gullyfourmyle

That was well said charter.rights. The point about the dumps might seem like one of the minor points but it isn't. Nearly all dumps in Canada - and there are thousands upon thousands of them - leak poisons into the aquifers over which they sit. That means virtually all of the water resources we like to brag about are being contaminated at their sources. There is no political will to fix any of them. I mounted a federal petition to try and have the problem addressed. Our current Minister of the Environment sluffed it off. For those areas affected, drinking water is unobtainable in the midst of plenty unless it's trucked in. How weird is it to be a First Nation citizen and not have clean water? You only need to take a short drive down the 401 towards Kingston to see the huge sign the Iroquois put up about their water supply having been destroyed. I forget how many years they've been without fresh water but it's a long time. Without safe water, nothing lives. Hows that for genocide?

Don't get too excited Angus. We'll have you fitted up for a set of zone implants and before you know it you'll be on your way to Caledonia to help the Aboriginals man the barricades while you yell and scream in your head. Obviously there is a lot more to the situation than this discussion has touched on or it would have been over long ago. Any decision reached in Caledonia is going to set precedents across the country or at the very least, affect outcomes. There are lots of issues right across the country and some are in very sensitive areas. We have one here in Pickering. Caledonia is a very messy situation that's getting messier the longer it takes. There are lots of Aboriginal Groups right across the country and around the world waiting to see what happens. No one wants to make a mistake. But the Aboriginals in Caledonia cannot afford to stand down for those reasons. The entire situation has come to a head. The feds have two options: 1. They can leave the Caledonia situation alone and hope the media loses interest. 2. They can do their best to fix it once and for all. The feds appear to have opted for Door #1. If they have, they've misjudged their opponents this time. The Aboriginals have the internet too and that makes everything different. In the past, the Aboriginals were isolated groups with not much education that could be picked off. Now they are a large united group with their youth being better educated. They are spread right across the country with the constitutional might to cause a lot more trouble than they have so far. Think about this. The Caledonia problem festered right under everyone's noses for many decades without the European component really having a clue or giving a damn one way or the other. Why should they care? Think about what the Aboriginals are finally going to do as they now arrive late maybe but arrive in time with their agendas intact - again under everyone's noses and with constitutional backing and a lot of legal weight behind them. As critical as people may have been about how the OPP have handled the standoff, you have to understand, as Fantino must have been made to understand since he shoved his oar in, that the legal situation is very likely in the Aboriginals' favour and the OPP probably have no right to interfere - just as McGuinty had no right to interfere. Before the internet, the government could basically run roughshod over Aboriginal opposition and get away with it - and did countless times. Now it's not nearly so easy. Now, if a government or police official should try it and get caught crossing the line, nothing can save such an individual from personal civil prosecution under the Criminal Code. Being a civil servant of any sort will save no one in this situation since those involved are required to know the law and should know the law. Former Premier Mike Harris was extremely lucky to dodge jail time over the Dudley George incident. He would have taken that hit personally with absolutely no government protection. If the internet, You Tube, Face Book and a host of other applications had been up and running like they are now, Harris could be serving time by now. The Caledonia incident is waking up politicians to the fact that their forked tongues can get them into a heap of personal legal trouble that was never an issue before now. Digital cameras, cell phones and the internet combined are going to bring tough love to politics like never before. Angus, there are plenty of people who agree whole heartedly with your position. They have their reasons and those reasons might not have anything to do with right or wrong, ethical or not. Mostly not. They think possession is 9/10ths of the law and up until now, that's the way it's been. Most think Aboriginals are freeloaders. That is a callous notion born of ignorance, cultural selfishness and economic rapacious greed. That mindset is part of the problem the Aboriginals have to overcome. It's a huge task that will take generations to accomplish - if there are enough generations left to us. But they have to try. Part of that will come when the schools are forced to start teaching real post-European Aboriginal history. That I guarantee you Thermopyle, will make people squirm in their seats. All the governmental apologizing in the world amounts to nothing compared to driving home what really happened. The entire public should have to face it and own up to it. Just as the Germans were forced to do when they had to tour the concentration camps at the end of the Second World War. Nothing is left of our concentration camps as they were, but there are plenty of existing reserves that would make you sick. Only then can some real healing take place for Aboriginal people - and by that I'm not suggesting that would in any way make amends for the damage done. But at least it would make all non-Aboriginals sensitive and knowledgeable of why the Aboriginals are as they are and why they are doing what they are doing. All of us need to be on that same page so we can start some sort of fresh. The time is right for the Aboriginals to get some payback - justice in other words, and I'd be surprised if they didn't take advantage of that. They have to.

