The uproar in Ottawa over External Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier’s dalliances with a former Hells biker mama smells more like a political assassination than anything else.
And the more I look at this file, the more I think Julie Couillard may have been working with the police. You be the judge.
Here are the nuts of the story in this morning’s La Presse: Last August, Tory MP Maxime Bernier presented himself at the official residence of Governor General Michaelle Jean to be sworn in as Stephen Harper’s external affairs minister. He was accompanied by the sultry Julie Couillard, wearing an audaciously low-cut dress. Since then, Stephen Harper has learned that the former model associated with the Hell’s Angels in the 90s and the capital is talking about nothing else.
Bernier and the 38-year-old former model were last seen together just two months ago at a reception at the Chateau Laurier. Her ex — who she divorced in 1999 — was a member of the Rockers, the wet-work branch of the Hells and Gilles Giguere, her Hells Nomad boyfriend before that, was assassinated.
Did the Tory spin machine plant this story in this morning’s La Presse? Bernier’s in the Harper doghouse these days after suggesting the governor of Kandahar should be replaced. The former golden-haired boy of the Tory Quebec wing was also mocked for a photo op handing out Mae Wests to Canadian troops and forgetting who governs Haiti.
Dimitri Soudas, Harper’s press flak, told La Presse to call Bernier’s flak, and Hrab told the scribes to call Couillard. She had nothing to say.
The problem is this: Couillard lived for three years with Gilles Giguère, the muscle for Robert Bob Savard, the loanshark for Maurice Mom Boucher and the Hells Angels Nomads chapter. They were together until one day in 1996, when Giguère left their east end home to go to a meeting. His bullet-riddled body was found in a north-shore ditch two days later. The Wolverines, the SQ’s antigang squad, believes he was executed because Mom was afraid he’d become a police informant.
Couillard was already known to police. Four months before Giguere was offed, she and her father were arrested in connection with a murder and extortion conspiracy involving an east-end real estate agent. The wolverines held her for 18 hours before releasing her uncharged. She complained to the Police Ethics Board.
After a year wearing black, Couillard married Stéphane Sirois a member of the Rockers, the military wing of the Hells Angels Nomads chapter. En 1997, Mom Boucher gave Sirois an ultimatum: divorce Julie Couillard or quit les Rockers. Sirois did both. He became a police informant in March, 1999. His divorce became final three months later.
Like I said, the fact point to Couillard having been a Woverines handler who got real close to Boucher and his gang, most of whom are doing hard time to life for crimes like killing prison guards. Bernier’s squeeze isn’t the story. Why she was outed, and who outed her, is.
For appellate court judge Yves-Marie Morrisette, 18 months is too harsh a sentence for Edward Hakim.
I find that strange, coming from the same man whose testimony played a huge role in the federal government’s war on tobacco advertising.
Hakim is the 21-year-old man-child whose Buick Roadster slammed into Patricia Jolicoeur as she was walking the family dog on a quiet residential street near her home. The force of the impact threw her 13 metres, shattering her skull and destroying her neural hub.
Patricia is condemned to a life sentence in a wheelchair and gurney, paralyzed, severely epileptic, tube-fed, unable to speak. She is a prisoner in her own brain and her family is condemned to serve that sentence with her.
Perhaps it’s better that Judge Morrisette has never laid eyes on Patricia. It might trigger the same anger and revulsion that causes me to write this.
It might trigger in him a need to send the message to reckless young men like Edward Hakim who drive as if life was an extension of their Grand Theft Auto gamer joysticks.
Jurisprudence and precedents be damned. Tell me, Mr. Morissette, why is reckless driving less dangerous to society than cigarette advertising?
Spare us from judges whose fear of rocking the judicial boat means nothing will ever change.
Spare us from our intellectually dishonest politicians who claim their hands are tied when it comes to traffic-calming, reduced speed limits and more cops on our roads.
