Blast from the Past: You Say It's Your Birthday – Liveblogging Stephen Harper's second anniversary party

By kadyomalley - Friday, January 25, 2008 at 5:08 PM - 0 Comments

You Say It’s Your Birthday (originally posted January 25, 2008)

3:45:32 PM
It’s Canada’s New Government’s birthday! And everyone is invited! Well, not everyone – not you, most likely, unless you’re a Tory MP, staffer, party loyalist or photogenic seat filler who was able to get to Ottawa for the afternoon on fairly short notice. Oh, and the hated, but still occasionally useful media – we’re invited and we’re here. At least those of us who have made it through the labyrinthine back corridors of the Ottawa Congress Centre, designed in the spirit of Escher as conceived by Fisher Price.

It’s nearly 4pm on the last Friday before the House gets back to business, which, as far as the Prime Minister is concerned, is the perfect time for he and his caucus to celebrate two whole years in power.

Last year, he marked his first anniversary with not one but two speeches: one at noon, at the Chateau Laurier and the other in the evening, at a gala dinner hosted by the Canada Israel Committee in this very room.

He beamed with pride as he checked off the achievements of his government — cutting the GST, getting tough on crime, noticing the existence of the environment, pretending health care was never one of the five priorities, and he predicted yet more successes to come. He praised the troops, gave a shout out to Tim Horton’s, and was presented with a jersey from Israel’s national hockey team.

I, on the other hand, tripped and cut my cheek, got a run in my stocking, forgot to eat dinner and was generally pretty much ready to quit my job by the end of it. Good times. I wrote the whole thing up for macleans.ca, of course – A Tale of Two Speeches, I believe it was called.

A year later, I’m back and so is the PM. Both a little older, a little more weary, but more importantly, this time one of us (at least that I know of) has a blog, and will thus be able to chronicle the event in all its practically-realtime glory.

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How we got here

By Michael Friscolanti - Monday, January 14, 2008 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Father’s Day, 1988 — Joseph Fredericks, a paroled pedophile with a lengthy criminal record, confesses to police in Brampton, Ont., that he abducted, molested and murdered 11-year-old Christopher Stephenson. He personally leads detectives to the wooded area where he dumped the boy’s body. Fredericks pleads guilty to first-degree murder, and is later stabbed to death by a fellow inmate at Kingston Penitentiary.

January 1993 — A coroner’s inquest into Christopher’s case results in 71 sweeping recommendations. Number 44 urges the federal government to create an electronic registry of convicted, high-risk sex offenders that records current addresses, telephone numbers and other descriptive material. The coroner’s jury concluded that if a registry existed the day Christopher was kidnapped, police would have been able to generate an instant list of suspects living in the neighbourhood. Maybe those detectives would have knocked on Fredericks’ door while the boy was still alive.

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The sex offender registry—and your province

By Michael Friscolanti - Monday, January 14, 2008 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

A recent Maclean’s investigation uncovered a long list of serious flaws in Canada’s three-year-old sex offender registry. Hundreds of rapists and pedophiles are missing. Hundreds more were never added to the system in the first place. In this web exclusive, macleans.ca provides a region-by-region breakdown of all the shocking problems—and all the warnings that the federal government continues to ignore. (Click here for a timeline of the registry and its embarrassing state.)

Canada’s national sex offender registry was created for one reason: to help police locate potential suspects. If a child goes missing, investigators can search the database for known pedophiles who live in the surrounding postal codes. If a stranger rapes a woman, police can input her attacker’s description and scan for matches. “What the registry does is eliminate the three months it used to take to find out what offenders live in the neighbourhood,” says Glenn Woods, a retired RCMP officer who helped build the system. 

That’s true. The database has been searched hundreds of times, and although the registry has yet to solve a single crime, the Mounties believe it’s only a matter of time. At the very least, the registry is a starting point for detectives with no other leads.

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'A national embarrassment'

By Michael Friscolanti - Wednesday, January 9, 2008 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

When he lived in British Columbia, Peter Whitmore followed the rules. He didn’t go anywhere near a pool or a playground. He didn’t talk to children, online or otherwise. And he was back home (at his aunt’s house in Chilliwack) every night by 10 o’clock. For once in his life — for an entire year, in fact — Whitmore was a law-abiding pedophile.

It was hard to believe. A notorious child molester, Whitmore’s rap sheet is full of repulsive crimes and empty promises. In 1993, he was convicted of sexually assaulting four boys. Eight days after his release, he abducted a young girl. In 2000, Toronto residents tried to run him out of town, but he made an impassioned plea on national television: “I have control over what I do.” He didn’t. Detectives found him in a hotel with a 13-year-old boy. A year later, while back on probation, police discovered a “rape kit” in his possession: latex gloves, duct tape and photographs of kids. A judge shipped him back to jail.
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Adding fuel to the doctor crisis

By Cathy Gulli and Kate Lunau - Wednesday, January 2, 2008 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

When Jennifer realized she was pregnant last summer, she called her family doctor’s office to make an appointment for a referral to an obstetrician. Having delivered her first daughter almost three years ago, she knew the drill. But when the secretary picked up and said that her physician had shut down her practice and left Toronto “to spend more time with her family,” Jennifer was stunned. It was the third doctor she’d lost since moving to the city in 1999—and every one of them was a woman who’d left for her children.

“I was pretty frustrated by the third time it happened,” says Jennifer (not her real name), a 36-year-old partner at a downtown law firm. Especially since this physician didn’t announce her departure, or try to find a replacement. Months went by and Jennifer phoned doctors’ offices posted online as accepting patients, only to find out they weren’t. She asked friends and colleagues for referrals, to no avail. Finally, in desperation, she went to the health clinic at her gym, which is only staffed with a doctor on Wednesdays. By the time she saw an obstetrician, Jennifer was in her second trimester.

“Before it was important to me to have a female physician,” she says. “I won’t be so fussy going forward.”

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