Infographic: Religious persecution around the world

By Brian Grim - Wednesday, February 22, 2012 at 12:36 PM - 0 Comments

The New Missionaries is a joint project between Maclean’s and OpenCanada.org, the Canadian International Council’s (CIC) hub for international affairs. Click here to learn more about the CIC.

Brian Grim is the senior research fellow in religion and world affairs at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Graphic design by Cameron Tulk.

Promoting religious freedom is complicated: extreme caution advised

By Janet Keeping - Wednesday, February 22, 2012 at 12:36 PM - 0 Comments

Protesters demonstrate in Los Angeles in 2008 against the Mormon Church's financial support of a bill banning gay marriage. (Damian Dovarganes/AP)

The New Missionaries is a joint project between Maclean’s and OpenCanada.org, the Canadian International Council’s (CIC) hub for international affairs. Click here to learn more about the CIC. To read Clifford Orwin’s defense of the Office of Religious Freedom, click here.

The promotion of freedom globally, if done peacefully—without invading armies, bombs, and the resulting carnage—can be a fine thing. But creating an Office of Religious Freedom, as the Canadian federal government is in the process of doing, may not be such a good idea. To test whether it is, there are three questions Canadians should insist be answered before the office starts its work.

First, is there a strategy in place for dealing with conflicts between religious freedom and the protection of other human rights? In Canada, we are quite clear: the oppression of women or vulnerable minorities will not be tolerated in the name of religious freedom. But how will the new Office of Religious Freedom respond when other human rights interfere with the rights claimed by religious groups in other countries, for example, to marry young girls off long before adulthood, or to impose rules that blatantly discriminate against women in religious courts, or to ban gays from places of worship? Continue…

Religious freedom does not mean freedom to practice illiberal religion

By Clifford Orwin - Wednesday, February 22, 2012 at 12:36 PM - 0 Comments

Indonesian Christians protest violence by Islamic hard-liners in Jakarta, Aug. 15, 2010. (Dita Alangkara/AP)

The New Missionaries is a joint project between Maclean’s and OpenCanada.org, the Canadian International Council’s (CIC) hub for international affairs. Click here to learn more about the CIC. To read Janet Keeping on why there’s reason to question the government’s motives for establishing the Office of Religious Freedom, click here.

In establishing an Office of Religious Freedom, the present government is not placing religious freedom above other human rights, for the simple reason that to do so is impossible. To think that religious freedom is liable to being placed above other human rights is to misunderstand what is meant by religious freedom (and therefore to misunderstand its relationship to these other rights).

To defend religious freedom no more implies its superiority to other human rights than to defend any such right implies its superiority to others. Properly understood (and there’s no reason to conclude that the present government understands it improperly) freedom of religion implies the other basic human rights. All are aspects of the autonomy of the individual, so to defend any is to defend that autonomy, and therefore (in principle) all the others. To establish an Office of Religious Freedom is therefore wholly without prejudice to any other human freedom.

Here the crucial point to grasp is that religious freedom has never meant freedom to practice illiberal religion (i.e. any religion that seeks to employ coercion, whether of its own adherents or others). You can’t persecute under the mantle of freedom from persecution, and it’s precisely freedom from religious persecution for which “religious freedom” is shorthand. In a clash of dogmatic and intolerant sects (of which there are still many in the world today), neither party can invoke the protection of the principle of religious freedom.

Nor, however, can any sect claim protection for practices that violate any human right, for any such violation amounts to illegitimate coercion on behalf of religion. The best way to understand religious freedom is precisely as freedom from such coercion.

From this, it follows that religious freedom equally protects the religious and the non-religious. The believer can no more coerce the atheist than the atheist can coerce the believer. I don’t fault the Harper government for not billing its new entity as the office for the Equal Protection of Believers and Non-Believers. However, to defend religious freedom is, in fact, to vindicate such equal protection. Who benefits from the purging of all coercion from the realm of religion? Obviously not only the religious.

There is, of course, one sense in which the establishment of an Office of Religious Freedom does “place religious freedom above other human rights,” but that sense is neither improper nor sinister. All governments choose their fights, and then their fights within their fights. For the Harper government to create such an office is not to turn its back on other human rights. It’s merely to indicate that it will focus a portion of its limited resources for international human rights promotion on issues of religious freedom.

Consider this decision as analogous to one to create an Office of Freedom of the Press or of Freedom of Assembly. Would either such decision have aroused such animus? Neither of these freedoms is less fundamental than freedom of religion, but neither is either of them more so. All belong in the bundle, as necessary aspects of the human autonomy that we mentioned at the beginning. All three freedoms, moreover, are subject to massive violation in many parts of the world today. All are in sore need of white knights to ride to their defence. All, indeed, are in need of far larger squadrons of these than Canadian diplomacy (and the new office with its limited budget) have to deploy. Is the Harper government then to be faulted for choosing to employ its few drops of influence in one bucket rather than many? Or for choosing the issue that is most likely to command the enthusiasm of a large fraction of its supporters? Not by me it isn’t.

Clifford Orwin is a professor of political science, classic and Jewish studies at the University of Toronto, as well as a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford.

How Geeti Shafia’s tombstone came to be engraved with a mistaken date

By Alex Ballingall - Tuesday, February 21, 2012 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

Crown Exhibit

For Ali Altaie, the warm spring weather can’t come soon enough. The co-director of the Hamza Cemetery, an Islamic burial ground in Laval, Que., has been fielding frequent phone calls in the wake of the Shafia “honour killing” trial that saw Mohammad Shafia, his wife, Tooba Yahya, and son Hamed convicted on four counts of first-degree murder. Their victims, Rona Amir Mohammad and sisters Zainab, Sahar and Geeti are buried in a neat row in Altaie’s cemetery. And people keep calling to tell him about a disconcerting mistake on one of their graves that the family doesn’t appear to care enough about to correct.

