Before honour, reconnaissance

By Michael Friscolanti - Saturday, November 26, 2011 at 12:02 AM - 0 Comments

Michael Friscolanti is covering the honour killing trial for Maclean’s, filing regular reports from the Kingston, Ont. courtroom to Macleans.ca and weekly dispatches for the magazine. The reports will continue for the duration of the trial, which is expected to run into December.

The cellphone photos appear to chronicle a typical family vacation: smiling faces on a hotel bed, a teenager in a bikini, the CN Tower. But the cellphone records—analyzed by police after four of those vacationers were found in an underwater car—suggest something far more sinister: an intense, week-long reconnaissance mission in search of the perfect murder scene.

It was June 2009, and the polygamous Shafias (husband, two wives, and seven children) were piled into a pair of cars for a road trip to Niagara Falls. By then, the family of wealthy Afghan immigrants had been living in Canada for nearly two years—in a household so divided and dysfunctional that one daughter told her vice-principal: “I’ve had enough. I want to die.”

Nineteen-year-old Zainab, the eldest of the sisters, had recently run away and married, a decision that disgraced the family to the point that even she agreed to a divorce. Sahar, the suicidal one, was showing up to school with bruises on her arms and tears in her eyes. Geeti, at just 13, was telling anyone who would listen that her dad was a monster and that she wanted to be placed in foster care. Rona, the infertile first wife, was possibly the most imprisoned in her new country: ostracized, ignored and prone to wandering alone through Montreal parks. Life, she wrote in her diary, was “a torture for me.” Continue…

Could someone have saved the Shafia girls?

By Michael Friscolanti - Thursday, November 24, 2011 at 10:46 AM - 0 Comments

Zainab Shafia (Canadian Press)

The “system” did not kill the Shafia sisters. If prosecutors are correct, and their midnight drowning was in fact a mass execution, the girls perished because their parents and their brother are “honourable” people. They are dead because they were beautiful and bold and very much Canadian, a combination that so disgraced the good Muslim family that nothing short of their corpses could reverse the shame. The “system” did not dump them in the Rideau Canal.

But it didn’t exactly run to save them, either.

As a jury in Kingston, Ont., is now hearing, detectives, teachers and child welfare authorities knew full well that the Shafia home was a toxic pit of abuse, fear and borderline enslavement. One of the doomed sisters fled to a women’s shelter. Another told a police officer, point blank, that her dad threatened to kill them. Yet another tried to do it herself, popping a pile of pills in a failed suicide attempt. “I want to die,” Sahar Shafia, then 16, told her vice-principal. “I’ve had enough and I want to die.”

Continue…

A loyal son, a ruthless brother

By Michael Friscolanti - Thursday, November 24, 2011 at 8:20 AM - 0 Comments

Marcos Townsend/The Gazette

When police searched Hamed Shafia’s Montreal bedroom in the summer of 2009, they found a short essay written for a recent school assignment. The title was: “Importance of Traditions and Customs.” Today, inside a Kingston, Ont., courtroom—where Hamed and his parents are on trial for the mass “honour killing” of four family members—the essay has a new title: Exhibit #2.

“Traditions and customs are to be followed till the end of ones life,” Hamed wrote in his opening line, his mistakes marked by a teacher’s pen. “It doesn’t matter at all weather your close to the community following the specific traditions or living millions of miles away. Traditions and customs of a person is like his identity and what makes him special.”

Hamed was 18, toothpick skinny with a mop of curly black hair, when he printed those ominous words. The eldest son of a wealthy Afghan entrepreneur, he had immigrated to Canada less than two years earlier, and already enjoyed what most in his adopted country can only dream about: a Lexus in the garage, a wallet full of cash, and the inevitable inheritance of his dad’s multi-million-dollar business. (In one memorable car-ride conversation, captured by a police wiretap in the days before their arrests, father asked son if he had any small bills because “sometimes they don’t accept hundreds” at the gas station.)

Continue…

A history of violence at the Shafia home

By Michael Friscolanti - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 11:55 AM - 0 Comments

Rona (left) and Sahar Shafia (Canadian Press)

Michael Friscolanti is covering the honour killing trial for Maclean’s, filing regular reports from the Kingston, Ont. courtroom to Macleans.ca and weekly dispatches for the magazine. The reports will continue for the duration of the trial, which is expected to run into December.

