The Proletariat Congress

It all began with a party outdoors in the bush. Some teens got together and got drunk. One of those teens was a 15 year old by the name of Willow Kinloch, who drank more than she could tolerate. Then as is the typical chain of events with these types of parties, it was broken up by police, and unable to tell the interlopers where she lived due to her inebriated state, she was taken to the precinct and put in a cell so she could sober up. Around 4am when she was fine, she was escorted home.

If only the tale stopped there then there would have been no news story to speak of and Kinloch would be living her life, free of any knowledge of the events that followed; the injustices that she witnessed and felt first hand as an innocent caught up in a corrupt system where it has become part of the mantra to shoot first and ask questions later.

Now at 18 years old, Kinloch has come out and has told her tale to the Canadian media in the hopes of drawing attention to her plight and that of others who were unjustly treated at the hands of the law; by those who are alleged to serve and protect the public and not abuse that sacred trust. She was influenced by the tragic events that took the life of Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski who was tasered not once but twice at a Vancouver airport after being detained for 10 hours with no translator or any way to contact someone who could help him, despite there being a telephone link to a translator nearby. One person who recorded the incident alleged that he had been tasered as many as three or four times. He suffered a tragic end at the hands of four RCMP officers who came in and used a taser gun to subdue him when all he needed was someone who could tell him what was going on in his own language.

Kinloch said she decided to tell her story because, at 18, she now feels mature enough to speak publicly. She was also influenced by what happened to Robert Dziekanski, the Polish immigrant who died after RCMP used a Taser gun to subdue him at the Vancouver airport. In that case, as in hers, Kinloch said, the videotape made all the difference.

Kinloch wasn’t tasered at any point in the duration of her stay, which is fortunate for her. However, she was still subject to abuse at the hands of her guards who didn’t take the time to understand her emotional distress. Being locked in a cell while she sobered up may not have been so bad if not compounded by the fact that she was returned to that cell later on after being released.

The officers who had escorted her home, wouldn’t let her out of the vehicle claiming that they were ensuring that she was watched as she was a child in need of protection. They refused to let her get out of the car when they had arrived at her home. They wouldn’t let her out. Yet if she had been permitted to exit the vehicle, she could have yelled up to the second floor of her home. Failing that, she could have used her cellphone to call her sister, who also had a cellphone. This option was also denied by the police. This resulted in her being returned to the station because they couldn’t get her inside because the intercom system to buzz the apartment wasn’t working that night.

“At this point, I’m not drunk anymore,” said Kinloch. “I’ve done nothing wrong. I’m not a threat, and my parents are at home and are going to be worrying about me. I just wanted to go home.”

Go home. Nothing more, nothing less. All she had wanted to do was go home, yet this wish of hers was flat out denied by police who wouldn’t even let her make a phone call to ask to be let in, as she had forgotten her keys. A simple phone call would have spared Kinloch the events that followed the return to the Victoria police station.

She was returned to the station but had refused to get out of the vehicle and was subsequently removed by force and returned to the same cell where she had been held earlier, when she had been intoxicated and anything but calm. She had been accompanied by a prison guard, Special Const. Merle Edmonds, who instructed her to remove certain articles of clothing, including the shoes that were being worn at the time. In removing the shoe, Kinloch kicked it across the cell, never targeting the delusional officer who claimed that she had been assaulted by a flying shoe.

The female officer who had asked for the removal of certain articles of clothing then pinned the girl to the wall as two other officers came in and pinned her, pushing her face and body to the floor, and holding her arms and legs in place for several minutes while they placed her under arrest. While this happened, another officer came in and brought a rope or leash like object that was used to bound the girl. The end result is the girl is left tethered, her hands and feet bound, to the door for four hours before she was released.

There was no reason for her to even be put into the cell the second time, as she had been sobered up. If the officers had even an iota of human decency they could have asked her to wait in an area that was not a cell of any kind. They could have easily asked her to wait in the lobby, until they would be able to return her home, yet instead they robbed her of her dignity.

There are plenty of ways to “protect” someone that doesn’t involve using a prison cell. If the officers really had her welfare at heart, the last thing they would have done is locked her in the cell, adding to the emotional distress that she was feeling. Kinloch admitted to being in tears for the duration of this.

Human emotion; emotional distress, seems to be the grounds for police to exercise excessive force these days, rather than simply listening. If diplomacy was used more and people employed empathy, there would be fewer cases where an innocent person is caught up in a corrupt system that would rather pretend its working because it has people behind bars rather than actually working and seeing people back on the street and rehabilitated or if the crime warranted it, sentenced accordingly after a trial before a jury of their peers.

If this kind of mistreatment of a human being had happened at the hands of a civilian, that person would have been charged with unlawful confinement and assault among other things, as the confinement and bounding left Kinloch covered in bruises, which were reported to the Victoria police and handled by an officer who hadn’t been involved in the case.