At 13, Geeti was the youngest of those killed and dumped into the Rideau Canal at Kingston, Ont. But her date of birth, barely visible above the snow on the grounds of the cemetery, is erroneously chiselled on her tombstone as “22-10-1991”—the same date inscribed on the grave of her beloved, 17-year-old big sister Sahar, which sits beside hers. “We’ll fix it,” Altaie tells Maclean’s, clearly frustrated with the attention brought by the mistake.

But any alterations will have to wait. The company that provides tombstones for the cemetery won’t make repairs to them during the winter because the ground is frozen. “They’re supposed to go and fix it as soon as the weather is good,” says Altaie.

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A run-in with the blind

By Emma Teitel - Tuesday, February 21, 2012 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

British Columbia: A Vancouver man is suing the Vancouver police department for injuries he suffered after being bitten by a police dog during his arrest. The massive wound required 100 staples, and cost him both his job and apartment, he says. His lawyers claim the police department repeatedly enlists dogs that are too young and too aggressive for the job.

Saskatchewan: An 18-year-old woman is suing the Regina Police Department for refusing to follow proper procedure during a 1994 police chase—when she was just a baby. She and her mother were hit by an officer in pursuit of a stolen vehicle, apparently leaving her with permanent brain injuries. The woman, whom the police department’s lawyer claims is “leading a normal life,” is seeking compensation for her injuries.

Ontario: An Ottawa jogger is suing two of Canada’s top blind Paralympians for running into her as she ran along the Rideau Canal in 2010. The woman is suing the athletes, who are brothers, for $350,000, saying she has had to undergo hip surgery and will need extensive treatment and therapy for the rest of her life.

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Cue the outrage over forbidden donations in Alberta politics. Not.

By Colby Cosh - Monday, February 20, 2012 at 12:10 PM - 0 Comments

Chris Young/CP

Over the past four months, many Albertans have taken their first-ever stroll through the province’s election law. Consider the list of entities that are forbidden from contributing to partisan causes—provincial parties, riding associations or candidates. It starts out quite commonsensically. Roman numeral one, corporations owned by the province. Number two, municipalities. Number three, Metis settlements; four, school boards; five, public post-secondary institutions.

In recent months, the Alberta Progressive Conservatives have been caught accepting donations from all five of these types of “prohibited corporations.”

Calgary Lab Services, a subsidiary of the province’s health super-board that recently took over cancer testing from Calgary’s Tom Baker Centre, gave $4,700 to the PC party between 2004 and 2010. The chief operating officer of the company, Chris Mazurkewich, admitted that “this shouldn’t have happened.”

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The ups and downs of Bill Vander Zalm and Gordon Campbell

By Alex Ballingall - Monday, February 20, 2012 at 11:30 AM - 0 Comments

Campbell

For much of their respective political careers, former premiers Bill Vander Zalm and Gordon Campbell—two lions of B.C.’s political scene—have been like two kids on a see-saw: just as one’s star rises, the other’s crashes and burns. “It’s more than ironic,” says David Mitchell, a B.C. historian and president of the Public Policy Forum. “It verges on the bizarre.”

Campbell, Canada’s high commissioner to Britain, got a raucous welcome last week in B.C., where he made his first public appearance since being hounded from office in the face of record-low public approval ratings. Coincidentally, just one day before Campbell’s cheery re-emergence, Vander Zalm’s star suddenly dive-bombed.

For two years, Vander Zalm had been riding high in B.C. His “Fight HST” campaign managed both to bring Campbell’s decade in the premier’s chair to an abrupt end, and kill the harmonized sales tax.

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No search, no rescue, for Labrador’s Burton Winter

By Alex Ballingall - Monday, February 20, 2012 at 11:10 AM - 0 Comments

As Burton Winters took his last breaths of frigid Atlantic air, marooned on an ice sheet off the Labrador coast, he must have scanned the sky for some sign that help might come. It didn’t. And the 14-year-old boy, a Junior Canadian Ranger from Makkovik, Labrador, froze to death in the snow.

Winters had been reported missing on Jan. 29, when he failed to return home on his snowmobile after dropping his cousin at their grandmother’s house. It was fully 48 hours before the Canadian Forces dispatched a helicopter. Three days later, his body was found; Winters had managed to trudge 19 km through the shifting ice and snow before finally collapsing.

The military claims poor weather in Makkovik kept them from sending a helicopter, but the response has been questioned by Winters’s family, local politicians and the public. Even if weather had allowed it, neither of the two helicopters stationed in Goose Bay, Labrador, could have made the flight due to maintenance issues, the Department of National Defence acknowledged last week. And private helicopters were able to launch a search, despite the weather.

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Hip-hop bells and a diplomat’s misspent youth

By Mitchel Raphael - Monday, February 20, 2012 at 11:05 AM - 0 Comments

Fred Chartrand/CP

Hip hop and the Peace Tower

There was much fanfare on the Hill during the week that kicked off celebrations of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. There was a House of Commons ceremony unveiling a small statue of Elizabeth II riding a horse. It will be placed outside the Library of Parliament for one year and then permanently installed in the Commonwealth Room in the Centre Block where there is already a bust of the Queen. The bells of the Peace Tower played a special selection of songs inspired from an assortment of British tunes. Andrea McCrady, who plays the carillon, the musical instrument made up of 53 bells in the Peace Tower, worked out a special program to mark the jubilee. She plays the bells live every weekday at noon, sometimes with the help of as many as six students. They practise in a special room on the Hill, but on Fridays they test things out on the Peace Tower bells when “not many people are around,” notes McCrady. “I play everything from Renaissance music to hip hop,” she says. For Flag Day on Feb. 15, she planned to play Wavin’ Flag by Somali-Canadian artist K’naan, who recently chastised U.S. Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney for using it during his campaign. McCrady doesn’t think K’naan will mind her 53-bell version.

