Tag: Mike Harris

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Mike Harris Spanks the Teachers

Let’s see now if we can get history right.

A long time ago, parents in every region of Ontario created schools for our children.

They hired teachers to teach the classes.

The specified that the teachers had to teach from 9:00 to 3:00, math, history, English, music, Latin, whatever… They knew that the teachers actually had to work several hours more than that every day, marking and preparing lessons, and chopping wood for the stove in the winter. Fair enough.

Some teachers, impassioned, perhaps, for the arts or athletics, told the children: if you want to play baseball or put on a play, stay after school and we will help you. The teachers stayed at school, voluntarily, because they loved sports or music or drama, or, heavens! because they loved their students and wanted them to experience the good things in life.

Mike Harris is elected première of the province of Ontario. He calls the teachers names. In his first session of parliament, he said, “you teachers are a bunch of scumbags and if you don’t smarten up my dad’s gonna get you.” The teachers replied, “you’re not the boss of me.”

Mike Harris said, we are paying you too much. Teachers? What a bunch of worthless scoundrels. You don’t sell anything. You don’t manufacture plastic trinkets. You don’t scam people into paying too much for credit. You get to stand in front of a bunch of kids and yak yak yak all day. You call that work? I’ll show you. You deserve to be paid three peanuts an hour, like the monkeys in the zoo.

The teachers said, if you keep calling us names, we’re not going to stay after school to volunteer for sports or dramas anymore. Harris said, “nyah nyah nyah nyah—woo woo woo woo”. And so we will have a strike next fall.

I was beginning to lose sympathy for the teachers a while ago, until Mike Harris tried to grab their extracurricular activities and make them unpaid job requirements.

You know, even if you agree with Mike Harris– that teachers are over-paid scoundrels who have taken the public to the cleaners with their excessive salary demands and luxurious pensions– I say, even if you agree with Mike Harris, you have to acknowledge that any employer who used this approach on his employees would be an idiot. What is the goal here? Every employer knows that the goal is to make your employees happy and loyal and productive. And the best way to do that, right, is cut their wages, make them work longer, and insult them. This is sure to built up loyalty and trust. This is sure to pay reams of dividends the next round of salary negotiations. This is sure to instill in your employees a devotion to their tasks.

The most contemptible part of it all is that Mike Harris himself spends about 2/3 of his time on vacation. And he has lately been talking about giving himself a big fat raise.

Oh the rank hypocrisy.

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Self-Regulation and Snitch Lines

I just heard that Mike Harris is going to get rid of all those snitch-lines and allow people on welfare to determine for themselves just how much they need and how long they need it for.

You think he’s crazy? You think that people would actually lie about how much money they need from the province to take care of their children and put food on the table, and to pay for those rapidly escalating rents on those de-controlled apartments? Do you really think someone might just quit his job out of sheer, perverse laziness, and collect welfare instead? How can you think that about people?

Just kidding, of course. Everyone knows that most people are fundamentally dishonest and, given half a chance, will cheat, lie, and steal at every opportunity.

Except…

Well, you see, Mikey Harris wants to do precisely the above…. except, he doesn’t want to rely on the honesty and integrity of the poor. He wants to rely on the honesty and integrity of the rich, the owners and managers of big industrial concerns that might– just might– cut corners by dumping toxic wastes into the environment or polluting the air.

I’m not making this up. He wants to rely more on “self-regulation” and get rid of those unpleasant, annoying pollution inspectors and officials.

Was there ever a more toxic illustration of the real philosophy of the conservatives: two sets of laws and principles– one for the rich, and one for the poor.

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Hospitals

The President of the University of Western Ontario was recently on the radio, explaining why his institution needs more money. He said that classrooms were filled to overflowing, and the residences were over-crowded– some students even had to sleep at professor’s houses. What an outrage! Mr. Harris better fork over some more money right now!

Then the reporter asked him a simple question– if you don’t have room for these students, why did you accept them? The president floundered briefly, then tried to explain that the University of Western Ontario believed so strongly in the rights of all students in Ontario to a post-secondary education, that it just had to squeeze them in, though they didn’t have enough room to accommodate them.