And spare us from parents who think they’re doing their kids a favour by protecting them from the consequences of their monumental stupidity. Hakim Sr’s petulant scolding of the media, accusing them of killing his son, is laughable to anyone who has looked into his victim’s eyes.
Please, Mr. Hakim, spare us your patently self-serving pity party. Drop this moronic appeal, let your son serve his time and when he gets out, help him undertake to help support the Jolicoeurs any way he can.
You tell me your son didn’t even want you to appeal his sentence, but that you insisted. Question, sir: when are you going to allow your boy to become a man?
Quebec Court Judge Juanita Westmoreland-Traore invokes the disadvantaged-First Nations excuse to release self-confessed police-car vandal Davin Johnny on bail. Whose side is this woman on?
I’ve just listened to Westmoreland-Traore’s seven-minute ruling. It’s just plain bizarre. She refers to the photos and videos — many photos and videos — of Johnny smashing the windows of police cruisers, of Johnny dancing on the roofs and says “ despite the videos, there’s the presumption of innocence.”
Johnny’s admissions to having called the cops pigs shows a distrust of authority, she says. The Westmoreland-Traore proceeds to the key part of any bail hearing — deciding whether there’s a danger of Johnny reoffending or being a danger either to himself or to others. Nope, no danger, says the learned judge. This was a specific cultural activity, she explains. One could assume Westmoreland-=Traore knows about hockey playoffs, that there’s a series going on, but I fear to assume this woman has any knowledge of anything outside her bubble of political correctness.
I know Juanita Wesmoreland-Traore. She’s one of those people for whom the world is composed of two classes — the oppressors and the oppressed. Her duty as a judge is to ensure that she’s always on the right side of that line, whether it’s good law or not. It doesn’t matter that the oppressed drink and steal and shoot drugs and harass people on the streets. It’s society’s fault. Davin Johnny is a victim, not a perpetrator. In Juanita Westmoreland-Traore’s world, he must be protected from society, because he’s one of the oppressed. Back at Loyola, the Jesuits taught us that line, but they also taught us the need to protect the social fabric. I guess Westmoreland Traore missed those classes.
Edward Hakim, the Dorval kid whose deadly driving destroyed Patricia Jolicoeur’s life, got 18 months in jail from Quebec Court Judge Michel Mercier. 18 months for sentencing Patricia to a life in the prison of her own brain. She can’t talk, she can’t move, she’s fed through a tube and her prognosis is bleak. Her family Lyse, Claude and Mathieu devote their lives to ensuring she’s as comfortable as possible in a chronic-care institution the Quebec Automobile Insurance Board doesn’t even want to pay for.
A life sentence for an entire family because Patricia was walking their dog on a quiet residential street on Nov. 29, 2006.
Hakim’s parents and lawyer have made much of their pain. I’m sure their lives have been disrupted. But not an infinitesmal fraction as much as the Jolicoeurs. Over the past 18 months, I have gotten to know this family. I have witnessed their struggle for justice on behalf of their daughter and all victims of deadly, stupid drivers. I have witnessed the lack of compassion and the dysfunctionality of the Town of St. Lazare in dealing with deadly drivers like young Hakim.
18 months for destroying a life? The kid will serve three. Eventually, he’ll get himself a pardon so he doesn’t even get a criminal record. Who will pardon Patricia Jolicoeur? Who will grant her parole?
The crown had asked for 30 months. That would not have sent much of a message, but at least it would have made the point that penitentiary time awaits stupid young drivers like Hakim.
The judge claimed there was no precedent to allow him to send Hakim to penitentiary. No precedent, no justice. My only question? How much would it cost to bribe a judge to impose a stiffer sentence?