‘Elegant’ Olympian butt

Last week, NDP MP Peter Stoffer launched an Olympic awareness campaign at his Ottawa office. In exchange for a donation, people can come to his office to shoot five darts, take five Nerf basketball shots, five shots of pool, five putts of golf and five kicks of a soccer ball. All proceeds go to support the athletes heading to the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London. His “opening ceremonies” included some celebrity guests: two former Olympic athletes, married couple Greg Joy and Sue Holloway, This Hour Has 22 Minutes host Mark Critch, Minister of State for Sport Bal Gosal, and British High Commissioner Andrew Pocock. “The colonies are going to kick some old-country butt,” said Stoffer. Pocock replied, “If the colonies are going to kick some butt, then it is going to be some extremely elegant butt.” Pocock was the first VIP to tackle the Stoffer pentathlon and managed to sink five out of five Nerf basketball shots. As he hit the pool table, Pocock quipped, “My misspent youth is coming back to me.” Double points were awarded for the soccer portion if the ball was kicked while wearing wooden shoes provided by Stoffer. In several cases, the wooden shoes went flying off the players’ feet and ended up whacking the door of NDP MP Dennis Bevington, whose office is across the hall. Gosal, who played a lot of soccer growing up, missed all his shots, which he did with a wooden shoe. The overall champion was Holloway with 180 points. She was followed by Critch (173), Joy (146), Pocock (164), and finally the minister of state for sport (111).

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We’re shooting polar bears?!?

By Nicholas Köhler - Thursday, February 16, 2012 at 8:10 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Jessica Darmanin

When lot No. 19002—a polar bear skin more than 10 feet in length—came up for auction in North Bay, Ont., a few Saturdays ago, Zhiqing Xu lifted his hand in the air and just left it there. The unorthodox manoeuvre forced Mark Downey, the auctioneer at the time, to belt out the skin’s rocketing price in one long, voice-destroying tear. Beside Xu sat his 21-year-old son Jason, who acted as interpreter and whispered a running translation of Downey’s rapid-fire patter into his father’s ear: “$53 is here, fiftythreefiftyfourfiftyfiveandfiftysixandfiftyseven, $57 is left, $58 is Billy, $59, and $60’s there—HOOO!!!—$60’s right, it’s on the right at $60—HOOO!!!—your bid’s sixtyoneandsixtytwo . . . ”

Even as the dollar figure soared, that arm stayed fixed, raised in a gesture that told competing bidders: back off. Xu, who moved to Vancouver from Beijing several years ago, went on to capture lot No. 19002. The price: $8,400. He spent thousands more on a second polar bear hide and a timber wolf skin. “Polar bear is a rare animal,” Jason, translating for his father, later told Maclean’s. “Not a lot of other places sell them—only Canada.”

Only Canada and, but for the small handful of polar bear pelts available each year at a competing auction house in Toronto, only at the Fur Harvesters Auction in North Bay, a town of 54,000 a few hours north of Toronto perched on the frozen lip of Lake Nipissing, a Group of Seven winter postcard come to life. The auction, which specializes in wild rather than ranched fur—from beaver to bobcat to muskrat to raccoon and coyote—has operated here in one form or another since 1947 and has long attracted international buyers. In the past, those fur shoppers came mainly from the U.S., Italy, Greece and other traditional fur-buying nations.

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Court: Dodging taxes isn’t ‘natural’

By Charlie Gillis - Monday, February 13, 2012 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Henry David Thoreau would be proud. For five years, a Chilliwack, B.C., couple refused to pay taxes while operating a school where they urged adult students to do the same, teaching that taxation amounts to slavery. But Elaine Gould and Russell Porisky will be lucky to get off as lightly as the 19th-century American writer, who famously withheld his taxes and paid for his disobedience with a single night in jail.

Gould and Porisky may spend years behind bars for failing to pay tax on more than $1 million of income generated by their school, Paradigm Education Group, plus $66,113 in unremitted GST. Last week, a B.C. Supreme Court judge found the pair guilty of tax evasion, and Porisky guilty of counselling their students to commit fraud. They’ve not yet been sentenced, but for evasion alone, the Income Tax Act allows for sentences of up to 12 months per count.

In his Paradigm seminars, Porisky taught that people are two separate entities in law—the “natural” person and “legal” person. Only the legal person is required to pay taxes, he claimed, and since the income flows to the natural person, taxes are essentially optional. Kooky as the theory sounds, it has been circulating long enough among tax resisters that the Canada Revenue Agency issued a release last fall advising Canadians to ignore anyone espousing it. One of Porisky’s students, a dentist named Eva Sydel, tried the “natural person” defence in vain in 2007, and received 18 months in jail. The judge in Porisky’s case was no less dismissive. “It is a failed attempt at word magic,” said Justice Elliott Myers of the theory, “and has no validity.”

Canada’s unofficial (and unelected) opposition

By John Geddes - Monday, February 13, 2012 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Photo by Blair Gable

For a particular set of policy wonks—generally identifiable by the telltale pallor and redness around the eyes that come from too many hours scouring spreadsheets—the recent news that Philip Cross is leaving Statistics Canada was big. The 36-year stalwart of the federal number-crunching agency, most recently its chief economist, has long been a prized source of analysis on questions from the depth of recessions to the problems of productivity. But Cross’s exit, prompted in part by his frustration with the Conservative government’s controversial 2010 decision to cancel the long version of the Canadian census, fits a pattern that has political implications beyond arcane economic debates. He is only the latest in a string of top former public servants to join what amounts to an extra-parliamentary unofficial opposition.