Hmmm.

Well, well. It’s nice to know that the University of Western Ontario is motivated by such lofty sentiments. One wonders how many homeless people they took in this week, or emergency medical cases.

I found this interview disturbing. I don’t happen to like Mike Harris, but I have some respect for the political process. It disturbs me that colleges and universities in Ontario might have so little regard for the rights of their students that they would use them, crassly, as pawns, in a little political game of showmanship. It looks wonderful in the news when the University of Western Ontario reports that they are over-crowded. The public is outraged, possibly. Possibly, they will demand that Mike Harris increase funding.

Possibly, they might ask themselves why colleges and universities continue to hike their tuition costs, year after year after year, in spite of the fact that average earnings for the average person have not increased at all over the past twenty years. The professors at the University of Waterloo are demanding a 20% increase in their wages. When asked who would pay for it, they insisted that students would not. Oh no– we would never force the students to assume that burden. They say they think the private sector should contribute.

Hmmmm.

And today it was reported that most hospitals in Toronto– 30 out of 32– are refusing to accept emergency patients. Most even refuse to accept critically ill emergency patients. We’re over-crowded! We have no beds! We have no monitors! We don’t have enough money or staff!

Mike, fork over the bucks.

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The Prison Franchise

Mike Harris wants to close down Ontario’s prisons. They are expensive and inefficient.

Whenever someone from a conservative political party says “expensive and inefficient” you know he has friends waiting to make a lot of money with a backroom deal– and he is about to announce a new privatization scheme. Sure enough, Harris wants to privatize Ontario’s prisons. He wants to pay private companies to incarcerate Ontario’s criminals.

Don’t we all believe that private companies are more efficient and effective than government? There’s something to the idea. Most private companies exist in a competitive environment. If they are inefficient or lazy or slow, they get squashed by those powerful rivals. In theory, this means that most private companies are smarter, quicker, and more responsive to changes in the marketplace than governments are.

Unless you happen to be Microsoft.

This is the simple myth that America lives by. It’s partly true. It’s also partly untrue. The U.S. has a private health care system in which hospitals, insurance companies, and doctors all compete for your business. Canada has a government-run monopoly on health services. Which system is more competitive, efficient, and cheap? Surprise! The Canadian system is at least three times more efficient than the U.S. system. Why? Because there are some advantages to a government-run monopoly. First of all, the government is able to control costs by negotiating the rates for medical procedures with the doctors. In the U.S., the market is supposed to keep doctors prices low. Right. Like you’re going to go shop around for a cancer treatment and see if you can get a discount from that “big box” medical centre out near the highway. Yes.

Secondly, there is much less duplication of services. Some U.S. cities have five or more Magnetic Image Resonance machines, each of which cost millions, and each of which sits idle most of the time.

Thirdly, the Canadian system is actually run quite well, thank you, by people who know their jobs.

Fourthly, the Canadian system doesn’t have to skim off a certain percentage of profits for greedy corporations.

Anyway, back to the prisons…

Privatizing prisons is quite popular in the U.S. there are thousands of them, run by several companies. Unfortunately, they haven’t reduced costs quite as much as expected. In fact, some studies show that they haven’t reduced costs at all. And when you think about it, why would they? A privately run prison must provide all of the same functions that a state run prison provides, plus, it must provide a profit for the owners. Now there is only one way for the owners to create that profit: and that is to run the prison more cheaply than the state does. That means less staff, less training, less programs for the incarcerated, and less medical care. Less food. Cheaper food. Smaller cells. More over-crowding. Less control.

In fact, this is what is happening to the publicly owned prisons as well. State after state is going to court to try to reclaim control of their prisons. Wait a minute… reclaim control? That’s right. They no longer control their own prisons. Why not? Because about 20 years ago, lawyers for the inmates began filing lawsuits against various state governments alleging that the prisons were so badly run, so decrepit and vermin-infested and dominated by sadistic long-term convicts that sentencing any person to spend time in them constituted “cruel and unusual punishment”. The courts investigated and agreed and seized control of the prisons. Many states still did nothing about the horrendous conditions.

