Clothes Make the Man…Even Transforming Mild-Mannered Clark Kent into Superman

“Eye on City Hall”
A column of Information, Analysis, Comment, and unfiltered opinion
Bill Longworth, City Hall Reporter
JuLY 12, 2010

WATCH CBC DOCUMENTARY ON THE POLICE VIOLENCE AT TORONTO'S G20 SUMMIT


FULL DOCUMENTARY OF TORONTO G20 POLICE VIOLENCE

CALL FOR PUBLIC INQUIRY IN G20 TORONTO SUMMIT


FINALLY---HAVE RULED THAT THOSE ILLEGALLY DETAINED CAN SUE!!! --- IT'S ABOUT TIME




How appropriate! The Queen is in Manitoba laying the cornerstone for a new Museum of Human Rights as I write this column on Canada Day Weekend. This has been a defining year for our Nation---the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, the Queen’s Canada Week Visit, and the recent G8/G20 Conference. This was a year Canada made a mark on the world.

The world view of Canada has changed forever.

The recent Vancouver 2010 Olympics were accompanied by serious security and safety concerns, and so the police presence was highly visible. Everywhere you looked on every street corner were police from across the country proudly displaying the regular uniforms of their police service which acted as a symbol of a strong unifying force within the country….police from every region of the country pulling together for the common good and they did us proud. They were everywhere, groups of two or three police smiling and chatting amicably with passersby as friendly helpful faces assisting the crowds. And everywhere you looked, public areas and secured areas were defined by colourful posters in the green, blue, and white colours of the Vancouver Olympics, displaying motifs of the various winter Olympic sports.

Protesters came from far and wide to oppose the tremendous costs which might well have been diverted to the homeless, the poor, the native communities, the environment, or to combat corporate irresponsibility and inequitable distribution of wealth, etc. Similar protests accompany all world gatherings for the rich and privileged.

Some of the protesters were professional protesters---social activists moving from site to site to exhort their views. As with all such protest groups, the vast majority were simply law abiding spectators witnessing the event or enjoying the party atmosphere….not much different than witnessing Canada Day Celebrations at Parliament Hill or spectating at the Gay Pride Parade or Caribana or the Santa Claus Parade.

There is a possibility of problems everywhere that people gather---and everywhere it is the police responsibility to protect the public safety. They also have the responsibility to uphold Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms which guarantees citizens freedom of thought, belief, opinion, and expression, freedom of peaceful assembly, and freedom of association. The Charter also protects citizens against unreasonable search and seizure, and the right not to be arbitrarily detained or imprisoned. Upon arrest or detention, the Charter gives the citizens the right to be promptly informed of the reasons, to retain counsel without delay, and to have the validity of the detention determined. All citizens have the right not to be subjected to any cruel and unusual treatment or punishment.

Toronto Police Motto---"To Serve and Protect"...Photo Credit--Richard Lautens, Toronto Star

WATCH THE MOST IMPORTANT VIDEO YOU'LL EVER SEE!

Every one of these constitutionally guaranteed rights and freedoms were widely ignored during the G20 Conference as if they didn’t exist. And so police actions are going to be tested in court actions brought by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, and calls to the Federal Government for a public inquiry are being made by Amnesty International, and after rejecting public inquiries into the police action, the Toronto Police Service Board has now acceeded to public pressures announcing an independent public inquiry as I write this. The Ontario Ombudsman is investigating the misinformation given by the police about their ability to demand identification of everyone approaching within five metres of the secured meeting area or face arrest.

A facebook site with over 10,000 "friends" as I write this has been established to document some of the policing infractions and increase public pressure for an independent public inquiry over the G20 police actions.

The police presence at the Vancouver 2010 Olympics handled security well. The few minor problems that erupted were handled with dispatch, professionalism, wisdom, and only the necessary police presence. No huge police demonstrations of strength and power were evident which would have incited rather than ameliorated any potential problems.

The Olympic security organizers must have attended Psychology 101 lectures and were well aware that aggressive behaviours provoke an aggressive opposition. Too bad, the G20 security organizers didn’t attend the same lectures.