Mother and son have both confessed, in separate tape-recorded statements, that they were there when the car-turned-coffin plunged into the canal. Beyond that, their recollections couldn’t be more different. Tooba Yahya told police that she fainted after hearing the splash, and doesn’t remember anything else about “the accident.” Hamed Shafia, meanwhile, claimed that both his parents were actually fast asleep at a motel, and that his sister, Zainab, somehow steered the sedan into the Kingston Mills Locks while he and his Lexus were parked nearby. Hamed, of course, did what anyone would do if four of his closest relatives drove into a body of water. He tossed down a rope and wiggled it around, like a fisherman hoping for a bite.

As absurd as both stories sound, there is one common denominator: in neither narrative does Hamed dial 911. Continue…

Four funerals and a wedding

By Michael Friscolanti - Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

Sean Kilpatrick/CP

Six weeks before her body was discovered in a sunken black sedan at the bottom of the Rideau Canal, Zainab Shafia was riding in a different car: her uncle Latif’s. It was May 19, 2009—the day of Zainab’s wedding reception—and the bride was wearing her dress, her skin painted with henna. She was 19 years old.

As Latif Hyderi steered toward the Montreal restaurant hosting the feast, he asked his niece, yet again, the question that was torturing her Afghan family, both immediate and extended. Why him? Why must you marry a Pakistani boy? (“Everyone, their heart was bleeding,” Hyderi explained on the witness stand last week. “Marrying a foreigner affected everybody.”)

Zainab’s answer was far more heartbreaking. “She said: ‘Dear uncle, there has been a lot of cruelty towards me,’ ” her uncle recalled. “‘There were many other boys who wanted to marry me. I rejected them. This boy does not have money and he is not handsome. The only reason I am marrying him is to get revenge for the cruelty of my father. I sacrifice myself for my sisters so they will get this freedom after me.’ ”

Continue…

Hamed Shafia: The good son

By Michael Friscolanti - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 at 11:16 PM - 0 Comments

Michael Friscolanti is covering the honour killing trial for Maclean’s, filing regular reports from the Kingston, Ont. courtroom to Macleans.ca and weekly dispatches for the magazine. The reports will continue for the duration of the trial, which is expected to run into December.

Hamed Shafia wants to look at the photographs of his dead sisters, their drowned bodies freshly extracted from an underwater car. Sgt. Michael Boyles tries to convince him otherwise, but Hamed is nothing if not determined. He wants to see the corpses. “Please,” he says quietly.

“Alright,” Boyles answers. Continue…

“Nothing is more dear to me than my honour”

By Michael Friscolanti - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 at 12:03 AM - 0 Comments

Michael Friscolanti is covering the honour killing trial for Maclean’s, filing regular reports from the Kingston, Ont. courtroom to Macleans.ca and weekly dispatches for the magazine. The reports will continue for the duration of the trial, which is expected to run into December.

Mohammad Shafia was blessed with seven children, praise be to God. Three are now dead, allegedly at his behest. Three are living under a different roof, allegedly for their own safety. And one is on trial with him, allegedly at the crime scene—along with his mother—on the night his “treacherous” sisters were dumped into the Rideau Canal.

Yet to hear him say it, Mohammad Shafia was the model Muslim father: generous, selfless and never “meddling” in his kids’ affairs. “We were not a strict family,” he insists to his wife and fellow murder suspect, Tooba Yahya, in one conversation captured by police. “We were kind of [a] liberal family.” He recalls how he let his children play at the park, took them on Friday afternoon picnics, and if they needed money, he never said no. “You and I, we carried these children on our backs,” he continues. “We subjected ourselves to hardships, we took on drudgery for them, we wash their sh– and pee, we wash their clothes.” Continue…

A mother forced to face the truth

By Michael Friscolanti - Friday, November 11, 2011 at 8:10 AM - 0 Comments

Lars Hagberg/CP

Mohammad Shafia, the Afghan immigrant on trial for quadruple “honourcide,” spent the day watching video footage of his wife crying, denying, and finally crumbling, under hours of police interrogation. Later that night, the 58-year-old accused murderer was rushed from his prison cell to a hospital room, suffering from what the judge described as a “serious medical emergency.” Whether the recording triggered his undisclosed ailment, only Shafia knows for sure. But the content was certainly enough to make anybody ill.

