I earlier blogged about my concern that BC Place’s new roof, built at a cost of over half a billion dollars of public money, was leaking just before the Grey Cup game.  Now I am hearing that its managers are so concerned that the new roof cannot handle a snowfall that they are frantically pumping hot air and steam into the stadium building in the hopes that the snow expected Monday will melt before it accumulates and causes the roof to collapse.  Apparently the expensive new roof wasn’t engineered to accept the load generated by a snowfall and, unlike the old roof, it lacks a built-in heating system that can be switched on to melt the snow as it falls.  I guess we will soon see if these band-aid measures work.

On December 14, 2011, we made oral submissions in support of an application, on behalf of the the 25 families of missing and murdered  women we represent, to have additional witnesses appear at the hearings.  The Commission directed that we make submissions in writing and the hearing adjourned for the day at 11:37 a.m.  The transcript of the morning’s proceedings is here.

On December 23, 2011, we delivered our written submissions and are awaiting a ruling.  The witnesses we are seeking to add to the witness list includes civilians like informants Bill Hiscox, Ross Caldwell and Lynn Ellingsen, who told the police as early as July 1998 that Robert William Pickton was responsible for the disappearances and deaths of the women, Pickton’s brother David, who lived on the property where the women’s remains and DNA was found, Bev Hyacinthe, a long time Pickton family friend who worked in the RCMP’s Coquitlam detachment.  It includes police officers like RCMP Cst. Ted vanOverbeek, a key member of “Project Evenhanded” who received information about Pickton’s complicity a years before he was apprehended, and RCMP Cst. Nathan Wells, who executed the search warrant on February 5, 2002 that led to Pickton’s arrest and subsequent conviction of six of the murders.  There are also a couple of senior officials on the list, then Attorney General Ujjal Dosanjh and current RCMP Commissioner Robert Paulson, who worked on the missing women investigations while a sergeant in British Columbia.

The Commission is currently hearing the testimony of Supt. Robert Williams from Alberta, the second of three police “armchair quarterbacks” who weren’t involved in the investigations, but merely reviewed them later.  Next week, Peel Deputy Police Chief Jennifer Evans is scheduled to testify.

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The Missing Women Commission of Inquiry was established by Attorney General Mike de Jong on September 29, 2010 and its terms of reference oblige it to inquire into the Crown’s January 27, 1998 decision to stay serious criminal charges against Pickton and the conduct of the police missing women investigations prior to February 5, 2002.  It was directed to submit its report by December 31, 2011.  The Commission commenced evidentiary hearings on October 11, 2011 and was subsequently granted a deadline extension to June 30, 2012.  The Commission has not yet called any police or Crown witnesses who were involved in the matters under review.

After hearing twelve days of testimony from Vancouver Police Department spokesman Deputy Chief Constable Doug Lepard, the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry resumes after a holiday break with the evidence of an RCMP spokesman, RCMP Superintendent Robert Williams.  Like Lepard, Williams was uninvolved in the investigations themselves, but conducted an internal review of the handling of the case.

There is no word yet on when the first police investigator or Crown prosecutor will be called as a witness.

Billy Bragg penned those words over twenty years ago in “The Marching Song of the Covert Battalions”.  Seven years later, at the APEC’97 meetings in Vancouver, the RCMP were busy arresting and pepper-spraying students for no apparent reason.  The students were upset that the University of British Columbia was hosting President Suharto of Indonesia, among others, and were conducting peaceful protests when their rights were abused.  This is a recent story by Christopher Guly of The Lawyers Weekly respecting the aftermath of the police crackdown at the G20  event in Toronto last year.  Don’t they ever learn?

By Christopher Guly
December 23 2011 issue

Most of the criminal cases emerging from last year’s G20 summit in Toronto have been resolved, but several remain unsettled, including one that a lawyer vows will “embarrass” the Ontario government.

“I think they’re stupid to go ahead with it,” Toronto criminal defence lawyer Howard Morton says of the impending trial against a deaf man charged with assaulting a police officer and resisting arrest. In November, 11 of 17 people accused of conspiracy in orchestrating the riots had their charges withdrawn as part of a plea deal. Six entered guilty pleas to lesser charges of counselling mischief; two of those also pleaded guilty to counselling to obstruct police.

Morton represented Joanna Adamiak, who was among those who had their charges dropped. He also serves as counsel to a man still facing charges arising from the 2010 G20 protests — ​a case Morton believes is one of the most egregious examples of Charter rights violations to have emerged from the summit. Emomotimi Azorbo faces two charges of assaulting a police officer and one charge of resisting arrest. His trial is scheduled to run from Feb. 6 to 10, 2012.

Azorbo was arrested on the eve of the summit on June 25, 2010. Morton describes the accused as an “apolitical” man who was with a friend and neighbour, Saron Gebresellassi, as they crossed the street in search of water when police began yelling at him. Since Azorbo cannot hear or speak, he couldn’t understand what they were saying to him.