“I wondered how they would feel if somebody took their child off the street and beat them up and detained them, and they didn’t know where their daughter was all night,” said Tammy-Marie Kinloch. “If I did that to my child — which I can’t imagine any parent would ever do — then throw the key away. Put me in jail.”

Her mother had been no doubt worried but in the end, at least her baby could come home to her. She was able to be with her daughter at the end of the tragedy. And with her daughter, able to confront the officers who had inflicted the bruises on her daughter.

Instead of assault charges being pressed against the four officers in question, Kinloch was initially charged with assaulting Edmonds, the female officer who had been in the cell when the shoe had been kicked to the other side of the cell. This charge was fortunately dropped quickly after the Crown Prosecution viewed the tape and exercised unprecedented common sense. Though it still intransigently maintains that the actions of the officers were justifiable given the circumstances, despite that the girl was petite and not even five feet tall.

Kinloch was fortunate enough to acquire a lawyer who believes that this is an open and shut case. Her lawyer, agrees with her about the tape, in that is secures her case against the officers named in the case. Even Kinloch admits that if it weren’t for the tape, she’d have no case. The tape is all that stands between justice and chaos.

B.C. teen alleges she was assaulted and unlawfully detained by police

The year is 1986, we’re near the the city of Tchernobyl, Ukraine, in one of the satellite states of the USSR. Today also happens to be April 25. All is calm, yet many live near a nuclear power plant, which supplies many with clean-burning electrical power, which is supposed to be more environmentally friendly than coal-fire plants. Each of the four reactors can create 1000 Gigwatts of power. On the same day, April 25, just before the evening shift came in, an order to meet peak evening demand came in, leaving the evening shift take handle it. Yet at 1:23:40, it took only seconds and limited knowledge of the state of the state one of the reactors to lead to one of the greatest nuclear disasters in history, rivalled only by Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Other places with problems in the same time period were Sellafield, Ireland and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.Fast forward to the year 2008, a good 22 years after Tchernobyl, to Ottawa, where a minority government is getting a might to big for its britches. A childish regime that doesn’t like to play nice with others in the playground and will take the ball home when the others don’t let him play by his rules. This kind mentality pervades the political front in Ottawa, and the casualty today is the former Canadian Nuclear Safety president, Linda Keen, whose only mistake was doing her job. She was fired by the minority government for refusing to start up a reactor that produced medical isotopes, being more than 50% of the world supply.

There had been rumours about a shortage of these isotopes, though it’s easily attributed to media sensationalism; anything to make a catchy headline and an engaging byline. There was no impending crisis despite the media’s twist on the story. It was easy to see that this was for safety and if there really was a shortage, the safety watch dog would have done something to alleviate public concerns while the safety upgrades go under way.

The Nuclear Safety Commission is a quasi-judicial arms-length body in charge of overseeing nuclear safety in Canada. As the police are there to enforce the law of the jungle in our streets, the Safety Commission is there to ensure that we don’t get exposed to the ill-effects caused by a nuclear meltdown. They are an inpendant commission who carry out safety inspections and ensure compliance.

The reactor had been shut down during a routine inspection that found the facilities weren’t in compliance with an earlier safety report to have the reactor at Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd.’s shut down because it hadn’t added the cool pumps, which would help in avoiding meltdowns during seismic activity. The reactor had been shut down in November of 2007, and would have been reopened once the upgrades had been done, and at the time of the firing, one of the two necessary upgrades had been completed, with another one due shortly after it.

On December 11th, the AECL had met with a House committee to give an update on it, and had given an estimate of 16 days or so to complete the upgrade. Neither the minority government nor the opposition governments were listening to this. Against the Nuclear Safety Commission and Linda Keen’s orders, they passed legislation, permitting the reactor to be brought back online despite that the existing safety concerns surrounding the Chalk River facilities, and the fact that there is known low but still detectable seismic activity in that region.

This put her at odds with Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn, one of the many spineless “Yes” men in the Harper administration, who love nothing more than making senior bureaucrats operate under the party banner. It should be noted that Harper has referred to Keen has that “Liberal appointee”, effectively bringing petty partisan politics into a ring where nuclear safety is tantamount to the industry where a single fault in a reactor is the difference between life and death, as history has shown us with Tchernobyl.

16 hours before Keen was expected to testify before a House committee about the reason behind keeping the reactor down, she was fired from her position, and all because she was doing her job and not bending over backwards to cater to a childish regime that doesn’t have the guts to speak to the media directly and prefers to act like a cowardly little bully, retreating when the big boys start to call the shots.

A clearly partisan move. An attempt to silence her and keep the media in the dark about the truth. Of course, this takes into account that the voting public lives under a rock with its fingers shoved in its ears. It’s too bad the Conservatives think this; they’d know otherwise, except they’ve lost their collective head, which is shoved 20,000 leagues up the ass they so willingly kiss.

PM defends firing of nuclear watchdog

Ousted regulator just doing her job

Concerns over nuclear safety

This entry is a guest article written by Brian Damage of demodulated blog.