At one point, as the camera rolls, Shafia’s wife buries her tear-soaked cheeks in a family photo album that contains the faces of all seven of her children: the four who are still alive, and the three who were dumped, allegedly with her help, into a watery grave. “I haven’t killed,” Tooba Yahya says, in between heavy sobs. “And I don’t want to talk.”

The cop trying to convince her otherwise is Insp. Shahin Mehdizadeh, a Farsi-speaking Mountie who was seconded to the Kingston, Ont., force for the sole purpose of interviewing the accused “honour killers” in their native tongue. A veteran of major crime investigations, Mehdizadeh arrived in town just 48 hours before the arrests, but by the time he introduces himself to Yahya on the evening of July 22, 2009, he is well versed on the case file. “We know what has happened now,” he says, his words subtitled for the jury. “But we want to know why. Why have four lives been lost? For what?”

Continue…

The Shafia clan, in their own words

By Michael Friscolanti - Thursday, November 10, 2011 at 11:30 PM - 0 Comments

Michael Friscolanti is covering the honour killing trial for Maclean’s, filing regular reports from the Kingston, Ont. courtroom to Macleans.ca and weekly dispatches for the magazine. The reports will continue for the duration of the trial, which is expected to run into December.

Weeks from now, a jury in Kingston, Ont., will huddle in a private room to decide whether the heads of the Shafia clan—father, mother, and eldest son—massacred nearly half the family. Much of their discussion will revolve around cars: why one became an underwater coffin, whether another was a murder weapon, and what was said (or not said) inside a bunch of others.

In court on Thursday, prosecutors at the alleged “honour killing” trial provided a small sample of the latter, playing the first of many intercepted, in-car conversations between the accused trio: Mohammad Shafia, 58; Tooba Yahya, 41; and Hamed Shafia, 20. Their words fluctuate between incriminating and idiotic. At one point, Hamed himself says that the cops probably planted a hidden bug in their mini-van. “They can fasten something to record your voice,” he tells his parents.

In fact, they fastened it in the very day those words were utttered—July 18, 2009—while the threesome was inside police headquarters retrieving some of their dead relatives’ belongings. Continue…

“Where is your honour?”

By Michael Friscolanti - Thursday, November 10, 2011 at 10:13 AM - 0 Comments

Michael Friscolanti is covering the honour killing trial for Maclean’s, filing regular reports from the Kingston, Ont. courtroom to Macleans.ca and weekly dispatches for the magazine. The reports will continue for the duration of the trial, which is expected to run into December.

Prosecutors have told a jury in Kingston, Ont., that Mohammad Shafia was a tyrant of a father, an Afghan immigrant so obsessed with restoring the “honour” of his family that he drowned his own daughters because they wore make-up and dated boys and had dreams of their own. But during the opening moments of his post-arrest interrogation, broadcast in court for the first time on Wednesday, Shafia looks hardly the menace, slouched in a wooden chair and barely whispering his responses.

Wearing slacks and sandals, he tells the cop on the other side of the table that being slapped in cuffs was a “violation of his right,” that his life is “ruined,” and that the person who really killed his kids “should be found” and punished. Continue…

A question of honour

By Michael Friscolanti - Tuesday, November 8, 2011 at 10:01 PM - 0 Comments

Michael Friscolanti is covering the honour killing trial for Maclean’s, filing regular reports from the Kingston, Ont. courtroom to Macleans.ca and weekly dispatches for the magazine. The reports will continue for the duration of the trial, which is expected to run into December.

Accused “honour killer” Mohammad Shafia returned to court this morning, nearly a week after being rushed from his prison cell to a hospital room with an undisclosed ailment. Dressed in a checkered sport coat and silver ankle chains, the 58-year-old was escorted to his reserved seat inside a bulletproof prisoner’s box. Within minutes, he was weeping. Continue…

Mohammad Shafia’s house rules

By Michael Friscolanti - Friday, November 4, 2011 at 11:40 AM - 0 Comments

Sean Kilpatrick/CP

On paper, Mohammad Shafia was the ideal immigrant, a wealthy, self-made businessman eager to inject his dollars into the Canadian economy. An Afghan who made his fortune in Dubai real estate, Shafia wasted little time setting up shop in his adopted country. In 2008, a year after arriving in Montreal, he purchased a $2-million strip mall in Laval—with a cash down payment of $1.6 million. He launched a company that imported and distributed clothing, household goods and construction material. And he chose the posh suburb of Brossard to build a sprawling mansion with plenty of room for all 10 members of his polygamous clan: himself, two wives and seven children.