Everyone knows that dress defines a person’s attitudes and behaviours. And in all of the resulting personas, the behavior is largely predictable. Dress can even turn a mild mannered Clark Kent into Superman---a superhero in battledress---ready to fight aggressively for his beliefs.

In Toronto, the 10 foot chain link security fence and the massed police presence numbering in thousands clothed in riot gear was in stark contrast to the Olympics security measures. The G20 police with their shields, billy sticks, hard helmets, face masks, and black superhero outfits defined the police attitude, and foreshadowed the predictably aggressive behaviours the police were to deploy. The police rhymically banging their shields with their billy sticks revved up the crowds and stoked up the cops. All of the trouble provoked by the police was predictable.

Such though is to be expected as a function of a federal “law and order” government that sees everything as white and black, as either good or evil, with little in between, a party so strict in its party discipline that all messages are controlled by the prime minister’s office. I suspect that the parameters for policing this summit were laid down by the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) and its “iron hand control” over everything it touches. This philosophy of absolute and overwhelming power never works. And now the Harper Government want no part of any probe that may point a finger back at them!

What a contrast, the Olympics policing and the G20 Toronto Summit policing, where the massed police presence, oppressive visual appearance, and aggressive policing philosophy has been highly criticized with widespread calls for a public inquiry and the resignation of Police Chief William Blair. Hundreds of YouTube videos of G20 police action have gone viral and have trashed Toronto’s reputation as one of the world’s great cities and destroyed Canada’s reputation as a peaceful, free, and tolerant nation with a great respect for human rights and democratic freedoms.

Police action has defined Canada and the G20 Summit with headlines in the national and international press like, “G20 Summit: smashing,” “A Black Eye for Democracy,” and “Brutal spectacle failed a city and its people.”

A YouTube search will unveil thousands of videos of questionable police action with the super-hero clad police in huge numbers advancing lava-like in their star-wars getups, morphing over protesters and spectators alike, and then rushing, apparently unprovoked, into the crowds with their billy sticks swinging and sucking up individuals to be dragged behind the police lines, roughed up in many cases while the police immobilized them with plastic ties fixing their wrists behind their backs before dragging them off. In some cases rubber bullets and tear gas were fired into the crowds. In one video, I saw, a young man was hugging his obviously frightened girl friend when the police, probably in a display of macho dominance in front of the girl, power-dragged him off to her screams. In another video, the police advanced aggressively swinging their billies on a group sitting passively on the road singing Oh Canada, with their backs to the officers.

You tube videos will also show massed riot gear clothed police officers "kettling" citizens who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and indiscrimately detaining and arresting them. Similar incidents in a recent London England economic summit were found by the British High Courts to be illegal and this will have some impact on class action suits of those similarly detained in Toronto.

Interestingly, there was no police presence around the burning cruisers or around those causing mayhem on the streets. As police seldom abandon their vehicles, there is speculation that the police planted and abandoned cruisers in the “trouble zone,” and may even have been responsible of torching them with some of their members planted among the protesters. There have been reports that the torched cars had been stripped of all of their computer and communications gear and fuel and gas caps before being abandoned. It was interesting that no police or fire service intervened to stop or limit damage to the police vehicles, nor, despite the presence of thousands of security cameras and police helicopters, was there any police presence around a Black Blok group rampaging up Yonge Street smashing store windows from Queen to College.

It has been stated by some of the police involved that they were ordered to “stand down” and not intervene in some of the destructive havoc being perpetrated by the Black Blok anarchists.

A theory being advanced is that authorities needed to allow and possibly incite some level of destruction to combat public criticism of the immense security costs.

This would not be the first time that undercover officers have infiltrated rampaging protesters and took a lead as Agent Provocateurs in instigating violence and destruction. In the 2007 Montebello Summit, police admitted such actions following press photos that showed three members of the rampaging and destructive group of rioters were wearing the same police issued riot boots as the riot gear clad officers.