“The woman he was with kept yelling to police: ‘He doesn’t hear, he doesn’t hear,’” explains Morton who, as a member of the Law Union of Ontario, agreed to act pro bono on G20-related cases. “There was a bit of resistance when police handcuffed him because he didn’t know what was happening.”

Azorbo was taken to the Eastern Avenue detention centre, where Morton arranged to have him meet with another lawyer and Gebresellassi, who could have provided interpretation using American Sign Language (ASL). Instead, a female Toronto Police officer, who knows ASL, served as his interpreter. “A lawyer is not going to give meaningful advice with a police officer doing the interpreting,” says Morton, who served as Ontario’s police watchdog while heading the Special Investigations Unit from 1992 to 1995.

Azorbo was granted $1,000 bail  and has already made two court appearances. On the first occasion in July, 2010, two court-ordered interpreters (one using ASL, the other signing for Azorbo because he’s not fluent in ASL) failed to show up. Justice Kofi Barnes said that, in the absence of the interpreters, he couldn’t proceed with the case under s. 24.2 of the Charter and set another court date.

The following month, Azorbo appeared before Justice Salvatore Merenda, this time with interpreters present. “The judge looked at the Crown and said: ‘I’m amazed you’re going ahead with this,’” recalls Morton, who said the prosecuting lawyer asked for a week to talk with his “superiors” about whether or not to proceed on humanitarian grounds. When the court reconvened, the Crown decided to proceed with its case against Azorbo, much to Justice Merenda’s surprise, Morton says.

“This province brags about accessibility in the justice system for people with disabilities. But it’s really quite horrible, particularly for somebody who doesn’t even understand why he’s there.”

Morton says he plans to use the Charter to “embarrass” the government when Azorbo’s case is heard next year. “If the Office of the Attorney General doesn’t want to be on the front page of the [Toronto] Star about how my client can obstruct police when he doesn’t even know what they’re yelling at him and they don’t allow him an interpreter, who was only a [few] feet away from him when he was arrested, it should drop the case against him.”

Morton is equally appalled by the treatment of Adamiak and the other alleged G20 mayhem conspirators who at one point were under house arrest and were banned from using cellphones.

“I’ve had clients charged with manslaughter that had less severe bail conditions,” he said, adding that only two of the original 20 people charged with conspiracy had criminal records for obstructing police at demonstrations similar to the one during last year’s G20.

“The laying of the charges and strict bail conditions was an attempt to try and justify turning downtown Toronto into an armed camp during the G20. Characterizing a group of 20 and 30-somethings as part of a major conspiracy at the G20 was “overblown” by police and the Crown, says Toronto lawyer Peter Rosenthal, who represented two of the activists — ​Montrealer Jaggi Singh, who pleaded guilty in April to counselling mischief and Patrick Cadorette, who was among the 11 who had their charges dropped in November.

“An extraordinary amount of money was spent on security, and two OPP officers spent over a year infiltrating groups planning protests — ​but they came up with very little considering all that and very few people were convicted,” says Rosenthal.

We were directed to make oral submissions today to the Commissioner concerning our desire to seek the addition of witnesses to the Commission’s abbreviated witness list.  Lawyers for other participants had made similar requests, but it appears that their overtures were summarily acceded to and we were the only counsel required to explain why we felt that other people probably had material evidence to offer to assist the Commission in its mandate.  We did not get very far.

As we endeavoured to explain why Bill Hiscox should be called as a witness, the morning’s hearing disintegrated.  Hiscox was repeatedly referred to in VPD Deputy Chief LePard’s internal review report and his name has been mentioned no fewer than 212 times in LePard’s oral testimony so far.  (LePard is still on the stand and is scheduled to appear for his twelfth day tomorrow).

Hiscox, as those following this matter may be aware, was the man who came forward in July of 1998, telephoning Wayne Leng and Crimestoppers to report that a pig farmer in Port Coquitlam named Willy Pickton was probably responsible for Sarah deVries’ disappearance as well as the disappearance and murders of the other missing Vancouver women, that he was a “sicko” and that he had slashed the throat of a Vancouver woman the year before.  He spent months in contact with VPD Det. Cst. Lori Shenher but was unable, despite all of his efforts, to get police to stop Pickton’s murderous spree.

Of course, after Pickton was serendipitously arrested in February of 2002, it turned out that everything that Hiscox had told police nearly four years earlier had been true.  Pickton was convicted of six murders in 2007 and, although 20 more first degree murder charges against him were stayed by the Crown, he is suspected of being responsible for as many as 49 murders.  Many of them were committed after Hiscox went to police with his information.

Here’s the Vancouver Observer’s take on today’s proceedings.

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This public inquiry was established on September 27, 2010.  We have yet to hear testimony from a police officer who was involved in the investigations.