I agree with fellowtraveller. Software comes under the heading of intellectual property. All manufacturers protect their logos and other forms of intellectual property rigorously. There is no chance an automobile manufacturer is going to let 3rd parties play with code. If they did, there would be all sorts of variations out there and these codes directly affect performance levels of the vehicles. If the codes could be tampered with, emissions testing would soon be compromised. No government could tolerate that. Try replicating a Chrysler emblem on a hat you want to take to market. That little stunt would land you in court. But you can change what your car or truck looks like radically. You can make your Toyota look like a Ford if you want. But don't mess with the logos or the computer chips. It depends on what is protected and why. Who owns the vehicle or how old it is has no bearing on the intellectual property tied to the vehicle. That's why you can see all sorts of variations of Chevys, Fords, Chryslers, AMCs, Studebakers and Packards out there. But one thing you won't see is the logo tampered with on any of them. Fellowtraveller also said you don't own things, you own rights. Those rights determine how commodities such as land, vehicles and intellectual property are dealt with from a legal perspective. We are merely custodians of the physical effects until we sell it or otherwise dispose of it. That's why I made such a big deal about the street racing legislation. It is legislation that denies rights illegally and directly affects how our ability to own material things, earn a living and maintain our freedom. That law has a profound negative impact on your ability to live a free life whether you drive a vehicle or not. It is legislation that destabilizes all Ontario legislation. That is a big deal. You should go to that thread and read it if you haven't yet. Without your guaranteed rights, you have nothing worthwhile beyond your own life. You can't even depend on the quality of that life. What kind of life is that?

I read the Global Warming thread and was disappointed at how little seems to be understood about what is happening to Planet Earth. Our chance to fix what is wrong is quickly slipping away. Global Warming is most likely caused by human activity. But the planet has endured warming and cooling trends in the past. Life went on. But each time, there was a wave of extinctions that changed the dominant life forms. All of this happened so long ago that virtually no one can relate to those events that must have been gruesome in the extreme each time. The big difference between then and now is that we are alive and the next wave of extinction has started. As smart as people think they are, the outcome looks like being the same since collectively we are not smart enough to stop what we are doing that's causing the end of the age of mammals. The thing we are doing that's causing the life extinction process is burning fossil fuels. Burning is one thing. The emissions are another thing altogether. What's in the emissions are tiny molecules known as VOC's - Volatile Organic Compounds. These compounds are mostly deadly. A good many of them belong to the Benzene group of chemicals of which there are many thousands. They are all man-made. VOCs are emitted every time we burn crude oil or anything that was manufactured or derived from crude oil. When those chemicals enter the atmosphere, they become a component of smog. They also become part of the process that is transforming earth's atmosphere from oxygen based to solvent based. The surface water, both salt and fresh is being transformed as well. The transformation is called acidification. Acid is a life destroying substance. It causes the dissolution of molecular bonds and the molecules themselves. In short, what VOCs touch, they attempt to change into a corrosive puddle. No substance is exempt from the process long term - especially living tissue. The emissions we are fouling the atmosphere with initially go up into the air but eventually, like everything else, they eventually come down. That's gravity for you. When the emissions come down, they do so as an industrial strength coating composed of the same chemicals our most powerful pesticides are manufactured from. That's what comes out of jet engines, cars, trucks, ships, trains, motorcycles, scooters, lawnmowers, industrial machinery, furnaces and so on. There is no form of energy we use or make that is not contributing to our immanent extinction. When you or any other living breathing organism on earth inhales or ingests these chemicals, they do what I mentioned earlier - they do their best to dissolve you. Currently the chemical load is too small in most cases for you to notice unless you live in a heavily polluted area. Whether you notice or not, you are not exempt from damage. Asthma, Multiple Chemical Sensitivities, Agent Orange Syndrome and Gulf War Syndrome all have one thing in common - they are caused by the same chemicals - the VOC's that burn away respiratory tissue. Asthma is sort of an entry level of the condition. It is not an allergy. It is a chemical injury. Most people who