In policy disputes over deficit financing or defence procurement, the government’s stance on the Middle East, or its response to an aging population, the most cogent criticism increasingly comes from independent-minded lapsed bureaucrats. Unlike university professors or think-tank researchers, former mandarins bring insider intelligence on how federal policy is really made. The civil servant colleagues they leave behind keep them up to speed on new developments. All of that can make their critiques more intriguing to the media and, for beleaguered politicians, harder to dismiss. In past eras, retirement often cut them off from timely information sources and avenues for disseminating their views. No longer. “We now have the Internet and blogging and tweeting,” says Scott Clark, a former deputy minister of finance. “All that stuff allows people to do it so easily.”

By “it,” Clark means the kind of probing analysis that he and another top former finance official, Peter DeVries, produce for their website, 3D Policy. As two of the most seasoned budget-makers in Ottawa before they left the public service a few years ago, their typically unsupportive appraisal of Stephen Harper’s approach to taxing and spending resonates in official circles. Last month, for instance, they posted a detailed deconstruction of the Prime Minister’s claim that Old Age Security was “unsustainable.” Not according to Clark and DeVries. They pointed to the government’s own projections showing that restraint already imposed on big spending items like defence and health would allow OAS to go untouched without threatening federal finances. Cross has plans for his own online newsletter, to be called Inside the Numbers.

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Excerpt: Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, February 9, 2012 at 11:40 AM - 0 Comments

Grant Harder

The Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction recognizes excellence in Canadian non-fiction writing, awarding $25,000 to the winning author on March 5.

Before Charlotte Gill, 40, of Powell River, B.C., became a prize-winning short-story author (Ladykiller, 2005) she was a tree planter. A professional tree planter, in fact, and for 17 years—long enough to plant a million seedlings on the West Coast’s windblown mountaintops, mist-shrouded sodden valleys and all the terrain in between. It was a job of constant physical misery and intermittent moments of emotional and intellectual clarity, a job she loved and loathed. And one Gill had to write about, in Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe, nominated for the Charles Taylor Prize, to fully grasp the pull it exerted on her and her companions, and still does. “We still think of ourselves as planters,” she says.

In prose that is at once lyrical, nuanced and sharp-edged, Gill examines a trade and a way of life, from the micro (the way even the most barren-seeming of clear-cuts is swarming with tiny life) to the macro (the sheer scale of Canada’s timber industry).

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Bison back in Banff. Burgers, anyone?

By Emma Teitel - Tuesday, February 7, 2012 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Tim Smith

It appears wild bison will roam in Banff once again, now that federal Environment Minister Peter Kent’s proposal that the four-legged bovines be reintroduced to Banff National Park has been accepted by federal officials. Bison are a popular tourist fixture of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, which may be one reason why our government is keen on bringing them back to their old stomping grounds in Banff: some say their presence will increase interest in the park. There is, however, a good reason why they were removed in the first place, and why their reintroduction isn’t as easy as it sounds.

In 1997, Banff’s captive herd never got a chance to “flourish” as intended because its paddock interfered severely with the migration patterns of other wildlife in the area. The bison were removed from the park as a result, then auctioned off. And back in the 1970s—it seems the bison have an extensive history of bad luck in the region—a group of 30 Jasper-based bison wandered out of the park and were killed (some presumably shot by hunters to be made into bison burgers). Hunting is a big concern for bison lovers, as the International Union for Conservation of Nature has listed them as a “near-threatened” species, but hunting the animals is not entirely illegal in Alberta. According to Maurice Nadeau, former president of the Alberta Fish and Game Association, “Any hunting opportunity [in Alberta] would be welcome, particularly an animal with the size and stature of a bison.” So while it appears that Banff’s only prospect of a successful bison resurrection will be of the free-range variety (i.e. paddock-free), Alberta’s burger-hungry hunters may cause Peter Kent to reconsider his policy.

The Shafia honour killing trial—Chapter 2

By Michael Friscolanti - Tuesday, February 7, 2012 at 9:10 AM - 0 Comments

CP

FOR THE COMPLETE STORY OF THE HONOUR KILLING TRIAL:
	On the ebook in the Maclean’s magazine iPad app – Get the full story, plus, a week-by-week account by award-winning reporter Michael Friscolanti, as well as documents, video and audio evidence from the Kingston courtroom, and the heartbreaking diary of Rona, Shafia’s first wife and one of his victims.
	Or download our 10-chapter series detailing how the case unfolded.

By Western standards, Mohammad Shafia is not an educated man; born in middle-class Kabul in the early 1950s, he didn’t reach the seventh grade. But as an entrepreneur, he was gifted and ambitious, a stingy deal-maker who turned a small electronics shop into a multi-million-dollar import-export operation. His specialties were Panasonic radios and Peacock brand thermoses, shipped in from Japan. “It was only me,” Shafia told the jury, the pride still evident in his raspy voice. “I had the monopoly on importing those.”

Like many in Afghanistan, Shafia’s first marriage was an arranged one. It was his mother who first spotted young Rona Amir, the pretty daughter of a retired army colonel. Three decades later, police on the other side of the world would find Rona’s diary, detailing the events that led to her wedding day—and the years of “torture” that followed.

“[Shafia’s mother] invited all of us to her house so that her son could have a good look at me,” she wrote in her native Dari. “After our visit her son announced his consent.” When one of Rona’s brothers asked if she “accepted” the union, her answer was eerily prescient: “Give me away in marriage if he is a good man; don’t if he is not.”