The Quebec government thinks it’s a great idea to expand the Lachenaie dump to accept more garbage from Montreal. At the current rate, the dump would be full by the end of next month. Owner and operator BFI has been granted an emergency injunction to expand the dump to 92 hectares, with enough room for garbage through 2025. Of course, area residents and environmental groups are screaming about the smell, the noise, the groundwater pollution, the seagulls and what’s happening to property values. BAPE, Quebec’s toothless environmental public consultation office has finished hearings into the dump expansion and is expected to deliver its recommendations to the Charest Liberals by May 28, but now that Quebec has already spoken, we know which side they’ll be coming down on when the report hits the desk of the Minister of Unsustainable Development, Environmental Pretense and Greenwash, Julie Boulet.
The city of Montreal says it's pleased with the government's decision. I’ll bet it is. It allows this gang of enviro-hypocrites to prance about pretending they’re green while they truck their trash to Terrebonne in ever increasing quantities. That’s 23 percent of all of Quebec’s post-consumer waste. A happy Earth Day to Alan De Sousa.
So. Sixteen arrests, 16 Montreal police cruisers torched and the usual delerium about why the cops weren’t better prepared.
Another Montreal riot.
I was too young for ‘56, the Great Maurice Richard Hockey Riot, but I’ve become a student of Montreal riots. Did you know the 1849 Montreal riot was started by anglos infuriated at the passage of the Rebellion Losses Bill restituting the 1837 rebels and their supporters? An English mob torched the Montreal parliament buildings and they had to call in the troops.
I was on Ste. Catherine for the 1968 Murray Hill Riot. The Montreal cops were on a work to rule, so the mob enjoyed a two-hour looting spree before the premier ordered in the SQ. My friend Peter and I got recruited by an Italian shoe store owner to keep the crowds away from his place.
The Montreal cops got their own back at the 1969 McGill français Riot. They rode their Harleys onto the sidewalks with the cops in the sidecars whaling away with their matraques at the crowds, many of whom were innocent bystanders caught in the crowd. The cops clubbed the demonstrators into successively smaller groups at each intersection with sheer brutality. Even there, a nameless anarchist had the foresight to bring tire spikes in the form of two sharpened headless nails welded together.
The 1973 La Presse Riot was huge and ugly. At one point, demonstrators rolled a stolen truck down the hill and into the line of cops. Paving stones filled the air. I got one on the back of the hand and had to go to the Royal Vic for X-rays. The ER was full of injured cops.
The 1993 Stanley Cup Riot I remember well. A few merchants on Ste. Catherine had put plywood over their windows, but the cops kept insisting they had it under control. They didn’t. The debrief found there were too few cops and no game plan. Merchants were furious, but what could they do but collect their insurance?
The 1995 Referendum Night Riot and the Medley Punk Rock Riot targeted more storefronts. Merchants howled, but what could they do? The Medley Riot aftermath found the tactical squad took an hour to get there because nobody had seen it coming.
So when I see pix of kids looting Foot Locker outlets, I wonder what’s changed. I’m sure their daddies, mommies and uncles were looting those same stores when I was a police reporter. The cops are still being faulted for not being fast, numerous or aggressive enough. I can’t blame them for not wanting to be targeted by a crowd that includes dangerous people for whom riots are a social action. Hockey fans don’t burn police cars, but Montreal’s vicious activists’ cells do.
I’ve always liked the old East German Stazi water cannon. Armoured trucks with armed outriders, equipped with turret nozzles capable of blasting someone off his feet from 100 metres. There’s nothing that cools a riot faster than being soaking wet. If I was feeling particularly dictatorial, I’d add some hog slurry or fish fertilizer to the brew. Then let ‘em riot.
More trouble at Montreal’s ambulance service. More than 500 Urgence Sante paramedics are refusing a computerized schedule due to start May 25 they say cuts even more into what little family time they have.
The paramedics just signed a new contract, but this system isn’t in it. They say management brought it in unilaterally, without consulting the union and they claim they'll refuse their assignment sheets.
The new shifts will end at 5pm or 6pm or 7pm, and for some people that means paying fines for not picking their kids up from daycare or after-school programs. This is a big deal for the working poor, which some of these paramedics certainly are. Some of these services have instituted penalties of up to $5 per every 10 minutes you’re late.