have asthma don't stop to think that other life forms are suffering from the same conditions or that the other life forms may be exhibiting different symptoms. Frogs for instance literally die on the spot - scientists have described their symptoms as immunological disorders. Bees have immunological disorders as well. So do mayflies and countless other species. What causes immunological disorders is the destruction of immune systems. When a human or any other species inhales corrosives, first contact causes a cooling followed by a burning sensation if anything at all can be felt. It depends on the amount of damage. In human infants, there is an opening at the top of the bridge of the nose where the olefactory nerves travel from the lining of the inside of the nose through the tiny channels in the skull to the brain. Until the age of two years, the spaces between the olefactory nerves and the bony channels are open to the atmosphere. The membrane that protects the brain through most of our lives does not start to form until the age of two years. So human infants are very vulnerable to the corrosive effects of airborne chemicals. But in our quest to look outside the box, it pays to consider what spaces human babies and other life forms inhabit. Mostly they are close to the ground where the poisons are most highly concentrated. Now think about the height baby carriages are and and the height of automobile and truck tailpipes. Would you suck on a tailpipe? Probably not but that's what millions of mothers do to their children in cities every day. For some reason, Newspapers won't print that and TV and Radio won't touch it with a barge pole. I've tried. You would think people would be more compassionate. Dogs and cats suffer the same fate but to a certain extent, can take avoidance measures. Except in our heavily toxic, high emissions in-home environments that is. Until the twentieth century, brain cancers were relatively rare except in heavily industrialized areas. Now the planet's air has become a corrosive. Oxidization has always been a factor but with the added threat of literally millions of new man-made chemicals floating about in the air, the situation has become much worse. What I described there is happening to everything, not just human infants. The chemicals are settling on everything. All animals including us, eat the coated vegetable material. As the chemicals move up the food chain, each succeeding animal takes on what is known as a chemical body burden. They are chemical deposits in your organs including skin that accumulate over the years. Our body burdens are accumulating rapidly. Since these are corrosive chemicals, rest assured these chemicals aren't sitting there in you passing the time of day doing nothing. Since every breath you take is contaminated to some degree, as your body neutralizes the damage done by your resident chemicals, they are replaced by more chemicals because you are still inhaling and exhaling. Back in the early '70s, the oil companies were forced to remove lead from fuels. They replaced lead with benzene. There was no extensive research to determine what the long term effects were. Benzene and its relatives are so lethal there is no acceptable level for them in the atmosphere. They are so toxic they can't even be tested on living things to determine a level of acceptability. There is no safe level of these chemicals in air. Remember how tiny I said the molecules are? They are so tiny you don't have to inhale them. They are known as transdermals. That means they can migrate straight through your skin without difficulty. Because they have such easy access to our internal works, they have access to our genetic codes - the instruction manual that makes you yourself and the instruction manual that ensures that your offspring will look human instead of something from a horror movie. But as we continue to contaminate the planet, the horror movie scenario is becoming commonplace. Essentially, our oil dependence is destroying the integrity of life on earth and its ability to re-create itself Chemical Winter is the oil industry's version of a nuclear war. Only this war is already nearly over and hardly anyone knows it started. Since the seventies, cancer levels have skyrocketed. Scientists have been spending billions looking for answers. But guess what? It turns out the scientists, since they were nerds in school, never went to auto class and didn't become drag racers or street racers or paint automobiles. If they had, they'd have read the labels on the cans containing the chemicals commonly used by the automotive industry. They could have read the cause of environmentally sourced cancers on every tin of lacquer thinner and paint. But scientists and medical practitioners as a group are rarely exposed to these chemicals and so KNOW NOTHING ABOUT THEM. Same goes for biologists, meteorologists (weather - think global warming and climate change), zoologists and so on. The causes are right under their noses but for the most part they don't get it. Except for the ones I've worked with on the subject. They get it. So the message is starting to creep out there. It's a slow