The media and viral YouTube visuals are not what anyone previously would have identified with Canada or Canadians. In future, it will be hard for government officials to criticize nations accused of practicing police/government brutality against its own citizens.

Close to 1000 innocent citizens, the largest mass arrests in Canadian history were arrested and detained in crowded holding cages with open door toilet facilities, no beds, and inadequate food and water over the G20 weekend, and about 800 were released without charges showing the arrests were unjustified, while the remaining 200 were charged with minor offences like resisting arrest.

The unjustified detentions and use of excessive force is now the subject of lawsuits being raised by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and Government Officials have now acquiesced to public pressure and have announced a public inquiry into the G20 police actions.

As Thomas Jefferson once said, “When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty. Let’s hope that the recent G20 tyranny turns to renewed liberty, as those responsible for this assault on Canadian people pay the price, through the ensuing lawsuits and public inquiries.

We can’t have this happen again in Canada!

Be sure to follow Bill’s radio broadcasts, “Eye on City Hall”,
every Monday, 6-9 pm EST, on http://www.ocentral.com/thewave/

Thanks for all your help boys…Don’t know what we’d do without ya!

“Eye on City Hall”
A column of Information, Analysis, Comment, and unfiltered opinion
Bill Longworth, City Hall Reporter
May 10, 2010

We’ve just passed the Federal Income Tax deadline and so that seemingly never-ending river of cash that floods governments at every level is obviously on our mind. No wonder they all seem compelled to spend like drunken sailors just to keep from drowning in all our cash.

And now on the eve of the new HST, which will increase Ontarian’s family tax loads by almost $800 annually, our minds are becoming focused on just what we get for all this money.

Recently our Prime Minister prorogued parliament so his commitment to Canada’s business did not interfere with his enjoyment of the Olympic Games. His $9000 an hour flights on government jets cost taxpayers about $45,000 for each of his trips to Vancouver or $90,000 for the round trip. This is only a small portion of his costs, however, when his accommodation, hospitality, security, venue tickets, etc., are included. His total Olympic costs undoubtedly cost the taxpayer tens of millions of dollars.

When Harper's Defense Minister, Peter McKay, took the same flight some months ago, he was asked by the press why he didn’t fly commercial. “Because it didn’t meet my schedule,” he responded. Well lah de lah. I took a flight out to Vancouver to volunteer in the Olympics, and guess what, I had to make my schedule fit the plane’s schedule. I couldn’t ask all you taxpayers to pool your cash to send me the Harper/McKay way!

Anyway, all this got me to thinking about where a lot of our tax cash goes and this exposes that strong sense of entitlement, the wastage, and the secrecy in too many places, even here in Oshawa with our local city government members, some of whom would be unemployed and unemployable were it not for their council seats. It's a fact that not one of our sitting council members made nearly as much in the private sector as they do from their Oshawa City Council political positions! And none of them has ever lived as high on the hog as they do now snorting at the public trough.

It’s not only here in Oshawa where Mayor John Gray feels he can use your tax monies to fund MBA’s for his friends, pay off parking and other bylaw infraction fines using a city visa card, use your tax monies to provide himself with a $40,000 birthday party, demolish council chambers and parts of city hall so that he and his political friends can get bigger office spaces and their names on a new building, and Louise Parkes, arguing for bigger office budgets so she can travel more on your dime, or Brian Nicholson arguing that university tuition money should be hidden in office budgets to hide these expenditures from you. After all, our taxes are the highest in the GTA and among the highest in the country and we wouldn’t want to lose this distinction, would we?

So Council…keep on spending, spending, spending….and we’ll keep on giving, giving, giving!

Whatever you do, don’t jeopardize our #1 rating as top taxpayers in the GTA! We want everyone in the GTA and in Canada to “Prepare to be amazed”….After all, city taxpayers reportedly spent $100,000 for some creative mind to come up with this motto-crap under our Mayor’s watchful eye.

Of course, voters have to be concerned with more than excessive spending by City Council. We have to be concerned that Councillors do not give away the store. How so, you ask!