Now, not only do state governments want to treat criminals like animals, they want to contract out the service of treating criminals like animals.

Unless you really believe that these corporations that own these prisons are seriously interested in rehabilitation and whatever.

The truth is this. Governments find it unpopular to treat prisoners too, too badly. Sooner or later, some muckraking journalist comes along and uncovers the dirt and then those liberals will demand reform. Or, as we have seen, the courts will step in and order expensive improvements. Some idiots actually think that prisons should have some rehabilitation programs. Some real idiots actually think that prisoners should be treated with some kind of dignity and respect, even though they have committed awful crimes.

You have to remember that when rich people commit crimes, they don’t go to prison. So when rich people privatize prisons, they know very well that no matter what, they themselves are never going to end up in one of those prisons.

So the goal of privatization is to append a flattering objective to a contemptible practice.

Now, wait a minute. If a private citizen or company locks me up in a room and threatens me and forces me to eat disgusting food and prevents from leaving…. isn’t that kidnapping? You bet. So why is not kidnapping when a private company does the same thing, even if it’s with permission from the state? How can the legal government assign rights that are normally only given to duly-constituted civil authorities to private individuals employed by a for-profit corporation?

Would it be legal for a state government to allow the mother of a murder victim to decide on and execute the punishment of the offender? It certainly would not be. But then again, never over-estimate the intelligence or ethics of twelve years of Republican-appointed judges. The Republicans have shown, over and over again, that they are willing to appoint relatively unqualified people to the position of judge if they share the “correct” ideology. Clarence Thomas, a manifestly undistinguished jurist, immediately comes to mind. And these judges, who were appointed too late to have an influence on the earlier court-ordered prison reforms, have been trying to undue their effects piece by piece. And they have ruled it is legal for a private company to hold people prisoner on behalf of the state.

I’m lazy so I don’t want to write a hundred pages about why this is a stupid idea. It just is. Sorry. I’d love to spend a week in the library so I can refer to you specific documents that show what a stupid, sorry mess the U.S. prison system is, but I have a job, so I can’t. But there’s one thing readily apparent to everyone: the Americans love to punish criminals. They love to see them suffer. They love capital punishment. They love long, long prison terms. For everyone who commits serious crimes, except the rich.

The Americans are on this vindictive schtick and it’s pure barbarism. It makes me wonder if you can even call the U.S. a civilized society. It certainly calls into question the intelligence of the average American voter. For about 30 years now, the U.S. has been throwing scores of people into prison and lengthening prison terms all in the name of being “tough on crime”. I would like just one of these people to give me an objective measure that will show us if and when this program is succeeding. When does the crime rate go down? When can you show me that it is having some positive effect? Can you show me that the benefits outweigh the costs? When will we finally see the slightest indication that we are winning the war on drugs?

They can’t and won’t because they are wrong. Longer, tougher prison sentences do not reduce crime. If they did, the U.S. would be the most crime-free nation on earth, and Canada and Europe would be infested with criminals. Instead, it is quite the opposite.

Privatizing prisons is a very bad idea. Mike Harris thinks it will save money and provide more “efficient” services to Canada’s justice system. I think it will result in scandals and abuses as these private companies try to cut costs to make bigger profits. Harris thinks, so, who cares? They’re criminals. They don’t deserve to be treated with respect or dignity.

The net result will be an increase in man’s inhumanity to man.

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Ontario Hydro Tarts

Ontario Hydro Tarts Up

I don’t know about you, but I have to work for my wages. I actually have to show up at an office and do something useful. It is very clear to me that if I don’t produce anything of value to my employer, I will be fired.

On the other hand, there is Paul Rhodes. Paul Rhodes is a consultant to Ontario Hydro. Ontario Hydro was worried that people might think that just because hydro costs have increased every year since time immemorial, and just because our nuclear power plants break down occasionally, people might think that Ontario Hydro doesn’t care about the environment.

Well, what’s the solution? Ontario Hydro could actually care about the environment. Ontario Hydro could develop some internal policies about preventing damage to the environment. They could allocate a few million dollars to a department responsible for ensuring compliance with environmental protection laws. They could even work on new ways of running cables that would be less disruptive to the migratory habits of the creatures the live in the forests of Ontario.