process slowed further by that twit covered in National Geographic. Stating his views doesn't make him a twit. What makes him a twit is failing to remove his blinkers and look at causes and effects outside his discipline and how they relate to one another. Specialization to a fault has made most scientists twits. If no one is looking at the big picture, they all see the obscure details and miss the blatantly obvious. That's what's happened with Chemical Winter. The nature of civilization is to cause individuals to specialize in specific fields. Individuals who see the big picture aren’t valued because they aren’t experts at anything. This situation tends to limit how much a given species can progress. If they specialize too soon, you have ants and other insects. A delay gives you mammals and a species divergence that continues until something like us happens. The we specialize and bingo – you have doctors who have lost touch with the world developing outside the walls of the hospitals and labs. Anyone of you probably has access to science nerds of one sort or another. You should ask them what they know about the potential for industrial strength lacquer thinners to extinguish life. Those that are into paint formulation and the like will tell you in gruesome detail what can happen to anyone exposed to high levels of the stuff. Most of them don't think about long term micro doses. The other sorts of scientists are mostly clueless. VOCs were allowed to be included as part of fuel formulation with the understanding that the solvents are neutralized by the environment within three days. What was never taken into account was the accumulation factor should the emissions exceed the environment's ability to neutralize the impacts within three days. At first the effects were not noticed. They weren't noticed by anyone until a biologist by the name of Karen Lips found newly discovered frogs going extinct right before her eyes: FROGS ARE US Frogs and people have a lot in common. Our mitochondria, the stuff that binds our cells together, is exactly the same. In fact every living thing on the planet has the same mitochondria. What that means to the average guy on the street without going into a long list of building blocks we share with our frog relatives, is that what affects frogs also affects us in much the same way. Essentially if something in the environment is killing them, you can rest assured we are at exactly the same risk, it may just take longer: The world's frogs, newts and toads are dying. They are being over-harvested for food, their homes are being destroyed, and most worryingly, entire species are disappearing for no apparent reason. That is the conclusion of more than 500 herpetologists around the world, reported in Science today. Stuart S., et al. Science, published online 10.1126/science.1103538 (2004). “Time and again, scientists have visited woods filled with frog song just 3 or 4 years earlier, only to find them frogless. Now, researchers have finally caught a killer in the act--a new fungus that has turned up in 120 frogs and toads of 12 species in Australia and seven species in Panama during mass die-offs in relatively pristine areas. Fourteen scientists from Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada will describe the fungus--from the phylum Chytridiomycota” - in the 21 July Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Fungus May Drive Frog Genocide, Jocelyn Kaiser, WILDLIFE BIOLOGY, 3 July 1998 "There is the canary in the coalmine argument," says Stuart. "Because of their sensitivity, amphibians are the first species we would expect to show adverse reactions to climate change and new emerging diseases." Amphibians face a bleak future, Emma Marris, [email protected], October, 14, 2004 In 1993, a then unknown biologist by the name of Karen Lips who became internationally famous when her research into new species of amphibians found in Panama was made public. Her research was in a hitherto unexplored mountainous region of Panama where she was discovering new species of amphibians virtually one after the other. It was like finding her own Galapagos Islands. It was a different story when she returned to continue her research in 1997: …imagine Karen's shock when she returned to her research site in western Panama and discovered dead and dying frogs everywhere: "I'd been going to Fortuna, Panama, since 1993. In 1997, I returned to find all these dead frogs. They looked fine, like they went to sleep and didn't wake up." Frogs are food to so many snakes and birds, a herpetologist could spend many seasons in some places without seeing a dead frog lying on the ground.” Kim Y. Masibay, Science World, March 11, 2002 What ties these events together is air. Nothing associated with planet earth permeates our environment as completely as air and air is a vehicle for the transportation of material that can mix or float along and become one with what we consider our atmosphere. Airplanes take great advantage of the density of air, lift and speed to fly. The waste products of the energy consumed to make this happen are exhaust emissions. If you remove the passenger and cargo component