs, canada, democracy, health, leftist content creation, link, online campaign, opinion, personal story, pro-choice

"Seven Oaks magazine is a publication which stands outside the realm of false consensus, in unapologetic alliance with those in this country and around the world dedicated to social justice, world peace, gender and racial equality, as well as equality of language rights, self-determination, environmental sustainability, and the celebration of cultural achievement and critical thought." from the Seven Oaks Magazine manifesto.

It isn't just the blog that has created a political stir this year. Even as new mediums allow instantaneous publishing power for anyone with access to the technology, a hard-core of experienced propagandists spend countless hours disseminating the in-depth written arguments and ideas that create the platform on which this freedom is built.

The failure of victoria.indymedia.org and its counterpart at vancouver.indymedia.org to live as long as our foggy memories of Seattle '99, ushers in a new challenge to the left, to create content in open forums, that leads discussion without debasing the debate to the point of irrelevance. Even bc.indymedia.org, created in the ashes of vic & vanindymedia and seen as a way to bring together a province with alternate forms of debate seems abandoned with no new posts in nearly 8 months.

Let's hope these same brilliants writers and activists who are creating on-line places like thetyee.ca and sevenoaksmag.com move quickly to adopt the use of new forms of media. Check this attempt of what I hope for by some local film-makers, now viewed over 5,700 times on YouTube: Guantanamo Bay.

Labels: bc blogs, bcmedia, blogosphere, indymedia, leftist content creation, new media critique, youtube