But, hey, consultants don’t get big bucks for stating the obvious!

Or, they could just spend a few million dollars on an advertising campaign.

“If Ontario Hydro is to successfully present a more proactive positioning on environmental protection it should be prepared to commit adequate resources to a paid media/advertising campaign.” Wow! That’s what Paul Rhodes recommended. Gee. How did Ontario Hydro manage find a great thinker like Paul Rhodes? Well, it turns out that Paul Rhodes is a friend of Ontario Premier Mike Harris.

Paul Rhodes was paid $255,000 for a 10-page report. The report recommended that Ontario Hydro spend more money on advertising to convince the public that they care about the environment.

I wish I had a job like that. I wish Mike Harris would be my friend. Mike Harris wants to cut taxes and save the Ontario taxpayer lots of money. Here I am, Mike: I would have been quite willing to work for a mere $100,000, to create a report of the same breath-taking simplicity, elegance, and intelligence. Here it is: spend more money on advertising. Done. You can pay me now. Not only did I give you good advice, but I saved you the trouble of reading through the entire 10 pages of Paul Rhodes’ report.

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Soma

A man writes Ann Landers:
“I am a 60-year-old man who doesn’t have any interest in anything or anyone. I’m bored with everybody I meet. I am bored with my job and bored with my life.”

Ann solves his problem: “You aren’t bored; you are depressed. But you don’t have to stay that way the rest of your life. See a doctor; and ask for an anti-depressant that will help you.”

Was there ever a better illustration of the rampant hypocrisy of our society’s stand on drug abuse? We spend billions of dollars a year trying to stamp out the recreational use of drugs by teenagers and the inner-city poor, and then turn around and, through that paragon of bourgeois values, Ann Landers, advocate that we go running for a quick hit whenever we feel a little depressed with the world.

In the meantime, a woman in Illinois has just been released after serving 20 years in prison for merely being in the same car as a drug dealer. I am not making this up. The drug dealer– classy guy, I guess– freely and immediately admitted that the three pounds of heroin were his and his alone, and that the woman didn’t even know about it.

The courts said, “We don’t care.” Those new “get tough on crimes laws” made it possible for the prosecution to convict her anyway.

While she was in prison, she acquired some legal skills and now plans to work as a paralegal. Ann Landers, however, is still on the loose.

What, really, is the difference between the Lithium this man’s doctor will probably recommend, and the cocaine sold on the street corners? They are both addictive. They are both escape hatches from the pressures of life.

The difference is, the class of people who use them.

* * *

Judy Sgro, who dared to challenge some behaviours by the police during her tenure on the Toronto Police Services Board, has been pushed out of the position of vice-chairperson. Somehow this really reassures me that the police are out there to make sure our civil liberties are well-protected.

November 1999: Once again, even though the crime rate is going down, the police in Waterloo County, Ontario, are requesting more money and more officers. So while Mike Harris keeps telling the rest of us to tighten our belts and make sacrifices for the good of the economy, the police get to go on fattening their budgets and payrolls and throwing their weight around as never before.

When the crime rate went up, the police said they needed more officers because there were more criminals. Now that the crime rate is going down…. well, I guess it’s too much to expect. Just as it might be too much to expect that the police, when the crime rate goes up, might admit that they’re not doing a good job, instead of asking for more money.

Sometimes, I’m not totally opposed to the conservative agenda. It’s the rank hypocrisy that bothers me. If Mike Harris had declared that all of Ontario, teachers, the poor, the rich, industry– everyone– is going to have to tighten their belts, I could have seen some benefit to that. But inevitably, with the Republicans in the U.S. and the Conservatives in Canada, the real agenda is not to reduce taxes, but to shift the burden from the rich to the poor. When Harris talks about reducing taxes, he’s not talking about you and me. He’s talking about those people who inhabit the private boxes at the Skydome, and with whom he’d rather spend his off-hours anyway.

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Small is Beautiful and Other Momentary Lapses in Justice

Twenty-five years after E.F. Schumacher published “Small is Beautiful” the Ontario government still doesn’t get it.