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Harper finally takes some risks

By John Geddes - Monday, February 6, 2012 at 10:50 AM - 0 Comments

Chris Wattie/Reuters

Among Stephen Harper’s defining political traits, his standout skill has long been a knack for presenting himself as a pragmatist who would never overreach. In opposition, Harper succeeded in softening the image of his restored Conservative party to squelch fears he might be cooking up a sweeping right-wing overhaul of the federal government. He won the 2006 election with a platform of narrowly defined policies, like trimming the GST and paying parents a monthly $100-per-kid bonus. As a minority Prime Minister, he had to draft policies unthreatening enough to attract sufficient opposition votes to pass. But now, as he begins his first full calendar year with a House majority, Harper’s customary caution has evaporated. “In the months to come,” he declared in Davos, Switzerland, last week, “our government will undertake major transformations to position Canada for growth over the next generation.”

Major transformations? Plural? And this from a Prime Minister who, only days earlier, had sounded much his old self, pleading for a “practical, incremental” approach, rather than bold measures, for First Nations. It was a different Harper at the World Economic Forum, touting decisive fixes on daunting issues. He zeroed in on at least four big files, though offering frustratingly few details. On pensions, he vowed to make underfunded parts of the system sustainable “for the next generation.” On immigration, he promised “significant reform” to match newcomers to labour force needs. On exports, he pledged both to finalize new trade deals and to end regulatory delays on oil and mining ventures. On industry, he committed his government to finally tackling the perennial problem of lagging Canadian business innovation.

This ambitious agenda was scarcely hinted at in the Prime Minister’s re-election platform just last spring. Looking over his Davos list, it’s not hard to see why Conservative strategists might have deemed some of these ideas too risky for the campaign trail. Sure enough, soon after Harper’s speech, the formidable Canadian Association of Retired Persons served notice of its intention to fight any future curtailing of the Old Age Security or Guaranteed Income Supplement programs, even though the Tories stressed the coming cuts won’t affect seniors already collecting benefits. Harper’s plan to streamline environmental assessments for pipelines and other resource megaprojects is also bound to meet with angry opposition, and shifting the emphasis on immigration to workers with more in-demand skills also risks raising concerns among some of the Tories’ hard-won ethnic community supporters.

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The office prank as evidence of RCMP dysfunction

By Ken MacQueen - Monday, February 6, 2012 at 10:10 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Jessica Darmanin

Dirty Bertie—yours for about $25, batteries not included—is about as rude as a plastic mechanical doll can get. “He’s disgusting, revolting and perverted!!!” promises the box. “See and hear him moan and groan until he reaches his final pant-shaking climax!” Bertie is so over the top, it gained something of a cult following after an appearance as a desktop novelty on the determinedly politically incorrect U.K. version of the TV show The Office. Now Bertie is gaining more infamy with news that two members of the RCMP explosives disposal unit in British Columbia are being sued for injuring a bomb-squad colleague with a booby-trapped Bertie.

On its surface this is a case of a prank gone awry, but the larger implications for an embattled national police force are no laughing matter, nor are the injuries suffered by bomb expert Cpl. Tyrone Hempston when, on Jan. 4, 2010, he turned on the doll only to have it blow up in his hands. The lingering damage, both mental and physical, to 44-year-old Hempston has impaired his ability to do his job, curtailed his chances for promotion and limited future career prospects outside the Mounties, according to his lawyer, Walter Kosteckyj. “You know, it’s harder to get a job when you’re damaged goods.” Kosteckyj, a former Mountie who represented the mother of Robert Dziekanski, who died at Vancouver International Airport after being tasered by Mounties in 2007, said Hempston is paying a heavy price for suing the force. “He feels some pressure both from the organization and the people involved over how this is going forward, but I think he felt that he had no other avenue to go down.”

The supposed prank raises a number of troubling issues: the cavalier handling of explosives by the elite 14-member disposal unit; the decision not to charge the perpetrators, although an independent police investigation recommended criminal charges; the fact that Hempston continues to work in a tense environment with colleagues he is suing in a bomb unit that demands teamwork.

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The Shafia honour killing trial–Chapter 1

By Michael Friscolanti - Friday, February 3, 2012 at 7:17 PM - 0 Comments

CP

FOR THE COMPLETE STORY OF THE HONOUR KILLING TRIAL:
	On the ebook in the Maclean’s magazine iPad app – Get the full story, plus, a week-by-week account by award-winning reporter Michael Friscolanti, as well as documents, video and audio evidence from the Kingston courtroom, and the heartbreaking diary of Rona, Shafia’s first wife and one of his victims.
	Or download our 10-chapter series detailing how the case unfolded.

The police diver who swam to the bottom of the canal found Zainab Shafia in the front passenger seat, her face slumped forward, her fingernails painted a light shade of blue. She was 19 years old and had 10 cents in her pocket. Her black cardigan, drenched after hours underwater, was on backwards.

Sahar, her younger sister, was in the rear of the sunken Nissan Sentra, dressed in a pair of tight jeans and a sleeveless top. Her belly button was pierced (a stud with twin stones) and her nails were polished two different colours: purple on the fingers, black on the toes. As always, the stylish 17-year-old was within reach of her cellphone—about to become a crucial clue for investigators above.

Geeti’s lifeless body was floating over the driver’s seat, one arm wrapped around the headrest, the window beside her wide open. Like Sahar—the big sister she idolized—Geeti had a navel ring underneath her brown shirt. Detectives would later find a note she had scribbled to Sahar, full of hearts and red ink: “i WiSH 2 GOD DAT TiLL iM ALIVE I’LL NEVER SEE U SAD!” She was 13.