The new house was still under construction on June 30, 2009, when three of the Shafia girls—Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13—were discovered at the bottom of the Rideau Canal, floating inside a sunken black Nissan that also contained the lifeless body of their “stepmother,” Shafia’s first wife, Rona Amir Mohammad. The four passengers appeared, at first glance, to be the victims of a late-night joyride gone horribly wrong. Within weeks, however, detectives in Kingston, Ont., offered a far more chilling version of events, laying first-degree-murder charges against a trio of suspects: Mohammad Shafia, the dead girls’ father; Tooba Yahya, their mother; and Hamed Shafia, their brother.

Today, more than two years later, the Shafia patriarch sleeps in a tiny cell with his eldest son. His wife—the one that’s still breathing—is locked in a separate prison. His mansion-to-be has been sold, his other surviving children (two girls and a boy) are under the watchful eye of social services, and his bank accounts have no doubt been decimated by mounting legal fees and lost profits. At the Kingston courthouse, where their murder trial is now underway, the accused threesome sits, ankles shackled, behind a thick plate of bulletproof glass. Outside, a police paddy wagon waits to escort them back to jail for the night.

Continue…

Danny Gail Dimm

By Michael Friscolanti - Thursday, October 27, 2011 at 8:10 AM - 0 Comments

Illustration by Ted McGrath

Danny Gail Dimm was born in Duncan, B.C., on Feb. 25, 1958. His father, Fred, and his mother, Eunice, both had two children from previous relationships, but Danny was their first child together. (Mike, his younger brother, came next.) “He was always a daydreamer,” recalls his sister, Jewel Juriansz. “And he adored animals. As a three-year-old, I fully expected he would grow up to be a vet.”

Danny inherited his father’s love for the outdoors. Fred was a woodsman and a pilot and a pipeline worker, and would often walk through the front door with souvenirs from the bush—from rattlesnakes to hornets’ nests. Eunice, a stay-at-home mom, was the family anchor. “Danny got a lot of his industry from her,” Jewel says. “He could work circles around most people, and he put his whole heart and soul into everything he did. He would run; he wouldn’t walk.”

After high school, Danny toyed with the idea of racing cars for a living; he even moved to Mont Tremblant, Que., the mecca of Canada’s Formula 1 scene. But by his early 20s, he was back out west, working as a tree faller in the town of Lillooet. “He was just a really quirky guy,” says Peter Ford, a close friend and fellow faller. “For somebody who was crawling around in the mountains all the time, he had a very, very broad knowledge base about a lot of different things. Even out in the woods, he would always have books by his side.”

Continue…

Why are judges giving immigrants who commit serious crimes a second chance?

By Michael Friscolanti - Monday, October 24, 2011 at 9:50 AM - 11 Comments

Canada Border Services Agency

When his son was born, Hamidullah Barkza celebrated the occasion with an epic bender. For eight straight days, the Red Deer, Alta., resident skipped work and pounded the bottle, pausing only when he passed out. On the night it finally ended—April 18, 2008—Barkza stumbled into the bedroom and plopped down beside his wife. “He wanted to have sex,” a prosecutor would later tell a judge. “But she said no due to the fact he was intoxicated and she had recently given birth.”

Enraged, Barkza grabbed a kitchen knife and lunged at the mother of his two children. He stabbed her once in the chest before turning the blade on himself, again and again. By the time police arrived at the apartment, he was covered in blood and barely conscious. (Thankfully, his wife’s wounds were far less severe, requiring only a short hospital visit.)

Originally charged with attempted murder, Barkza pleaded guilty to aggravated assault and received a 26½-month prison sentence. Then came the real punishment: like hundreds of other landed immigrants convicted of serious crimes, the Afghanistan native was slapped with a deportation order. Canada, home since 2004, wanted him gone.

Continue…

The life and times of Steve Jobs

By Chris Sorensen, Jason Kirby, and Michael Friscolanti - Monday, October 17, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 4 Comments

John G. Mabanglo/AFP/Getty Images

Theo Gray was at the wheel of his car when he learned his friend Steve Jobs was dead. The call from his assistant came as a shock, not because Gray didn’t know of Jobs’s failing health—“I had some information about how bad he was”—but because it was difficult to comprehend a world without the legendary Apple co-founder. Jobs not only built one of the world’s most successful companies, with a market value of more than US$350 billion, but he elevated technology into the realm of the magical and gave us our first true glimpse of its potential. “I don’t know, maybe I was repressing the knowledge,” says Gray, who has known Jobs since 1988 and whose software company, Wolfram Research, has worked closely with Jobs and Apple for the past two decades. “I hoped maybe he would have another year or something.”