It is about to close hundreds of small schools across Ontario because they are “inefficient”. The Ontario Public Schools Association predicts that 600 small schools will have to be closed to meet the demands of the Harris government. In Toronto alone, 128 schools are slated to be shutdown. In response to the public outcry, Harris tells the boards to cut their own “bloated bureaucracy”. He tells them, to give up some of their administrative space, though he must know that even if they gave up all of their administrative space, it would still be less than 20% of what is required.

The Toronto Board has already implemented the following:

  • School superintendents (making $100,000 a year) cut from 92 to 47.
  • Trustees cut from 74 to 22.
  • Trustees’ salaries cut from up to $50,000 to $5,000.
  • Administrative staff of 2,000 to be cut in half over three years.

Well, hey, we all hate bureaucracies, so way to go Toronto School Board! I’m too stupid to figure out what 2,000 administrative staff do in a city the size of Toronto, so let’s turf them.

Well, what do they do? The truth is, I have a feeling that a lot of what they do is administrative masturbation. You need a clerical worker to do the filing for an administrator who organizes training seminars for other administrators who run the human resources department which administers the pension plans and benefits packages for the secretaries and the administrators. Other administrators spend a lot of time doing “the vision thing”, going on retreats, and making strategic plans.

Anyway, speaking of Napoleon, I’ve had enough the Harris sniveling about “improving” education. He thinks we are stupid enough to believe that reducing the money spent on education will result in smarter, better students and teachers. Just as you know that if you reduce the amount of money you spend on a car, you will end up with a better car, right? And if you spend less on plumbing, you get better pipes, right? And if you hire the cheapest computer programmer, you get the best software, right? Riiiiight.

Now, obviously, spending more money does not guarantee a better educational system, just as it doesn’t guarantee better software. But you certainly can’t have a good educational system without spending the money necessary to do the job well, attracted good people, and provide adequate resources.

I attended small schools all my life. My children attend a large high school. The larger high school has some advantages, but the biggest difference between the two, by far, is that it is relatively easy to coast unnoticed through four years of education without learning anything in a big school. And it is hard for parents to get to know your kids’ teachers. You see them once for the one semester your child is in their class, and then you never meet the same teacher again. You never develop a strong enough relationship to feel that wonderful sense of accountability that teachers in small schools feel.

Small schools are often an important social and cultural force in the communities they are located in. They are where everyone goes for Halloween parties and the Christmas pageant and graduation. Parents volunteer to help in the classroom and to improve facilities. Everyone meets there at 3:15 to bring their children home. Everyone cares about their safety.

Harris wants to put them all on a bus, demolish or sell the schools, and convince the parents to place all their trust in an institution he has been slamming ever since he came into office.

Does Harris really care at all about education? It’s hard to believe that anybody could be so stupid as to not care. But all of the policies and directives and initiatives he has taken seem far more concerned with reducing costs than actually improving anything. The truth is, improvements do cost money. The truth is, even though we know schools and school boards waste a lot of money, they do still accomplish things. Students need good lab equipment, computers, books, field trips, art supplies, film, paint, desks, and so on. Having all those things doesn’t guarantee a good education, but you can’t have a good education without them.

* * *

The government has stacked a committee that was supposed to hold hearings, listen to varying viewpoints, think about the information gathered, then come to a rational and fair conclusion about how 46 million hectares of publicly owned land in Northern and Central Ontario should be used. This committee heard from loggers, industrialists, commercialists, environmentalists, cottage-owners, and the general public. They then adopted a very thoughtful expression and said, “hell, let’s turn everything over to the loggers.”

The Committee’s official conclusion is that 7.6% of public land should be set aside for preservation. “Hell, let’s give everything to the loggers.”

Now, this is a government that says no one gets a free ride. No more welfare bums. No more government handouts for people who don’t contribute. This government wants to charge user fees for fresh air. This is a government that wants schools of 10,000 students, taught by video camera from a windowless cell in Port Elgin. This is a government that wants MacDonald’s to operate our prison system. But then they turnaround and offer all the trees in Ontario to the logging companies for practically nothing.