Elections are expensive. With the General Vote and City-wide campaigning in Oshawa now, the upper spending limits for city councilor, regional councilor, and mayor are now approximately $80,000, $90,000, and $110,000 respectively. Politicians turn chiefly to the development industry for their election funds. Of course, we know he who pays the piper calls the tune…and so the developer’s political donations are nothing more than vote buying. Pleasing donors with "friendly votes" insures repeat donations for the next election. Thus politicians may give away our city store.

Politicians may give away the store, as is the case in Oshawa, with the smallest development lot levies in the GTA thus forcing the highest property taxes in the GTA on residents. Taxpayers then in Oshawa are called upon to subsidize the housing development in this city.

The largest proportion of campaign funds in Oshawa comes from the Development Industry with Mayor John Gray leading the pack getting the 77.47% of his campaign donations from the corporate sector.

Part of the real concern about use of our tax monies is the secrecy involved.

Because of inadequate controls, politicians can spend their office budgets with impunity. They can use these for hosting their friends at the Legion, buying birthday gifts for their children, taking their friends for a big night on the town, or buying flowers for their spouse. While all of these are admirable expenditures, they are not admirable uses for your tax money or mine.

When John Gray spent $40,000 of your tax money on the Stephen Colbert Day (The Mayor’s birthday party), he refused to let even his fellow councilors know the cost and it was left to one of them to file a $100 freedom of information request to get the costs disclosed.

Even at the Federal Level, the 308 MP’s and 105 Senators are very secretive about their “office budgets”, an acronym, of course, for the personal expense use of our tax funds and have been resisting audits of that half billion dollars of “petty cash” by Federal spending watchdog, Sheila Fraser, for some time. Each MP and Senator burned up $1,210,653.75 on average for their expenses...amazing.

All parties are complicit in upholding the culture of hidden Ottawa receipts, one of the few stashes of taxpayer funds not yet subject to review and audit. They have their own Public Accounts committee of parliamentarians to do this, they say. Unlike the spending scandal by British parliamentarians that ended the careers of 30% of them in 2009, we have no castle moats to clean in Canada and our guys don’t pay prostitutes for their professional service…oh yeah!

Locally here, city politicians rave that their salaries are tied to salary increases won by unionized city staff. I fail to see how this justifies politician’s excessive salaries. Doesn’t this tend to allow for excessive wage increases for all city staff as the politicians realize that they will personally benefit from big staff increases?

And salaries are excessive! An inspection of Ontario’s “Sunshine List” (Public Sector Salary Disclosure List) shows over 100 city employees making over $100,000 annually.

An email I received, signed “Angry Taxpayer” asked me to explain how at least 12 Maintenance Supervisors in the Regional Works Department could be making over $100,000 per year and why a foreman on an asphalt crew made over $130,000 when this job in the private sector would pay less than half of that. You’ve have to admit there are no explanations except that things are running wildly out of hand…and you and I, Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer, are paying for this largesse….even while struggling to put bread on our own table!

Recently questions of mileage allowances have been in the press. One Toronto city manager who earns in excess of $170,000 claimed $17,483 for business use of his automobile in 2009, a Toronto city engineer claimed $29,000 in the last two years and the highest claiming Toronto politician, Norm Kelly, claimed $14,000 in the last two years. That’s only slightly higher than the $10,400 tax-free every one of our Oshawa politicians claimed over the last two years. But hey! Our politicians don’t deserve near as much as those Toronto guys because our guys don’t have to drive so far and we don’t have to cope with all that heavy city traffic.

Some Oshawa city employees are claiming over $800 weekly for using their own vehicle for city business. That’s more than many workers in this country get in salary and more than it would cost the city to rent a vehicle from Enterprise or one of those big rent-a-car places.

But who gives a damn about costs when you can just reach deeper into the pockets of those generous Oshawa taxpayers to fund all your extravagances.

And now we find out that Regional politicians from Ajax, Pickering, and Clarington are sitting on the board of Veridian Corporation and Pickering reps are reaping handsome stipends and expenses of $29325 (Dickerson), $27845 (McLean) and $15493 (Pickles) annually to oversee the operations of the former municipal electrical distribution companies they sold to Veridian. The two Ajax and the two Clarington reps are no doubt harvesting the same.