One more year. It boggles the mind to imagine what a digital dreamer like Jobs could do with 365 more days on this planet; the wonders he might conceive, or even the little annoyances of the mobile age he would inevitably solve. Jobs reshaped the world and how it communicates more in his 56 years than almost any other person of the last century.

It was why, moments after Apple Inc. confirmed Jobs’s death on Oct. 5, tributes began to pour in on sites like Facebook and Twitter, by the tens of millions. A few hours later, makeshift shrines popped up outside Apple stores throughout North America, Europe and Asia. President Barack Obama was moved to write: “Steve was among the greatest of American innovators—brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it.” Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple Computers with Jobs in the 1970s, put it even more simply: “It’s like the world lost a John Lennon.”

Continue…

There’s no way to spot another Russell Williams

By Michael Friscolanti - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 3 Comments

Andy Clark/Reuters

Kevin West was Russell Williams’s right-hand man at CFB Trenton. If the base commander was at a ribbon cutting ceremony or a photo op with a visiting politician, Chief Warrant Officer West was always nearby. The two men golfed together. They ate dinner, with their wives, at each other’s houses. And on the Sunday night in February 2010 when Williams confessed to police that he was a serial killer in colonel’s clothing, West was among the first in uniform to hear the unthinkable news.

Early the next morning, while Williams was leading police to Jessica Lloyd’s lifeless body, Kevin West picked up his BlackBerry and typed a message to senior staffers at the base. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he wrote, at 2:11 a.m. “Request you all meet in the WHQ conference room as early as possible tomorrow morning. I will be in my office for 0700 hrs. This is extremely important, more information to follow.”

What followed is still difficult to fathom. An elite officer who piloted prime ministers and the Queen—and oversaw the country’s largest air force base—was doubling as a depraved sexual predator who somehow managed to ascend the ranks without a whiff of suspicion. Grasping for an explanation, the Canadian Forces launched an “immediate review” of the way candidates are selected for senior command positions—and whether enhanced psychological testing might have revealed the real Russ Williams.

Continue…

There was a grow op in my house?

By Michael Friscolanti - Friday, October 7, 2011 at 10:40 AM - 3 Comments

In a move that is part public safety, part public shaming—and part public relations—the Mounties have launched a new website that lists the addresses of former marijuana grow ops and other busted drug-cooking labs. Inspired by similar initiatives in Quebec, Toronto and Winnipeg, the online database will act as a warning for homebuyers across the country, who otherwise wouldn’t know that the property they’re about to purchase was once loaded with pot plants or crystal meth and could suffer from problems such as mould. “Illicit marijuana grow operations in our neighbourhoods and the criminal organizations that run them are a danger to us all,” said RCMP Commissioner William Elliott. “Homeowners will now have a tool that will lower their risk of being victimized.”

But here’s another warning for would-be homebuyers: don’t use the new website as your only resource. The fine print is nearly as long as the press release. “Some addresses may have been erroneously included in this list,” the disclaimer reads. “If there is an address which has been erroneously included on this list, please advise the site administrator.”

“This is also not intended to be an exhaustive list of all addresses at which the RCMP is aware that marijuana grow operations and/or clandestine laboratories have been located,” it continues. “This list should not be relied upon for such purposes. This list is for information purposes only and is not intended to be relied upon by any individuals. The RCMP will accept neither liability nor damages by any person who rely upon this information to their detriment.” Rely on this, in other words, at your own risk.

REVIEW: The lost dream: The story of Mike Danton, David Frost, and a broken Canadian family

By Michael Friscolanti - Wednesday, October 5, 2011 at 2:05 PM - 4 Comments

Mike Danton tried to hire two different people to murder his agent, David Frost. The first, a strip club bouncer, ignored the hockey player’s frantic phone messages. (“Help me out any way you can, please,” Danton said in one voice mail. “It’s a matter of life and death.”) The second would-be hit man—a police dispatcher, of all things—tipped off the FBI. Danton was arrested on April 16, 2004, just three days after scoring his first and only NHL playoff goal.