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What’s in a name? Can a few proper nouns summarize the essence of a human being? If a man is only as good as his name does that man have the sole rights to its selective usage? Not according to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers who is the world’s regulating body for internet domain names.

Let’s back up that tractor a bit first. (beep beep beep)

Blogger and native Edmontonian Dave Cournoyer, aka Daveberta, is a vocal member of Canada’s Liberal party and a staunch opponent of the provincial Progressive Conservative party of which reigning Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach is a member. Dave recently registered the publicly and freely available domain name “edstelmach.ca” for fourteen bucks and pointed it to his blog. Shortly thereafter, with nary a warning shot, Dave was contacted by the Stelmach’s lawyers who demanded he desist in pointing this domain name to his blog and that he surrender the domain to the Premier at once, else the coyotes of litigation would git to howlin’.

Cournoyer, unswayed by these empty threats, merely pointed the domain to the Wikipedia article on Harry Strom, a former Alberta Premier who was criticized similarly to Stelmach as a good old farm boy whose reputation dwindled for being oblivious to the needs of the province’s flourishing urban centres. Threatening this indebted University of Alberta student due to his misunderstanding of the workings of the internet certainly bolsters such comparison.

Does Stelmach have the authority to unleash his stampede of thoroughbred lawyers on this poor kid in his jurisdiction? Well sure he does – it’s his got-dang right as a western Canadian. But that’s as far as he’ll mosey along, ah reckon.

The US Copyright Office, who regulates the ICANN, has this to say on the matter of copyright…

… on domain names:

“Copyright law does not protect domain names. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a nonprofit organization that has assumed the responsibility for domain name system management, administers the assignation of domain names through accredited registers.”

… and on proper names:

“Names are not protected by copyright law.” and “Copyright does not protect names, titles, slogans, or short phrases.”

That’s right, it’s first come first serve in the Wild Wild Web. (otherwise translated for Stelmach’s benefit as “them dubyas”)

It seems that unless the very Right (if not Honourable) Premier might have to prove that he is either the world’s one and only Ed Stelmach, the supposely infringing use of his name detracts from his brand, the domain name disingenuously cuts his profits by impersonating his brand and thereby tricking customers, or that his name is the entirety of a catchy corporate slogan. (might I recommend, like George Costanza before him, the “by Mennen” tune?)

Ed Stelmach may as well hitch up and git along. Daveberta is making a stand and won’t be ponying up any time soon.

For more information on this topic I’ve blogged previously (here and here) about corporate bullying for domain names.

“Yeee haw, lit’s wrangle up this internet sumbitch!” – not actually said by Ed Stelmach

There are a number of ways one can submit their voter’s ballot in Canada. This was developed to allow for people to vote in absentia, whether they are out of their riding or out of the country. There are also ways for people to vote if they are unable to get to their riding’s polling station. Elections Canada makes it easy for voters to get the job done. Their website provides the information sought by the elector (or voter).

This ensures transparency in the system.

Or at least it should. The current system is no longer good enough for the minority Conservatives, who want to make life difficult for veiled Muslim women; to make voting more difficult for this group by violating their rights.

When voting in absentia, the voter must provide valid identification, but only to register to vote in absentia. The elector is required to submit the following:

• pages 2 and 3 of your Canadian passport, or a Canadian citizenship certificate or card; or
• a birth certificate or a baptismal certificate proving that the elector was born in Canada.

It doesn’t require valid photo ID if the elector was born in Canada. Yet the Conservatives feel the need to mandate that Muslim women not be allowed to vote while veiled. This is more than a small inconsistency given what is permitted and accepted by Elections Canada.

The Tories were furious over a decision by Elections Canada to allow Muslim women to vote with their faces covered by burkas or niqabs during three Quebec byelections in September.

“During the recent byelections in Quebec, the government made it clear that we disagreed with the decision by Elections Canada to allow people to vote while concealing their face,” Van Loan said.

“That is why … we committed to introducing legislation to confirm the visual identification of voters.”

So, let me get this straight, while an elector can vote in absentia without photo ID, a veiled Muslim woman cannot have her face concealed when she goes to a polling station in person, even if she does present valid photo ID?

Bill C-31, which was passed last spring, required voters to show one piece of government-issued photo ID — the most basic standard of voter identification — or two pieces without a photo before being allowed to vote.

But not while in absentia? Is it any wonder why people hate the Conservative government? This is the kind of sheer hypocrisy that will cause this minority government to implode on itself. If they’re going to change the rules, they need to initiate the change across the board.

Marc Mayrand of Elections Canada, explained that it was allowed for the veiled Muslim women to vote without having to show their faces as he accepted the photo ID (up to 2 if the woman didn’t wish to remove the veil) as valid proof of the voter’s identification. The current law also allows for the elector’s ID be verified by another registered elector in the same district. Though this is not required by the current law due to the methods used for electors to register to vote in absentia.

Tories introduce bill to ban veiled voting