No wonder we’ve been hearing rumblings for years about Oshawa City Politicians wanting to sell Oshawa taxpayer owned Oshawa Power Utilities Corporation to Veridian….There’s big personal bucks sitting in those hills for the politicians to do this. Many of the City Politicians could add another $30,000 to their annual income by selling off OPUC in exchange for a job of sitting on the Veridian Board of Directors….Isn’t it great how politicians are always looking out for our interests?

Thanks for all this public service boys….don’t know what we’d ever do without ya!

Be sure to follow Bill’s radio broadcasts, “Eye on City Hall”,
every Monday, 6-9 pm EST, on http://www.ocentral.com/thewave/

Mayor John Gray inflames the MBA Rage…again!

“Eye on City Hall”
A column of Information, Analysis, Comment, and unfiltered opinion
Bill Longworth, City Hall Reporter
March 22, 2010

Mayor John Gray’s refusal at the March 8, 2010, City Council Meeting to allow further discussion on the MBA funding issue by calling a motion “out of order” to have city politicians reimburse city coffers $46,000 for their collective failure to stop Gray’s irresponsible and irrational MBA funding for Councillor April Cullen and his executive assistant, James Anderson, has once again ignited rage across the city and has been the subject of discussion in media coverage across the country.

John Gray obviously believes in the city motto, “Prepare to be amazed” and his “amazing” actions have made him and our city council the subject of national ridicule.

Canadians right across the country are certainly becoming amazed at the irresponsibility and the sense of entitlement of Gray and his self-serving council. He must feel so secure in his position that he doesn’t give a damn what he does to the public---even in the face of an upcoming election!

Council Members must feel equally secure in their positions to let this kind of bulls—t slide through with nary a whisper knowing that past history with the self-serving General Vote that they swung on the people lets them hide in the weeds of “name recognition” and shields them from electoral defeat.

Never before with Oshawa’s General Vote history prior to 1985 had any politician lost their seat through the general vote. But never before have we had such a politically incompetent mayor and council.

This ridicule focused on city council will certainly extend to city voters if they do not remove this Mayor and his band of incompetents, shysters, tricksters and free-loaders from control of our Civic public purse. We have had too much of their snorting at the pig trough at our expense!

The Toronto Star and Toronto Sun Oshawa MBA stories have been picked up by the national news agencies and published across the country.

Such widespread publication of this story documents the public interest in the extreme feelings of entitlement of this city council in using our tax monies for their own benefit rather than the benefit of the city.

There is such extreme national and international interest in this MBA story that a Google search using the words “Oshawa,” “Mayor,” and “MBA” will turn up 106,000 references as of the date of writing this column.

I was surprised to see an item in the “Leader Daily”, a free paper distributed at sky train locations for commuters into Vancouver where I am working as an Olympics/Paralympics Volunteer. Hundreds of thousands of Vancouver commuters all saw the same item that caught my eye—“Paid MBA not a free ride: political staffer,” which documented Mayor John Gray’s and his political sidekick, John Anderson’s, assertions that Anderson forfeited $36,000 of city pension contributions in exchange for his $23,000 MBA funding---a deal negotiated by Gray who thus took credit for saving the city $13,000.

Gray advanced this justification for funding the MBA tuitions at the Feb. 22, 2010 City Council Meeting

Gray’s gloating, however, proved to be an outright lie used in attempting to defuse the situation, a theory supported by Gray’s (and the city’s) refusal to make Anderson’s MBA funding agreement public in response to citizen “Freedom of Information” requests that have been lodged.

This refusal to release the document even questions the existence of any contract or agreement.

Gray’s statements were investigated by private citizens who discovered such agreements were an impossibility as Anderson didn’t qualify for any pension without giant time buybacks which did not require matching paybacks from the city.

When this information was publicized, Gray then said that his earlier statements were in “error.” I say Gray knew his words were an outright lie designed to mislead the public.