Rona Amir Mohammad was slouched in the middle back seat, her soaked black hair rubbing against Sahar’s. At 52, she was the eldest of the dead: the girls’ supposed “auntie,” but in fact their dad’s first wife in a secretly polygamous Afghan clan. The day she drowned, Rona put on a blue shirt, three pairs of earrings, and six gold bangles. She was not wearing a seatbelt. None of them were.

It was June 30, 2009, the morning before Canada Day. Det.-Const. Geoff Dempster was supposed to work the afternoon shift, two ’til midnight, but his cellphone rang a few hours early. A colleague in the major crimes unit briefed him about the car full of corpses at the Kingston Mills locks, and asked him to come in as soon as possible. A few minutes after he arrived at police headquarters, three people showed up at the front counter to file a missing persons report: Mohammad Shafia, the girls’ father, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, their mother, and Hamed Shafia, their 18-year-old brother.

Dempster, a veteran cop with short blond hair and a rookie’s face, spent most of that Tuesday shift interviewing mom, dad and son, assuming, at first, that they were grieving relatives devastated to learn that their loved ones were gone. Their initial stories, videotaped for accuracy, were essentially the same. Wealthy Muslim family. Recent immigrants to Canada. Road trip to Niagara Falls, the 10 vacationers split between the Sentra and a silver Lexus SUV. Shafia, Tooba and Hamed all told the detective that they had stopped at a Kingston, Ont., motel on the way home to Montreal, and that Zainab grabbed the car keys to retrieve some clothes. The next morning, the Nissan—and nearly half the family—were gone. “That’s it,” Shafia said. “I don’t know anything else.”

But that was hardly it, as the detective soon realized. The more questions Dempster asked, the stranger their story sounded. Why would these women, after a six-hour road trip from Niagara Falls, pile into the Nissan for a middle-of-the-night joyride? Why did an eyewitness tell on-scene investigators that he saw two cars at the water’s edge that night? And why did the Shafias show up at the station in a green minivan—not the silver Lexus they were driving during the vacation?

Hamed, not a tear in sight, told the detective that he didn’t actually sleep at the motel with the rest of his family. Instead, he climbed back behind the wheel of the Lexus at two o’clock in the morning and continued toward Montreal, more than 300 km away. “I forgot my laptop,” he explained. He was home for only a few minutes, he said, when his dad phoned to tell him the girls were missing.

“How come you came back in the Pontiac?” Dempster asked, referring to the minivan.

“No special reason,” Hamed answered, mumbling about how the Lexus “takes more gas and fuel and stuff like that.”

“The reason for coming back in the Pontiac and not the Lexus was because it’s better on gas?” Dempster pressed.

“Well, that’s one of the reasons.”

“What would be another reason?”

“Nothing, uh, big,” Hamed replied. “Nothing, ya know, that’s worth telling.”

What police discovered over the next three weeks would tell a story so chilling, so unthinkable to most Canadians, that the resulting trial captivated the country like few crimes ever have. Mother, father, and eldest son—motivated by an ancient, barbaric “honour” code—used their Lexus to smash that Nissan over the lip of the Rideau Canal, watching with perverted satisfaction as all four females vanished into the water. “I am happy and my conscience is clear,” Shafia proclaimed the night before his arrest, unaware that a police wiretap was recording his every word. “They haven’t done good and God punished them.”

Today, a different punishment looms: life behind bars. After four months, 58 witnesses, and too many lies to count, a jury found Shafia, Tooba and their beloved Hamed guilty of quadruple murder in the first degree. It took just 15 hours of deliberation for the jurors to reach their verdict.

The evidence, utterly heartbreaking, left no real doubt about the truth. Before they died, the Shafia sisters were caught in the ultimate culture clash, living in Canada but not allowed to be Canadian. They were expected to behave like good Muslim daughters, to wear the hijab and marry a fellow Afghan. And when they rebelled against their father’s “traditions” and “customs”—covertly at first, then for all the community to see—the shame became too much to bear. Only a mass execution (staged to look like a foolish wrong turn) could wash away the stain of their secret boyfriends and revealing clothes.

Rona, it turns out, was simply a convenient throw-in, the infertile first wife who died as she lived. An afterthought.

“They committed treason from beginning to end,” Shafia declared, during another one of his intercepted rants. “They betrayed kindness, they betrayed Islam, they betrayed our religion and creed, they betrayed our tradition, they betrayed everything.”

His daughters died because they were defiant and beautiful and had dreams of their own. Because they were considered property, not people. But the two words at the heart of this sensational case—“honour killing”—do not tell the whole twisted tale. What happened on that pitch-black night is also a story about cries for help that were missed or ignored. About sibling rivalry and family snitches. About young love and old-fashioned police work.

And it’s a story about a custom-built courtroom, where father, mother—but not son—took the stand to proclaim their innocence.

Read the full ebook edition of the Shafia honour killing trial, available for purchase in the Maclean’s iPad app.
Or download the complete story as PDF.

Police blotter: landlord with a gun and milk-truck bandits

By Alex Ballingall - Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 8:30 AM - 0 Comments

British Columbia: An apparently lovestruck Washington man snuck into Canada eight times over the past 12 years so that he could be with his Vancouver girlfriend. During his visits he also racked up a criminal record for break-ins and assaults. After being arrested once again last April, the man—who is addicted to crystal meth—will spend the next 11 months in prison. In Canada.

Alberta: A man carrying a knife and wearing a balaclava was fleeing the pharmacy he robbed in an Okotoks grocery store when he was “linebacker” tackled by a man shopping for milk and eggs. Several patrons dog-piled on top of the thief and held him down until police arrived. There were no injuries, except for those incurred by the robber’s street cred.

