Second person charged in connection with Salvation Army toy theft
By The Canadian Press - Thursday, November 29, 2012 - 0 Comments
Toronto police say a second person has been charged in connection with the theft…
Toronto police say a second person has been charged in connection with the theft of millions of dollars in toys and other donations from a Salvation Army warehouse in the city.
Umaish Ramrattan, 61, of Ajax faces numerous charges, including theft and possession of stolen property.
Police say they’ve also found a third cache of stolen goods after raiding another commercial warehouse in Brampton on Wednesday.
Twenty-six skids containing toys, school supplies, cleaning products and food were reportedly found at the warehouse.
Former Salvation Army warehouse executive director David Rennie was charged Monday in connection with the theft, which police and the charity have estimated at about $2 million.
Rennie, 51, faces charges of theft over $5,000, possession of stolen property and criminal breach of trust.
On Monday, police alleged a company called Northern Sales Group, which they said controls a Toronto warehouse where some of the toys were found, was involved in a scheme to sell the Salvation Army toys.
At that time investigators said they were looking to arrest and charge a second suspect connected to the group.
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Megapixels for machine guns
By Emily Senger - Wednesday, November 14, 2012 at 7:10 AM - 0 Comments
The Pixels for Pistols program is bringing in a lot of firepower and dishing out cameras in return
Winnipeg police are trading guns for digital cameras. In a program dubbed Pixels for Pistols, anyone who turns in a working firearm to police gets a Lumix DMC-FH8 digital camera and a gift certificate for photo classes, both donated by Henry’s, a Canadian camera chain. As an added bonus, anyone who surrenders a gun during the four-week amnesty period won’t face criminal charges for possessing an unregistered firearm.
This isn’t the first gun amnesty in Canada. Under the now-defunct federal long-gun registry, gun owners were immune from criminal charges for possession of unregistered non-restricted rifles and shotguns, but the federal government certainly wasn’t handing out cameras. And the cameras seem to make a difference.
In 2008, the Toronto Police Service offered its own Pixels for Pistols program. It was deemed a success, netting 1,897 guns, 304 non-firearms (including pellet and replica guns) and 1,486 boxes of ammunition in just over a month. During that program, a surrendered gun was good for a Nikon Coolpix P60, and there was a bonus—a higher-end Nikon Coolpix S52—for a handgun, machine-gun or assault rifle. The program was repeated in Halifax in 2009, when police collected more than 1,000 weapons.
Winnipeg’s gun amnesty is off to a strong start, says Sgt. Geordie MacKenzie. By the fifth day of the month-long program, Winnipeg police had already collected 105 non-restricted firearms, seven prohibited weapons (mainly old handguns) and 5,000 rounds of ammunition. During Winnipeg’s last gun amnesty in 2010, there was no incentive involved and police collected 300 guns in a one-month period. “If, in three or four days, we’re at what took half a month last time, clearly the incentive must be what the difference is here,” says MacKenzie.
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Violence in the heart of Toronto
By Tamsin McMahon - Tuesday, June 12, 2012 at 5:00 AM - 0 Comments
Eaton Centre shooting claims second victim. In its wake, Tamsin McMahon finds defensiveness over Toronto’s safety record
Rick Madonik/Toronto Star
It was barely 48 hours after a gunman fired a hail of bullets through Toronto’s busiest mall on the weekend, killing one and injuring six others, that the city’s top officials rushed to declare the downtown a safe place to shop. “This is the safest city in the world,” Mayor Rob Ford told a press conference. “I’ve travelled around to other cities and you see the stats. We don’t make these up.”
Shootings are on the increase, noted acting deputy Toronto police chief Jeff McGuire, but mostly in incidents where no one is hurt and bullets instead get lodged in buildings and car doors: “I’m not minimizing those because they absolutely are important to us. But let’s not become too alarmist.”
Alarmism was hardly the prevailing sentiment at the Eaton Centre on the Monday after the shooting, where the chief complaint among throngs of shoppers seemed to be that the food court where the shooting took place was still closed for a police investigation.
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Who’s suing whom?
By Cigdem Iltan - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 9:31 AM - 0 Comments
Our regular roundup of the weird lawsuits winding their way through Canada’s courts
Nunavut: A cruise company is suing the Canadian government for US$15 million after one of its ships was stranded in the Northwest Passage last summer. No one was injured when the vessel hit a rock shelf near Kugluktuk, but passengers and crew were stuck on the ship for two days until an icebreaker arrived. The cruise ship owner claims the government didn’t tell mariners about the rock shelf.
British Columbia: The City of Surrey has filed a lawsuit against a former city planner, claiming he took bribes from developers and used city money to buy a half-million-dollar home. The former city employee has denied the charges. “The claim against me is baseless and should not be allowed to proceed anywhere. All this has caused my family a lot of stress,” he wrote in his statement of defence.
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Nobody's fault
By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, December 9, 2010 at 10:59 AM - 19 Comments
In regards to the sweeping police powers invoked during the G20 summit, the Toronto Police Chief points to the Integrated Security Unit, the coordinating authority established by the RCMP. The RCMP says it was “made aware” that the Toronto police might invoke the law, but “not consulted.”
The Ontario ombudsman’s report lays out a series of discussions between federal, provincial and municipal authorities starting at paragraph 117 and by that telling, it was federal legislation that was first considered.
It appears that the federal government’s reluctance to enter into an agreement under the Foreign Missions and International Organizations Act provided increased incentive for officials to look to the Public Works Protection Act. Under the federal Act, the RCMP appeared to have clear authority to construct and control the interior security barrier for the “red zone,” but the Toronto Police Service believed that unless it was somehow delegated power under that legislation, it would have to look elsewhere for incontrovertible legal support to construct and control the exterior security fence.