Behind bars and on the brink of suicide, the St. Louis Blues forward spent hours on the prison telephone, talking to the one man who had always been in his corner: David Frost, the same person he conspired to kill.

Continue…

James Forrest Kienholz

By Michael Friscolanti - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 at 11:05 AM - 0 Comments

Illustration by Team Macho

James Forrest Kienholz was born in Nelson, B.C., on Sept. 12, 1946, the first of five siblings (Melvin arrived next, then Lorraine, David and Beverley). James’s father, Forrest, was a Greyhound bus driver; his mother, Malendar (neé Davidson), was the anchor of the family home. “I had a house full of kids all the time,” she says. “I always baked bread and buns on Monday mornings, and all five kids wanted to bring a friend home for cinnamon buns. I let them each to bring one, so that meant 10 kids every Monday morning.”

As a child, Jim was a natural athlete. He spent the summers playing baseball and soccer and anything else that kept him outdoors. When the kids went fishing on Kootenay Lake, Jim always took the time to bait his little sister’s hook. “We would collect grasshoppers from my grandmother’s backyard and use them for bait,” Lorraine remembers. The family had a cat named Mittens. Jim’s pet rabbit was Sniffles.

When he was 13, a family of refugees from the former Yugoslavia moved in across the street. Dan Skopac barely spoke a word of English, but Jim and his brothers welcomed him to Canada, sharing their Batman comic books and teaching him the language (good words and bad). “Jim was three years older, and I just thought he was such a cool guy,” says Skopac, who remained lifelong friends with the Kienholz boys. “He had his comb-back hair with the Brylcreem and he looked like James Dean and Edd ‘Kookie’ Byrnes and Fabian all rolled into one.”

Continue…

A series of fortunate events on 9/11

By Michael Friscolanti - Thursday, September 8, 2011 at 9:20 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Blair Gable

Aylah Mitic, a few weeks away from her third birthday, is sitting at the kitchen table, fiddling with jars of Play-Doh and pouring imaginary cups of tea. Her father, Jody, is beside her, a pair of grey running shoes covering his two prosthetic feet. “I don’t know if she’s even clued in that mom has feet and dad doesn’t,” Mitic says. “I’ve been waiting for the questions, though. At daycare, I sometimes walk in with shorts and the other kids say: ‘What’s up with your legs?’ I just say: ‘They’re my magic legs.’ ”

“It’s normal to her,” adds Aylah’s mom, Alannah Gilmore. “It’s funny, but sometimes she’ll say: ‘Daddy, put your legs on. Let’s go!’ ”

Ten years ago, when Daddy still had his real legs, Aylah’s parents-to-be were stationed at CFB Petawawa. He was a sniper in training, she was a medic, and they had never met. But like thousands of other Canadian soldiers whose careers were forever changed on that September morning, Master Cpl. Mitic and Sgt. Gilmore would be off to Afghanistan—and a fateful encounter with a land mine.

Continue…

Tim Hortons: rolling in dough

By Michael Friscolanti - Tuesday, September 6, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 4 Comments

Photo Illustration by Liz Sullivan

Last year, customers spent more than $5 billion at Tim Hortons. Five billion dollars. That’s $13.7 million worth of coffee and doughnuts per day. Which, in theory, should leave everyone—head office, shareholders and individual franchisees—with plenty of profit to go around. (Don Schroeder, recently fired as Tim’s CEO, pocketed $5.7 million just for walking away and keeping quiet.)

But not everyone agrees with how the pot is divvied up. Arch and Anne Jollymore, both long-time Hortons franchisees, were in a Toronto courtroom last week hoping to certify a hefty class-action lawsuit against the iconic company, arguing that Tim’s historic shift to frozen doughnuts nearly a decade ago has taken a huge bite out of their cash registers—while providing head office with “spectacular” returns. Their legal briefs are complex (the court file is tens of thousands of pages) but the couple’s claim boils down to this: Hortons “forced” franchisees to scrap their deep fryers, then sold them frozen fritters and crullers for triple the cost of the scratch-baked versions.

Three years after the lawsuit was filed, a judge will soon decide whether the action should be sent to trial or tossed out of court. But whatever the outcome, the high-profile case has already served up one revelation that some loyal double-double drinkers will have a hard time swallowing: the Jollymores aren’t the only Hortons operators who think they should be making more money.