Urgences Sante paramedics usually end up working about an hour of overtime per shift. The low end of the pay scale is $17, the high end is $23.82. If you use $20 as the median, for an hour of overtime the average employee makes $30 gross, and if they're an hour late to pick up their kid, it's $30 net.
Why does Urgence Santé insist on punishing paramedics with thse working conditions? In other jurisdictions, these men and women are looked upon as the vital first links in the chain of survival. Here, they're still looked at as glorified morgue attendants whose task it is to toss the cooling meat into the back of the wagon, then tool off to the nearest hospital, where REAL medical personnel can declare them DOA.
Come to think of it, maybe that's it. The slower the ambulance, the fewer people will pile up in those ERs and make whoever's in power look bad.
In that light, Urgence Santé's actions are fully consistent with Quebec's emergency healthcare priorities.
More language hysteria in this morning’s Le Devoir: Quebec ridiculing Bill 101: Turns out this is about how Revenue Quebec makes tax forms available to corporations which must file a tax return in Quebec. The horror of this is that the State is breaking the French language charter by communicating with Quebec-based corporations in a language other than French.
The hysterical Le Devoir story is about how the internet sites of Revenu Québec, Investissement Québec et l'Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF), make everything available in English for investors and corporations outside Quebec. Malheureusement, a Quebec corporation could use these to deal with the Quevbec government and its agencies in English. Imagine.
OQLF spokesman Gilbert Paquette says if the charter was properly applied, Quebec-registered and incorporated financial entities would be forced to file in French.
The commonsense argument is that the state will benefit by making the document-filing process simpler for everyone. Language transparency is part of that process.
But we all know that, in Quebec, language hysteria always trumps common sense. That's why the Quebec economy is so unattractive to so many businesses that would otherwise love to do business here.
Canada today becomes the first nation on the planet to declare the plastics precursor Bisphenol A a dangerous substance. I’ve no doubt it’s a wise step. Studies show BSA triggers gene responses in female breast tissue consistent with aggressive tumor growth.
Health Canada, moving with uncharacteristic speed and decisiveness, is saying it will weigh the consequences of any decision to ban the use of the chemical where leaching might pose a problem.
That includes polycarbonate plastic items we’ve already heard about — baby bottles and sippy cups, water bottles. etc.
But it also includes the resins used to coat metal cans to prevent foods from coming into contact with the metal. There’s heat in the canning process, one of the risk factors in the release of Bisphenol A. At what level? We don’t know. All we know is that one study has shown a very low level of this chemical appears to trigger the carcinogenic gene expression in healthy breast tissue.
It would be easy to challenge Health Minister Tony Clement’s decision by comparing Ottawa’s speed-of-light decision compared to, say its response to the risks of tobacco. Governments spend millions on smoking-cessation programs and millions more on battling the tobacco industry, but continue to permit the legal sale of a drug they know to cause a multitude of fatal diseases.
The difference between BSA and tobacco is that tobacco use is a personal choice, whereas almost everything that comes from a can comes into contact with a BSA coating. It kind of limits personal choices, doesn’t it?
Why would a Canadians fan in his or her right mind bother to watch Habs hockey on the CBC? RDS has better play-by-play, better analysis — featuring Jacques Demers! — and much, much better highlight replays. Plus their commericals are funnier and you get to work on your colloquial French.
But I can’t get on this Dump Don Cherry bandwagon. Like I said, I don’t listen to the guy, because I don’t like the way the CBC does hockey. But at least he’s got an opinion that isn’t politically correct.
On second thought, maybe I’m wrong on that. I think even Cherry hears the footsteps of the CBC thought police, now that he’s had his wrists slapped a few times. His anti-French, anti-European rants make him sound like a cheesy old fart. Plus you’ll never, ever hear Don crapping on the league or the players’ association, because he knows which hand feeds him. I figure Cherry will die in the saddle, because not even Canada’s thought police want to try to take him down.