Saskatchewan: A dispute over the terms of a rental contract for a home in Swift Current turned dangerous when the 65-year-old landlord drew a gun on the 29-year-old woman renting the house. No shots were fired. The landlord was charged with breaking and entering, careless use of a firearm and unsafe storage of a firearm. The tenant is likely looking for new digs.

Ontario: A man in London faces theft charges after posing as a buyer of a diamond ring, then making off with the jewellery. The 23-year-old alleged thief responded to an online ad offering to sell the ring for $5,000, and asked the seller to meet him in a parking lot. When the two met, he then grabbed the ring and ran. He was later caught, but the ring is still missing.

Nova Scotia: Police in Cape Breton are investigating a bizarre bank theft that was carried out using a stolen dairy truck. Thieves made off with the milk truck from a local creamery. Then, at around 3 a.m. on Jan. 9, police believe the thieves hooked a long firehose or rope to the truck and wrenched a bank machine from the foyer of a Co-op store in Margaree Forks. No arrests have been made.

A house call for doctors

By Kristy Hutter - Wednesday, February 1, 2012 at 8:10 AM - 0 Comments

The wildfires that swept through Slave Lake, Alta., last May destroyed two-thirds of the town, but they also left another smouldering crisis: an acute shortage of doctors. Prior to the fires, the town of 7,000 had 13 doctors. After their homes were wiped out by flames, however, five physicians moved away, leaving the remaining eight doctors seriously overworked. Now, as the town attempts to recruit more physicians, it faces a daunting challenge—where to house them.

To that end, two local financial institutions have stepped in to help the small northern Alberta town in its mission. ATB Financial and Servus Credit Union, which both have branches in Slave Lake, purchased seven townhouses and offered them to the town, which plans to make them available to new doctors. Because of the shortage of homes, rental rates have soared, so doctors will be offered the homes at “pre-fire” rental rates. “Housing is very short right now,” says regional recovery communications coordinator Andrea McDonald. “It helps to say, ‘If you’re going to move to the region, we have somewhere for you to live.’ ”

Alberta Health Services, which initiated the recruiting program, aims to bring three new physicians to the town. “We’re aware that the physicians who are working in Slave Lake right now are working really hard, and we’d like to help them out by providing them with some colleagues,” says Alberta Health Services spokesman Kerry Williamson.

There are some hopeful signs that the plan is working. In mid-January, one doctor toured the town. Meanwhile, two others are planning visits to Slave Lake over the next few weeks.

In Gatineau, the squeaky wheel gets investigated

By Gabriela Perdomo - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments

The city of Gatineau in Quebec laid out its “statement of values” for immigrants late last year and immediately set off a firestorm of criticism. Among Gatineau’s instructions to immigrants: avoid cooking “smelly foods,” maintain good “personal hygiene” and abstain from bribing. One of those incensed by the guide was Kamal Maghri, a 38-year-old Moroccan immigrant who moved to Canada 11 years ago. But when Maghri sent an email to the city to say he would like to file a complaint, what he got back surprised him. City officials accidentally copied him on an internal exchange that showed they’d dug extensively into his background, calling a local Islamic centre to ask about him and prying into his financial situation.

In the emails, one employee noted Maghri had come to Canada “just before the September 11 attacks” and that he was in debt. “I was shocked. This is racial profiling,” he says. Even more astonishing, he says he later learned that the city official who wrote the email was a “diversity coordinator.” “They [Gatineau City] have people working on diversity and integration of immigrants who don’t even believe in it,” he says. Only after Maghri went to the media did officials apologize to him.

In mid-December, Maghri was contacted by the Montreal-based Centre for Research-Action on Race Relations offering to help file a human rights complaint, which he did in mid-January. The complaint claims discrimination and racial profiling on the part of the city of Gatineau, both based on the values guide and on the email that Maghri read.

At least one expert believes Maghri has a strong case. Jeffrey Reitz, a professor with the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto and an immigration expert, says the guide “stereotypes immigrants in a negative way,” portraying them as “a threat” to our society.

Economic boom brings a labour shortage to Newfoundland

By Alex Ballingall - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 at 10:20 AM - 0 Comments

Vale Archive

There may be no more surefire sign of an economic boom in Canada than a shortage of staff at the local Tim Hortons. It happened in northern Alberta when Fort McMurray exploded with oil sands-related activity. And now it’s happening in Deer Lake, in western Newfoundland. “We’re in the midst of a period of poor availability,” says local Tim Hortons’ owner Oral Clarke. He plans to bring in foreign workers from the Philippines to fill out his staff.

For a town of 5,000 that sits at a highway interchange near the entrance to Gros Morne National Park—never mind in a province with the highest unemployment rate in the country at 13.1 per cent—this may seem like a strange conundrum. But it’s indicative of a growing problem on the Rock. After decades of being Canada’s archetypal “have not” province, Newfoundland and Labrador is experiencing an unprecedented economic boom. And the record expansion brings an unfamiliar problem: an acute shortage of labour. “For years we’ve had people leaving the province because of too few jobs,” says Richard Alexander, executive director of the Newfoundland and Labrador Employers’ Council. “All of a sudden there’s been a switch and we’re entering an area where we have excess jobs and too few people to fill those jobs.”

More than $43 billion is pouring into major development projects across the province. Among the most prominent are the $8.3-billion Hebron offshore oil platform, the $3-billion Long Harbour nickel processing plant, and the $6.2-billion Muskrat Falls Lower Churchill hydroelectric project. The government surplus—once a rare figure on provincial balance sheets—climbed far beyond expectations to $755 million last year, thanks mostly to oil revenues, says Memorial University economist Wade Locke. In a report titled “ Outlook 2020,” the province estimated that 77,000 job vacancies will open up over the next eight years (with more projects announced since the report, that estimate is widely perceived to be conservative).