Continue…

The truth about Ottawa’s missing war criminals

By Michael Friscolanti - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 77 Comments

Before he snuck into Canada and disappeared, Kiemtor Alidu was a loyal—and ruthless—supporter of Ghana’s military dictatorship. Between 1982 and 1985, Alidu served as vice-chairman of his local “People’s Defence Committee,” a quasi-police force that kept a close eye on political dissidents. By his own admission, more than 100 people were rounded up and murdered because he and his colleagues fingered them as threats to the regime.

“Even a person who is innocent was killed during those incidents,” Alidu testified during an Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) hearing. “A lot of people were killed.”

Foreigners who are found to be complicit in war crimes or other human rights abuses are not welcome in Canada, and in 1993 the IRB unanimously rejected Alidu’s request to remain in Toronto. (How he got into the country remains a mystery). “It is clear to the panel that the claimant was guilty of crime [sic] against humanity,” reads the ruling, obtained by Maclean’s. “The claimant was part of a team that showed no mercy to political dissidents, as well as innocent victims.”

Alidu filed an appeal with the Federal Court (“I am extremely perturbed,” he wrote in one sworn affidavit) but that, too, was turned down. After a second appeal met the same fate, Alidu vanished. He has now lived in Canada for nearly 20 years, all of them illegally.

Continue…

The lawsuit is in the mail

By Michael Friscolanti - Monday, August 15, 2011 at 9:44 AM - 1 Comment

Andrew Vaughan/CP

Next to soldiers, few on the federal payroll suffer more wounds at work than mail carriers. According to the latest stats, nearly 2,300 Canada Post employees trip and fall on the job every year, twisting ankles and breaking legs and triggering millions of dollars’ worth of compensation claims. On Valentine’s Day 2007, Beverly Collins joined that long list of casualties, slipping on a snow-covered walkway and shattering her wrist. “I knew there was something seriously wrong,” she later testified. “You could see the bone sticking out of my hand.”

Collins applied for, and received, undisclosed benefits under the Government Employees Compensation Act. Later that summer, a federal bureaucrat mailed a letter to the owners of that icy Ottawa property—demanding reimbursement. “I’ve been doing this for 11 years, and I’d never seen any case like this,” says Jaye Hooper, the owners’ lawyer. “My clients were a little taken aback.”

For most Canadians, the reaction would be something closer to “going postal.” Yet as surprising as it may sound, the federal government quietly targets thousands of homeowners a year in an attempt to recoup the hefty costs of mailman mishaps. “From a public policy perspective, it is a balancing act,” says John Norton, an insurance lawyer in London, Ont. “Certainly it does appear like the big, bad government is going after this little homeowner. But if the homeowners did do something wrong—and it was a significant injury that cost the government a lot of money—taxpayers might expect the government to go after the at-fault party because if they don’t, it’s taxpayers who foot the bill.”
Continue…

Colonel who?

By Michael Friscolanti - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Nathan Denette/CP

As soon as Russell Williams stood up in court and admitted his crimes, the military severed all ties. The killer colonel was promptly booted from the air force for “service misconduct” (the gravest breach possible) and became the only officer in Canadian history to have his commission revoked. The Forces even torched his uniform.

But it turns out that the military’s efforts to forget the name Russell Williams actually began many months before his October guilty plea—when a team of contractors tore up his former office at CFB Trenton. According to documents obtained by Maclean’s under the Access to Information Act, the “cosmetic work” was ordered by the chain of command on Feb. 10, 2010, just 48 hours after Williams was charged with two murders and two sexual assaults. The renovations left behind no trace of the disgraced commander: construction crews tore out the carpet, repainted the walls and replaced every piece of furniture. “This should be considered high-priority work,” Lt.-Col. Sean Lewis, Trenton’s engineering officer, wrote in an email to colleagues. “Please be patient while we get these renos done.” The remodelling cost taxpayers $10,336 ($6,656 for material; the rest for labour).

Capt. Jennifer Jones, a base spokeswoman, insists that the facelift had nothing to do with boosting morale. “The renos were needed for some time but scheduling a week to get them done was challenging,” she says. “The office’s vacancy allowed the construction engineering folks to get in there and get them done.”

In the meantime, another order was circulated via email: “Pictures of the previous Wing Commander on the honour walls should be removed.”