06.07.2013 04:25 PM

140 characters on this email “scandal”

If you start criminally investigating every pol who deletes email, you’d better build a lot more jails. They’re gonna fill up fast. #onpoli

17 Comments

  1. Iris Mclean says:

    Are all telephone conversations supposed to be recorded and preserved as well?

  2. Pat says:

    I’m glad you agree Dalton’s a crook.

  3. Pat O'Malley says:

    Sir, Happy Friday. I’d love to see you take up this file:

    Lord of the Flies

    The Harperites have introduced the Respect for Communities Act: “Our Government believes that creating a location for sanctioned use of drugs obtained from illicit sources has the potential for great harm in a community,” said Minister Aglukkaq.

    The backstory to this is the Conservative Party’s clearly obsessional desire to shut down Vancouver’s Insite facility. In a nutshell, a “supervised injection site” is a specialized community health resource designed to address the problems of people who are in most cases are mentally ill and addicted to drugs and in many cases also suffer from serious physical ailments including HIV/aides, hepatitis C, cancers and whatnot – this is truly extreme medicine on the frontlines and in the same league as Doctor’s Without Borders. The goal is to reduce the further spread of communicable diseases such as HIV, to prevent overdoses and infections, and to hopefully provide a point of entry to stabilizing medical services such as psychiatric and addiction counseling. The goal is to drag this terrible problem out of the Dickensian shadows and into a rational, scientific, and compassionate space to move forward.

    The Harperite perspective is then really puzzling. First off, it’s hypocritical in the extreme. I live right near 15 Windsor Road – a house that has been known for years by us as the “crackhouse,” crack shack,” or more recently, “city hall.” Seems to me, if Harper really is against the creation of locations for the use of drugs from illicit sources, he should not publically endorse and hang out at barbeques with people known to have traded illicit drugs, consumed illicit drugs, and made party houses to consume even more illicit drugs, far and wide across the GTA – for decades. What is little Insite compared to the Ford franchise of illicit drug distribution and consumption?

    Secondly, the Harperite position of “just say no” is an impossibility under the laissezfaireist ideology of the Conservative Party. That is, the only time the supply of foreign drugs (i.e. cocaine and heroin) ever dried up on this continent was during World War 2 because every port was being closely guarded to prevent sabotage. Unless our current economic system was massively overhauled to reduce foreign trade and/or increase the searching/scanning of foreign products entering North America, drugs will flow into this country and a certain percentage of the population will abuse them – especially the mentally ill, often under the tutelage of drug traders. Of course, trade dampening measures of this nature will never happen under this government or presumably any foreseeable government – a growing global trade network is a given.

    The Respect for Communities Act is just that – a cynical, hypocritical, double spoken a-c-t. Hell, these people can’t even manage their own lives, get their own drug issues under control. They have no business imposing their false morality on our lives. Therefore, harm reduction strategies must stay in place unless of course, like the Fords or Harpers, you just don’t care if people are dropping like flies.

    • Tim says:

      Yes. And how about some respect for the Supreme Court of Canada? None whatsoever from this PM, Stephen Harper MA, who has never had a real job in the private sector. We have another Joe Clark on our hands here, except one who has many axes to grind.

    • You DO realize, don`t you, that they have to steal $800.00 per DAY from their neighbors and adjacent businesses to get the heroin to take in to the “safe” injection sites.

      Also, it is still a full time job keeping the alleys free of the syringes they drop there when they are too lazy to go to the site.

      Still want one next door to your family???

      • Rick Rossenberg says:

        Stephen Harper thanks you for your brusque commentary, Lindsay.

        Some points to consider: given the nature of addiction, addicts are going to get money for their fix regardless of facilities – especially as governments have gutted social programs including detox beds; $800 is a bit of a high estimate and an oversimplification – heroin is cheap and relatively pure these days – a hundred bucks, even less, can get the job done – the majority of addicts fund their addiction by selling yet more drugs or prostitution (the expanding vicious cycle); and the more people go to controlled environments, the less used syringes will be left lying around in public areas – containment, it’s just about containment. Is it so difficult to grasp?

        In terms of locale, have you actually ever walked down the street Insite is on (*) – it is literally a ghetto – you folks with your cozy Ikea nooks and night terrors can rest easy – ironically though, rather it than a Ford style crack shack where people are getting attacked with pipes or mysteriously ending up dead.

        *http://maps.google.ca/?ll=49.281369,-123.100723&spn=0.000481,0.001912&t=m&z=19&layer=c&cbll=49.281369,-123.101235&panoid=tpImgAcB2x3tb_6HRMmytw&cbp=11,347.91,,0,0

      • Kaspar Juul says:

        Hey Elizabeth. Where are you getting those numbers? $800 a day? That’s just ludicrous. That’s probably enough junk to kill three people. As a resident of the east side of vancouver I can say as a firsthand witness that things have improved, businesses and people are returning

        Maybe you should see for yourself before buying into hysterical rhetoric

  4. Lance says:

    Why does it necessarily have to mean jail?

  5. John Mraz says:

    Ummm. I’m all for infrastructure projects. Like the Hoover Dam. Or the Sphinx. Or the new NSA headquarters. Anything that makes an impression. Oh, and I have kept every email I’ve ever sent or received. Mine that, you monkey-fuckers. (I learned that term from Wajid.) Whoops. I meant authoritarian crypto-fascist capitalist apologists. Am I bad. Because, for fate’s sake, most of them are from you. Off to bed. jm

  6. patrick says:

    You say that like it’s a bad thing. Really, better than filling them with pot smokers. And then if we could do something about that blight filed under lawyers………..

  7. Glen says:

    You’re certainly loyal Warren, I’ll give you that!

  8. Ian Howard says:

    There needs to be serious penalties for destroying government information. If you were stupid enough to commit politically damaging material to emails, it is likely you were stupid enough to get siting and cancellation wrong. The Mcguinty government behaved with a sense of entitlement that allowed the actual job of governing the province to become secondary to political considerations. Clearly it is time for the ex Premier to do everyone a favor and leave the legislature in disgrace for what is at best staggering incompetence. Did they really believe that winning a by election in Kitchener could delete their total abject failures in governing the province.

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