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The polygamy tax break

By Ken MacQueen - Monday, January 30, 2012 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments

Photography by Brian Howell

He quoted the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and the Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, but in Judge Diane Campbell’s Vancouver courtroom over the next three weeks, polygamous leader Winston Blackmore is confronting another book of fire, brimstone and unyielding dictates: the Canadian Income Tax Act.

By his own admission, 55-year-old Blackmore, leader of a breakaway sect of fundamentalist Mormons living in Bountiful in southeastern B.C., has faced police investigations since 1990. But while he escaped convictions for the widespread practice of polygamy, and allegations of child exploitation of young brides, it’s Canada Revenue Agency tax auditors who have laid low the once all-powerful bishop of Bountiful.

At issue is whether the polygamous group of some 450 that Blackmore leads constitutes a “congregation” eligible for special tax status under the arcane “Communal Organizations” section of the tax act. The blunt assessment by Justice Department lawyer Lynn Burch is no. In opening comments in the federal Tax Court appeal, she called him merely the “patriarch of a large polygamous family.” What little legitimacy that he had as a bishop of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints ended in 2002, when the community split in two and Blackmore was excommunicated from the controversial church. He represents, she said, “a splinter group of a splinter group.”

Auditors claim that Blackmore under-reported $1.5 million in personal income over five years starting in 2000, and that he washed personal and family expenses through a Bountiful-based business he controls, J.R. Blackmore and Sons. Throughout, Blackmore, who admitted in court to having 21 wives and to fathering 47 children during the five years under tax review, claimed annual income rarely exceeding $30,000 a year. She said by trying to win special tax status, Blackmore wanted to permanently shift his tax burden onto others in the group, many of whom work for the Blackmore company “for a pittance” in remote logging and wood-processing plants. If he sees himself as a shepherd, she told the court, “the role of a good shepherd is to shear the sheep, not skin it.”

To achieve special communal status as a congregation—as, for example, Hutterite communities have—Blackmore’s group must meet the criteria under Section 143 of the act. Members must live and work together, adhere to the principles of the religion, they can’t individually own property and their working lives must be devoted to the congregation. Blackmore, clutching his books of faith, testified he and his flock meet that test. He cited from the founding Covenants and Doctrines of the Latter-Day Saints, which says all members have “equal claims” to property, and that men’s talents must contribute to “the Lord’s storehouse to become the common property of the whole church.” At other times he quoted Scripture, and the teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, who published the Book of Mormon in 1830. Blackmore said he remains faithful to Smith’s “founding principles,” including plural marriage, while mainstream Latter-Day Saints broke faith.

Blackmore takes a calculated risk by fighting the taxman. He is testifying under subpoena as a “compelled witness” in the likelihood that his testimony in this civil case won’t be admissible in any criminal trial. Just a week before this trial, the B.C. government appointed yet another special prosecutor to consider if such charges as sexual exploitation and trafficking of young brides to polygamous enclaves in the U.S. can be laid. Clearly, these are taxing times for Bountiful and its defrocked bishop.

Does Brian Topp have the chops to lead the NDP?

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, January 30, 2012 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Photography by Cole Garside

Seated on stage at the front of a packed high school theatre in Toronto this month, Brian Topp—a prominent contender in the race to be the next leader of the NDP—is told he has 60 seconds to introduce himself. Despite being some 400 km from Quebec, he opens in French, earning his first applause of the evening. Switching to English, he delivers a greeting-card sermon to the faithful. “This was Jack Layton’s town,” he says. “And he loved this town and we know why. It’s because it’s diverse and it’s cosmopolitan and it’s progressive, which is everything that Stephen Harper and his pet mayor don’t like about Toronto.” The swat at Rob Ford draws laughter and applause.

He enthuses then about everything New Democrats can do to build a “more equal” city and country, and finishes with a defiant slap at any suggestion the NDP must change fundamentally to succeed. “We don’t have to become Liberals to win,” he declares. The crowd bursts into applause for a third time.

But however meticulous the phrasing and however receptive the audience, he does not always wear a look of perfect relaxation and his voice does not quite boom. So if, two months from the leadership vote, there is little doubt that Brian Topp knows the right words, the only questions are whether he can look and sound the part.

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Is the Tingley family a criminal organization or is the definition flawed?

By Richard Warnica - Monday, January 30, 2012 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Adam Huras/Telegraph-Journal

Rodney Tingley, a white-haired 58-year-old grandfather who police said was the head of one of New Brunswick’s most notorious crime families, lay in bed the night officers came for him. His wife, Gayle, was next to him; their six-year-old grandson was in between. The police raid didn’t come as a surprise, exactly. Mounties had been investigating Tingley for more than 14 months. But the pure force of it shocked him. “I woke up and all I could hear was someone hollering, ‘Cops! Cops! Cops!’ ” Tingley says. “So I jumped up, looked out the hall, and all I seen was SWAT teams with machine guns and masks and all this stuff.”

Tingley didn’t know the half of it. More than 100 Mounties from three provinces were raiding Tingley homes that morning, Dec. 10, 2008. Nine Tingleys or close relatives were arrested, and eight of them were eventually brought up on 57 charges. (The ninth, Rodney Tingley’s 78-year-old mother-in-law, was released without charge.)

The raid was hailed at the time as a major crackdown on a significant organized crime group. It was the first time in New Brunswick’s history that criminal organization charges had been laid since the definition of the term was broadened by the federal government in 2002. The RCMP wasted no time painting the so-called “Salisbury Sopranos”—as the family was dubbed—as a dangerous posse of gunrunners and drug dealers.

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