If you’re poor. If you’re destitute, and living on the streets of the Toronto– this government says, tough luck, fella. I can’t help yah. But give that bum a chain saw, and the government says, hey, you want some trees? We don’t need them.

* * *

Hey, I’ve been saying this all along! You know those late penalties they charge you on your utilities bill (in Canada)? Like, about $20.00 if you’re one day late on a $200.00 bill? The real interest rate on those charges is, according to actuarial experts, about 5,000,000,000%. That’s right, five billion. In Canada, it is illegal to charge interest rates higher than 60% per annum (which is pretty ridiculous anyway). Well the Supreme Court just ruled that these interest rates, contrary to previous rulings, and with the complicity of the Minister of Energy for Ontario in the 1970’s (under Premier Comatose, Bill Davis), may well be subject to Federal law after all.

This was just another example of the golden rule: he who has the gold makes the rules. Now it looks like there’s a chance that the law might be applied equally once again.

The court case is based on a challenge of the penalty filed by Gordon Garland against Consumer’s Gas, on behalf of the 30% of customers who pay late.

* * *

The Blue Jays are demanding a “better deal” from the Skydome or, so they say, they will play at the “mistake on the lake”, Exhibition Place, next season.

Watch your pockets. A “better deal” means the Blue Jays want the taxpayers of Ontario to subsidize the cost of playing baseball in the Skydome so they can pay Jose Canseco $28 million over four years to bat .234.

Why don’t they just pay Jose Canseco less? Because the New York Mets just agreed to pay Mike Piazza $91 million over seven years to play catcher for them. How can they pay this guy so much money? Well, they can’t. Buy we can. You and I will gladly hand over our money for stadiums and police and road construction so Mike can have an extra limo, three or four extra houses, body guards, and a $25,000 stereo system.

If we don’t pay, undoubtedly, they will move the Blue Jays to Sarasota or someplace that has more suckers per capita than we do.
* * *

How many wars are there in the world this year? How many conflicts between two or more nations in which people are shooting or bombing or shelling each other?

None. Nada. Not a single one.

Yes, there are conflicts. But every conflict in the world this year, involving military action, is a civil conflict, between two factions within a single nation.

It’s true– you can check it out. Is humanity making progress? I think so. Eeyore says, “oh, there’s sure to be another war soon.” Pooh says that’s dumb.

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Alan Eagleson’s Friends

I was, in my youth, somewhat of an enthusiast for Marxism. Our society seemed to me to be based on greed and corruption, and I thought a good dose of Marxism would solve a lot of social ills. Of course, I knew that the Soviet Union was an oppressive, unjust society. I just didn’t think the Soviet Union represented Marxism any more than I thought the United States represented Christianity. In each case, the high ideals of the state religion was propounded but the actual practice was ruthlessly materialistic. Nowadays, I suppose I could be called a liberal.

There are days when I miss the idea of overthrowing the established order. Like today, when I read in the Toronto Star about Alan Eagleson’s friends.

Alan Eagleson has been charged with more than 44 counts of fraud committed since 1994, when he was head of the National Hockey League Players Association. Among other things, he stole money from players he represented and he colluded with the owners to keep player salaries low.

Some players now say they did kind of wonder about why their union leader was spending so much time on the owner’s yachts. They did, did they?

There is not much dispute about his guilt: Eagleson has admitted to some of the charges, and has been sentenced to 18 months so far, of which he will probably serve six. He is presently serving his time in Mimico Correctional Centre.

The Law Society of Upper Canada, hilariously, is now trying to decide whether or not Eagleson has engaged in conduct “unbecoming a barrister or a solicitor”! Like what? Did he donate some of the proceeds of his fraud to a charity?

In the same article, the Toronto Star reports that Mike Gillis, a former Boston Bruin, sued Eagleson successfully in 1996 for $40,000, part of a disability payment which Eagleson had swiped from him. Gillis was awarded $570,000 but Eagleson has appealed. The trouble is that almost all of that money is going to go to Gillis’ lawyers. Conduct unbecoming? Eagleson is a crook precisely because he behaves like a lawyer.

