The trial of a Cambie Street merchant’s civil claim for compensatory damages resulting from Canada Line construction disruption has been adjourned to March 16, 2008. The BC Supreme Court trial, which was to have started in November, was rescheduled by Mr. Justice Pitfield.

The Plaintiff, Susan Heyes Inc. dba Hazel & Co., alleges that the Defendants Canada, BC, Vancouver, the GVTA, Canada Line Rapid Transit Co. Ltd. and InTransit BC is liable for misrepresentations, private nuisance and negligence. None of these allegations have been proven against the Defendants, who have admmitted no liability.

“I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.”
Albert Camus, in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, 1960

By now most Canadians are familiar with the story of Maher Arar, the Canadian citizen whose return to his Ottawa home was interrupted by authorities who stopped him at JFK Airport and sent him to Syria, where he was tortured and jailed for over a year. Fewer are aware of the three other Canadians who suffered similar abuses around the same time. In Dark Days: The Story of Four Canadians Tortured in the Name of Fighting Terror, author Kerry Pither reveals how Canadian agents were complicit in the detention and torture of Ahmad El Maati, Abdullah Almaki and Muayyed Nureddin. These three men, like Maher Arar, were guilty only of being Muslim in the tense aftermath of the tragic events of September 11, 2001. They attracted the attention of overzealous, blundering RCMP and CSIS agents who thought their heritage and frequent travel made them suspicious extremists. For that, these four unfortunate men paid a heavy price indeed.

Writing in a compelling, fast-paced dramatic style, Pither exposes the ineptitude, if not the outright malevolence, of other Canadian officials who not only turned a blind eye to the plight of the four Canadians as they rotted in jail, but actually relayed interrogation questions to their Syrian torturers. The Syrians apparently felt they were doing Canada’s bidding and the Canadian consular officials who were in a position to disabuse them of that notion, and return the four men to their Canadian homes, utterly neglected to help. Pither names names, and her portrayal of Franco Pillarella, former Canadian ambassador to Syria, and his subordinate Leo Martel, is less than flattering. The reader cannot help but be angered by the obtuse ignorance of these men and their complete failure to discharge their primary duty, which was to safeguard the interests of Canadian citizens abroad.

Pither also documents the despicable leaking of false information calculated to demean the reputations of the four men and to cast doubt on their innocence. Every Canadian should read this book, for as Camus said later in the same essay quoted above, “it is at least worth knowing that when expressed forcefully truth wins out over falsehood”.

The two week long coroner’s inquest into the death of Kyle Tait, 16, concluded yesterday with the jury determining that his shooting was a homicide, not an accident. Kyle Tait was one of five teenagers aged between 14 and 18 who were in a vehicle that was pursued into Burnaby by all ten New Westminster police officers (in seven police cruisers) on duty on Tuesday, August 23, 2005. The pursuit ended in a collision which damaged six vehicles in a residential neighborhood. The jury heard evidence from at least four civilian witnesses that the teens’ vehicle was stalled and motionless when Cst. Todd Sweet fired three bullets into it, wounding the eighteen year old driver and killing Kyle instantly. No drugs, alcohol or weapons were found in the vehicle, which later turned out to have been stolen.

As it happened, Cst. Sweet was under criminal investigation at the time of the shooting as a result of kicking another car theft suspect in the head two months earlier while the suspect, Anthony White, was lying defenceless in handcuffs on the ground. The “cowardly attack” was witnessed by several other police officers, who were reportedly sickened by the assault. They reported it to their supervisors, who took no action. Apparently frustrated, they then wrote an anonymous letter dated July 2, 2005 to the Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner in which they described the brutal kicking incident and reportedly said, “[Sweet] has been getting away with this for two long and its time that something was done about it.” This was apparently a reference to formal complaints lodged against Sweet by ten civilians between 1999 and 2005, all of which were investigated by Cst. Sweet’s New Westminster colleagues and ultimately dismissed as “unsubstantiated”.

After Cst. Sweet killed Kyle Tait, he declined an opportunity to explain what had happened. Instead, he went to Smart & Williams, the law firm of choice for police officers in trouble, which submitted brief written statements on their client’s behalf over the next couple of months. The statements purported to justify the shooting by asserting facts that were contradicted by other witnesses and evidence.

Cst. Sweet, the President of the New Westminster Police Association since 2000, was charged in February, 2007 with assault causing bodily harm for the attack on White and later convicted. He remains on duty.

DNC, Thursday