The outright “lie theory” is also supported by Gray’s use of the “lie strategy” in the past.

He claimed for public consumption on the televised council meeting in his preamble before final voting to adopt the general vote that city hall had no responsibility to communicate details of the plebiscite question to voters.

As I had just made a presentation pleading to council not to adopt the general vote, he said the communication responsibility was not the city’s but was the responsibility of citizens like me.

This was an outright lie as he would have known that “Third Party” citizen campaigns were against Ontario Elections Law which gives municipality’s unfettered ability and thus responsibility to fund such plebiscite information campaigns. You can view John Gray making this statement at http://www.motionbox.com/videos/4c9fdcb41510e6c3.

The other strategy used is secrecy and stonewalling, despite him gloating earlier on a transparency and accountability bylaw passed and signed by all councillors.

Gray not only refused to divulge the Anderson MBA contract, he says he negotiated, but also refused to disclose the $40,000 expenditure he personally approved for his personal birthday party dubbed the “Stephen Colbert Day.”

This information was not even available to our elected councillors until a $100 Freedom of Information Request was filed.

So much for the transparency and accountability policy the mayor personally wheeled out with great fanfare. It’s just pretty “Political Words” tarnished beyond recognition by his and council’s actions.

This whole issue leads to many unanswered questions about the agreement and about the integrity of Mayor John Gray and James Anderson.

Was this a verbal or a written agreement? If verbal only, what business acumen does this show about the Mayor? After all, this is a contract according to the Mayor that saved the city from paying $33,000 from Anderson’s pension. If the contract was written, dated, and witnessed, it must be made public. Failure to disclose the contract to the public will only lead to continued public speculation and anger.

Voters will rightly begin to speculate on the honesty of the mayor and whether the story about the pension payment savings to the city was a blatant lie “crafted” by Gray and Anderson to resolve the issue to public satisfaction.

Freedom of Information requests to disclose the Gray/Anderson MBA contract have so far been refused leading to speculation that:

a) There is no contract suggesting the tuition was an unconditional gift of taxpayer money.
b) The issue of foregoing pension plan paybacks for Anderson was never discussed and has only surfaced recently to appease public inquiries.
c) Was a city form used and the funding ceilings identified on the form superseded on the form or did the mayor draft up his own contract for the funding?
d) If there was a contract, was it properly drafted by the city legal department?
e) Where and how is the money identified in the city financial records?
f) At what point and in what way were the details of the MBA funding communicated to council?
g) Is there any record on council discussion on this matter after they learned the Mayor had personally gifted the funds?
h) What was the timeline in the approvals of both Anderson’s and Cullen’s tuitions?
i) What were the conditions of tuition payback when Anderson left his position if the Mayor was not re-elected?

You can undoubtedly devise many additional sensitive questions upon close examination.

The most important question though is, “Why did no politician SCREAM about this issue before it was made public by private citizens?”

But let us speculate that the whole idea of the pension payback was a lie perpetrated by Mayor John Gray and his executive assistant.

It would not be the first serious misinformation campaign perpetrated on the people by John Gray. His whole rationale for council’s failure to communicate the ward system plebiscite details to the public was a response to my criticism that the people had not been properly informed. What did Gray do in light of this criticism? He floated the giant lie, “The city had no responsibility---that was up to citizen’s themselves!”

This kind of statement demonstrates that Gray believes that the council need not communicate to the public. Nor should it be self policing---all is a public responsibility….Amazing!

As citizen Alan Slater wrote in a letter to the editor published in a local paper last week, “The MBA issue will not be over until Election Day. If Mayor John Gray has any supporters left, will one of them inform him that the affair is definitely not closed. It will not be closed until the coming election when voters are reminded of his arrogance and lack of business judgement, which has helped Oshawa to become one of the highest taxed municipalities in the country.

Anyone who votes for him or any of his colleagues can expect more of the same abuse of power and disconnection from the realities of life in these hard times.”

Be sure to follow Bill’s radio broadcasts, “Eye on City Hall”,
every Monday, 6-9 pm EST, on http://www.ocentral.com/thewave/