Cherry bombs when he leaves his field of expertise, but I think he's aware of that. Too bad CBC's senior management hasn't come to that same realization about their inability to serve all Canadian hockey fans.
Here's a piece I want to share. It was written by David Leroux, an 18-year-old John Abbott College student whose right hand was destroyed in a press in a meat-packing plant. I have also attached a companion article which demonstrates exactly how Quebec's provincial workplace health and safety commission was complicit.
The summer job that changed my life
St. Lazare resident David Leroux was working at a summer job at Vaudreuil-Dorion’s Premier Meats when an industrial accident cost him his right hand. He is writing this in the hope that it will alert his fellow jobseekers to the dangers inherent in the workplace.
By David Leroux
July 24, 2007. I turned the key and yawned as the digital clock of my car read 5:25 a.m. It was another early drive to my summer job but I was already looking forward to its end since I knew that I’d be with my dad and brother after work, and that we’d be going white-water rafting. I punched in at 6:30 and at 7:00 a.m. I began to work. I went to my station thinking I would be unwrapping liver, it sucked but, hey it’s safer than cutting chops on a saw, right?... I started unwrapping but after a couple of minutes I was told by the man in charge of the station that I was too slow. I was told to go to the end of the meat press to remove the product. I nodded my head in agreement and went where he indicated.
The machine I was assigned to was called a meat press. The machine uses hydraulic pressure to press and form slabs of meat into manageable blocks of meat to slice. At the end of the machine there is a hatch where the meat is forced out and slides down a trough onto a table for the next operation.
When I arrived at the end of the machine, the “lead hand” instructed me to take a meat hook and manually take the meat out after it was pressed to speed things up. I noticed that the trough had fallen off and when I told the “lead hand” about it he told me not to worry and to just do what I had been told since it was almost lunchtime. Crazy eh?... but I wasn’t worried because there were many safeties around all exit and entry points to the machine. It never occurred to me not to trust the more experienced workers around me. (This person had actually been foreman in the past and therefore had years of experience and knowledge regarding the workings of the machinery).
In reality, I was sticking my hand into a machine with nothing in place to stop things from going wrong. What I had not been told was that there was a key which, when pushed in and turned in this machine, cancelled all safeties. The key was only supposed to be used during maintenance and never during production. This key had in fact been used to speed up production the Friday before and had even been broken in the machine, therefore permanently canceling the safeties. No one could tell that the machine was now a safety hazard because the broken piece of the key was inside the lock and therefore not visible! Although the existence of the broken key and cancelled safeties had been reported to maintenance, and those in authority, the machine had not been fixed by the following Tuesday when it was put back into production.
It happened so fast… the top hydraulic part of the machine caught my right hand on the wrist and drove it down with a crunch. The pain hit me like getting hit by a tidal wave of needles, as I writhed in pain with only two things in my mind; should I leave it in and hope the operator has taken his hand off the switches, or pull with all my might?
The ambulance ride was a blur and I woke up in a hospital bed, in the middle of the night to my mom having to break the news to me that my hand had had to be amputated.
The CSST investigation concluded that, “dangerous work methods were used to improve productivity. This increase in productivity was achieved to the detriment of the safety of workers, notably those having little experience. The investigation also showed that training and supervision were inadequate.”
I am not writing this article for pity or revenge. I’m hoping that once you’ve read this you’ve realized the dangers that can be present in a workplace. No summer job or paycheck is worth the loss of a limb or life. Even if you believe that you are doing everything in your power to take care of your wellbeing, doesn’t mean the company is. As students we are often the most vulnerable employees. We don’t often see the dangers or realize that we can say no to any task. Always remember — your safety comes first!
CSST was monitoring Premier at the time: report By Jim Duff and Nick Mayes VALLEYFIELD — The machine that cost 19-year-old David Leroux his right hand had already been faulted in a CSST inspector’s report filed prior to the July 24, 2007 industrial accident at Vaudreuil-Dorion’s Premier Meats.