Look at this system! A man is owed $40,000 by a lawyer. The lawyer refuses to pay. Is he arrested? No, hell he’s a lawyer! So the victim of the fraud has no recourse but to go to court. The judge says, you can’t represent yourself– get yourself a…. lawyer! So the victim hires another lawyer to get his money back. But he can’t afford to pay this lawyer, you see, because he lost his money to the first lawyer. So the second lawyer says, no sweat, we’ll sue for what he owes you and for what you will owe me!

Now, you might observe that Mike Gillis, having been enlightened as to the courageous, unselfish, righteous needs of his own lawyers, has the solution. This solution is carefully suggested and facilitated by his lawyers: he sues Eagleson not only for the $40,000 he is owed, but for an additional $500,000 to pay his lawyers. The lawyer says, “I’ll help you get back your $40,000 and while we’ve got him down, I’ll rob him blind.” The man doesn’t care because it won’t come out of his pocket. So the system “works”.

Everybody’s happy, right? Consider Eagleson’s lawyer. Does he mind? Hell, no. He will charge Eagleson at least $500,000 himself, to spare him from having to pay out $40,000! But if he does a lousy job and loses the lawsuit, does he give the $500,000 back? Now, don’t laugh yourself silly. If he was going to do that, would he have advised him to fight the lawsuit in the first place, knowing it would cost a lot more than any possible out of court settlement would cost?

The truth is that this system is insane. It is absolutely, totally, completely, irrevocably insane. And everybody knows it. This system destroys everyone consumed by it…. except, of course, for the lawyers. And who, pray tell, makes these laws under which these cases are heard? Who is the judge? Who is the defense, the prosecution? What profession is represented in our legislature at numbers all out of proportion to their share of the population? Lawyers!

Are we really so surprised that they have cleverly evolved us a system that pays only them?

And now the most distasteful part of this particular story. Eagleson’s loyal friends have written him letters of commendation. Eagleson is a good man. Eagleson is honorable. Eagleson is a loyal friend. Eagleson never done me wrong. Here’s a list (side bar) so you can remember their names. If you bump into Bobby or Willard on the street, please restrain your desire to punch one of them in the nose. And remember that Bobby Clarke is the hero of the 1972 Canada-Russia hockey series for breaking Valery Kharmalov’s ankle with a wicked–and unpenalized– slash in game 5. Sittler? Shame on you.

Yes, this is how it works. These are Alan Eagleson’s friends.. So while he was cheating Mike Gillis and Glen Sharpley and Bobby Orr, he was carefully cultivating loyal friendships with Bobby Clarke and Paul Henderson and John Turner. What does this tell us? That, contrary to the testimony of Gillis and Sharpley and Orr and all the others that Eagleson was actually an honest man? That’s what these “gentlemen” want you to believe. Their signatures on their letters are a slap in the face to all the honest, hard-working NHL players whom Eagleson has cheated over the years. Paul Henderson is saying, “hey– he didn’t cheat me. Why should I care if he cheated you? Go to hell, Orr…”

The only thing their letters prove is that even a brilliant lawyer like Alan Eagleson couldn’t screw everybody at the same time.

We often hear about the two tiers of justice in this country, but we don’t often get such an intimate glimpse into how it works. You rob a string of banks of various amounts up to $40,000 and get caught and brought before a judge. If you don’t have your friendly letters from wealthy members of the establishment, judges, members of parliament, and retired professional hockey players, you can look forward to a long stay in prison. But if you are a lawyer and you rob a disabled hockey player of $40,000, and numerous others, and if you have invested that money wisely by acquiring the clothes and cars and boats and homes that allow you to move within the ranks of the privileged and blessed… you’re not likely to serve any time at all. Well, maybe 6 months. In mean old Mimico Correctional Facility.

Eagleson moves in conservative circles and was a member of the provincial Tory caucus at one point. I wonder if he ever partied with Mike Harris, who grew almost hysterically angry at the teachers who defied the law and went on strike last year. At moments like this, it seems transparent to me that the law has nothing to do with justice or fairness or good order. The law is there to hold you down while the lawyers rob you blind.