According to the CSST report on the workplace accident obtained by The Hudson/St. Lazare Gazette, CSST inspectors visited the Premier plant eight times in 2007 and filed several reports regarding what were termed “important security elements.”
While the initial visit was a routine inspection related to the regional CSST’s ongoing campaign to make workplaces safer, the followups were part of what CSST spokesman Ronald Hart termed an action plan to securitize the plant’s machinery.
Premier’s owner Paul Dejong said he was extremely sorry for the accident and insisted the plant was as safe as he could make it.
“Accidents are what they are,” Dejong said following the incident. “It takes people that work with equipment and assist with equipment to be very observant and to have respect for the equipment.”
Premier’s owner confirmed that the CSST was working in the plant prior to David’s loss of his hand. “As a matter of fact, before the accident happened, the equipment being used had gone through a major security update, along with I believe two other pieces of equipment.
“This is part of a project that we entered into with the CSST to go beyong what normal standards should be,” Dejong said, adding that the machine had been out of commission for roughly a month prior to the accident as a result of the CSST’s inspections. Most of the CSST’s visits came fater the accident, he added.
According to the CSST incident report, the machine David had been assigned to clear was knowingly being operated by Premier with a key broken in a switch position that locked the system into a maintenance mode and bypassed the safety interlock.
The interlock, known as a two-hand anti tie-down, and widely used throughout industry, requires requires that two buttons widely spaced be pressed within a few milliseconds of each other and then both be released before another cycle can start.
According to one manufacturer familiar with its use, it prevents a lazy operator taping down one button and continuing operation. It is very difficult for two individual people to trigger a cycle.
The CSST also faulted Premier for failing to provide adequate training for their summer staff, a charge Leroux confirms.
“I took the day off on my birthday and the next day they asked how old I was. I told them I was eighteen and they put me on the machine. They showed me the two buttons and that was pretty much it,” he said.
David also recalls seeing the green-hatted CSST inspectors throughout the plant as he worked.“I kept seeing people coming and looking around the plant and I thought they may be investors or new owners of the plant,” he said.
When Leroux began working at the plant last May, he thought he was going to be involved strictly in the packing part of the operation, filling boxes with already processed and plastic wrapped meat and sealing them. “The worst that could happen to you there was that you’d drop a box on your foot or something like that,” he said. “In production there were all sorts of things that could go wrong.”
Although he’s remarkably calm in describing the loss of his right hand, Leroux admits to feelings of anger when Dejong came to his house one night, trying to be jovial and offering hockey tickets. He says he still has dreams about the worst moments of the accident and is skittish about closed spaces and things like sliding doors.
Always a writer, David started to write about what had happened, first in a series of articles in The Bandersnatch, John Abbott College’s student newspaper. Those first accounts went into graphic and gory detail about the specifics of the accident, but he’s changed his tone since. “I figured if I was going to make people want to read what I had to say I would have to be more profound.”
He claims to be adapting well. “I try to do most stuff on my own,” he said. “With my prosthetic hand I can play X-Box 360 and whip any kid. Actually I can’t even imagine playing without it.”
A week after he was released from the hospital he woke up early one morning and shocked his parents when they found him cooking bacon and eggs. “I was holding my arm up like this, I taught myself how to do it,” he said, demonstrating manipulating a frying pan and spatula with one arm up in the air.
The anger is never far from the surface as Leroux recalls how Premier would hire more students when production was heavy. “I believe Premier was given options and they just looked at the costs,” he said.
Dejong said he’s done everything that could reasonably be expected to mitigate David’s loss of his hand. “The CSST is basically an insurance company. I believe there is a benefirt that David will get for the rest of his life.”
He is anxious to dispel safety concerns. “I would welcome the readers who have concerns to come down to our plant and see what we’re doing. It’s an unfortunate thing that happened.”
Flooding in Laval. Water levels rising on the Richelieu. Flooding risk looms on the Chateauguay River...here’s my question: Why do we keep letting people build on floodplains, then come running to their rescue when the damn things flood?
Here’s the scoop, folks: the Environment Ministry publishes maps of floodplains. They have two lines, one marking the 20-year highwater mark and the other marking the 100-year level. That means that whoever builds there can expect the water to rise to the lower mark once every 20 years and to the high-water mark, every century. Maybe more, maybe less. It’s an average.
Used to be, you couldn’t build anything within the 20-year mark. Now you’re not allowed to build an inhabited part of your house within the 20-year mark. A garage is okay. Hundred year? Go ahead and build.
Now, the folks on the upper Ottawa, on the Gouin and Baskitong Reservoirs, say they haven’t seen that much snow in a century. The snowpack won’t melt until mid June at the latest. And already, the sluicegates in the Carillon dam are opening to let the water through. If folks are lucky, the water will break up the ice before more water pushes the breakup through their walls.
Ever seen a house carried away? I have. It’s not a pretty sight. So why are we continuing to let people build on floodplains? Because it’s a great water view, right? Lotta taxes and real estate commissions on one of those waterfront properties.
Earlier this week, I had a chat with one of Canada’s most successful and respected criminal lawyers. I asked him what the conviction rate all those accused of drunk driving in Quebec.
About 80 percent don’t fight it, he said. Of the 20 percent who do, two-thirds win.
Why such a high win ratio?
Lawyers shop for judges who they know have higher than average acquittal rates, he replied. If they draw the wrong judge, they ask for a delay until they’re guaranteed of appearing before their man.
Let’s say we hear that a certain judge has a higher than average acquittal rate for traffic violations. There is no way of determining just how high, because that would necessitate combing through the court registry office manually.
In other words, there is no mechanism by which the public can easily determine a judge’s conviction rate. Only someone working in that jurisdiction — a lawyer, perhaps, or a judge’s clerk — would know that.
Even if we know that a certain judge acquits a high percentage of the folks nailed after blowing into the balloon, not even the justice and public security ministers can touch him. That’s because the Canadian legal system confers untouchable status on the judiciary. Only the Canadian Judicial Review Board can investigate a judge.
That frustration is what led the Harper government to institute mandatory minimums for those convicted of drunk driving and a reverse onus on anyone who tries to argue that the breathalyzer lied. As of June, you’ll have to prove the breathalyzer was defective.
In other words, it will become harder for a judge to toss out a drunk-driving case on a technical issue. Invariably, lawyers will concentrate on other weak links — the integrity of the chain of evidence, perhaps, or the testimony of our police officers.
I’ve talked to police officers about this, and frankly, they’ve become paranoid about whether certain judges are on the take or into the bottle. How else, they wonder, would any judge rule so consistently for those who are so brazenly contesting what would appear to be an open-and-shut drunk driving case?
We should care, they say, because every day a cop is in court testifying in a traffic case, he or she isn’t patrolling our streets. We should care because every drunk or reckless driver who escapes justice is emboldened to continue his or her antisocial behavior.
I’ve heard their stories about being able to buy a judge. It’s also a standing joke at some political gatherings. But it’s one thing to make snide remarks and another thing to stand up in court and prove it.
There are those who argue that elected judges and prosecutors tend to produce judgments more in step with what society wants. I see no benefit to a system that produced a hypocrite like Elliott Spitzer and a 78-month sentence for Conrad Black.
That said, why should the conviction rate of our judiciary be such a deep, dark secret available only to insiders?
I want to be able to write: “After several delays, the accused appeared before Judge So and So, whose conviction rate for drunk/reckless driving makes him/her one of the most lenient judges in the region/province/nation.”
Surely, a society fixated on goals-against averages, sacks and turnovers can get their collective heads around the need for a ratings system for the gatekeepers of our legal system?