 

Who wrote letters asking the courts to be lenient on Alan Eagleson?

  • Bobby Clarke
  • Paul Henderson
  • Douglas Fisher
  • John Turner
  • Darryl Sittler
  • Willard Estey
  • George Gross
  • Darcy McKeough
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Keystone Cops

The Toronto Star recently reported that 99% of the complaints made against the Metropolitan Toronto police force are resolved in favour of the police, according the “objective” civilian complaints review process. That means that either Toronto has the greatest police force in the world– truly, the most amazing, perhaps, in history– , or the biggest liars. An officer responsible for handling complaints against the police force, with a straight face, actually insisted that the police really are in the right 99% of the time.

What kind of a person are you that you would say something so preposterous to a journalist, on the record? What do you really think of the people out there, that would make you believe they would believe you?

Now, even if you support the police (and with the level of paranoia in our society as high as it is nowadays, that’s quite likely), and even if you believe the Metropolitan Police force to be the best trained and most well-behaved in the world, it is statistically impossible that they could be right 99% of the time. It simply cannot be true. This kind of statistic is reminiscent of the old Soviet Union, when year after year, “record breaking” crops were harvested, proving the superiority of the Soviet system, while the people continued to starve.

When you think about it, it’s pretty scary that the police can get away with pulling this stuff. How dare they claim to be right 99% of the time? Who’s making this judgment? Who is in control here? Is there no civilian authority that can call this guy up and say, “What? Are you out of your mind? Don’t you realize how stupid that figure sounds? Do you want people to think you’re delusional? Withdraw the figure immediately and come up with something more credible, like 70%.”

Let’s get real. Would you believe that 99% of the customer complaints against Walmart were false? Would you believe 99% of the complaints against a surgeon were false? Would you believe that 99% of the allegations of sexual abuse made against boy scout leaders or priests were false?

I don’t know what the actual number of legitimate grievances against the police force should be. The Toronto Star didn’t have any difficulty finding at least two representative cases that made the police look pretty bad but which the police resolved in favour of the police. (The investigating officer decided that the two police officers, who corroborated each others’ stories, were more believable than numerous civilian witnesses, who right out of the blue, for no reason at all, decided to make up a bunch of lies about two officers beating up an innocent civilian.) The point is, that even if you think the police are doing a great job, a terrific job, it is simply outside of the realm of human experience that they could be right 99% of the time, or that an honest judge would even think they were right 99% of the time even if, incredibly, they really were.

It’s like those leaders in totalitarian nations that receive 95% of the vote.  Right.

What this number really means is that if an officer pulled you over by mistake, dragged you out of your car in front of family or friends, kicked you and beat you with a club, and then tossed you into jail for a day or two until the mistake was realized…. well, who’s going to stop him? If he has any hesitations about exceeding the limits of “reasonable” force, they are swept away by his acute awareness of the fact that you have only a 1% chance of success in filing a complaint. This, my friends, is about the same percentage of success you could expect in a police state.

Or you might believe that there is virtually no chance that such a thing could happen, because our Toronto police are better, and more honest, and more virtuous, than any other police force in the world.

Some cops–and some civilians too—believe that we need to give the cops more latitude to deal with those hordes of criminals out there. They believe that most law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear. Right. Like Guy Paul Morin, Donald Marshall, Damien Echols, and David Milgaard. Anyway, the fact that a victim of excessive police force might be innocent is beside the point. The idea that police can use excessive force on anybody, criminal or not, with impunity, is repugnant to a democracy.

The solution is simple: a civilian review board should be set up to handle all complaints against the police officers. Appoint smart, fair, and dedicated people to the board. Tell the police that because we know they are competent and professional, we expect few complaints, but that even the most competent and professional people in the world make a few mistakes, lose their cool, and do stupid things sometimes. And if the police were smart, they would welcome the increased public confidence in them that would result from a fair and impartial review board.

Unfortunately, this is pretty well exactly what they did do a few years ago. The police complained so bitterly about actually having to be accountable to someone else that the Harris government, ever concerned about civil rights (ha ha) disbanded it.