of the aviation experience and equate what an airplane does as a cordless paint-gun, you have in our aviation system, a most complete mechanism for spraying a life dissolving chemical wash over the entire globe. Frogs have three areas of their bodies that can aid in gas exchange: skin, lungs, and the thin membranes lining the mouth and pharynx. Frogs can breathe through their skin while they are in wet places. They can also exchange gases between their blood vessels and with the outer environment. Unlike us they have mucus glands in their external skin tissue, they keep the skin moist. We have those same mucous glands but they line our nose and respiratory tract rather than our outer skin. Sweat glands are evolved mucous glands for land-lubbers. Frog skin absorbs a lot of dissolved oxygen from the ambient atmosphere. The second respiratory surface is the thin membranes lining the mouth and pharynx. Our membranes exchange gases too, but not to the degree that those of frogs do. The lungs are third respiratory surface, thin, elastic and lightweight, they are organs that inflate and deflate rhythmically, while the frog is at rest. Adult frogs have poorly developed lungs, due to their mostly motionless existence as they wait patiently for the next unsuspecting bug. Now just imagine adding crude oil-derived solvents to the air the frogs must breathe. Solvents that turn their protective mucous to an acidic solution which then evaporates more quickly than pure water. You have a cooling and immobilizing effect that would tend to freeze the frog in place and strip it of its immune system (the mucous) at the same time. Since frogs live in environments that are thick with fungal spores, it is no stretch of the imagination to figure out what happens next is it? Fungal and parasitic attacks from varieties of viruses and bacteria we have never imagined existed, including viral cancer. Imagine a cancer you can catch like the common cold. It’s real. It’s in Cairns, in northeast Australia and it apparently hails from the air pollution capital of the world, southeast Asia. It is suspected of being a hitchhiker on a boat loaded with illegal Chinese immigrants. If a frog can acquire this disease, possibly from humans, it is no big thing to imagine it migrating back again is it? The point is this: cancer, in most cases, is a man-made injury, not a disease. Cancer cannot exist in undisturbed wilderness locations. It takes time for cancer to evolve in an organism. Cancer is a complex activity that starts at the sub-microbial scale and evolves forwards, gradually acquiring mass but not necessarily shape. In nature, an animal with an injury or disability is quickly identified and consumed by its natural predator. Generally that only fails to happen if the animal is a member of a protective society, but even so, they have shorter life spans. If the predator is absent due to man’s interference or other activity such as pollution, habitat loss, hunting to name but three, an animal can persist for longer. We are now at a point where predators have been reduced so severely in most eco-systems, that chemical impairment can evolve into cancer. That is serious because cancer interferes with DNA development and integrity. If those damaged genes are passed on, you have what doctors assume is a hereditary disease rather that a migratory injury. It makes a big difference which you call it because if it is a disease, you assume the logical approach is to combat it with drugs. If it is an injury, you simply eliminate the source of the injury and DNA will respond over generations accordingly. To fail to recognize the difference, you have the medical and scientific communities perpetuating injuries and in effect marginallizing the health of our entire species eventually. But that isn’t all. Animals don’t have cancer wards or sunglasses or sunblock. They don’t know to wash fruit before eating it and the carnivores don’t realize they can no longer consume the organ meat they get their minerals, vitamins and trace elements from because they are loaded with toxins. Animals that develop cancer advance it up the food chain through predators as well as diminishing the physiologic integrity of their species by procreating and spreading defective DNA around. Human beings are without a doubt, the most sickly organisms on earth because we have been able to prolong not only our own lives, but lives of our own predators – parasites in the form of cancer, worms and so on. By massive pollution, we have ensured that our own diseases now have a foothold at the other end of the food chain. We have cancer advancing towards us through fish, then frogs. Without much fanfare, it has snuck into the reptile population as well. Certainly, there will be plenty of biologists who will no doubt dispute this and say that cancer appears in wildlife naturally. But my research into the nature of cancer leads me to conclude that cancer is not a “normally” occurring event without some sort of unusual chemical disturbance such as a forest fire or volcano eruption or man made pollution. In short, wild animals don’t develop genetic cancer the way people do, or they didn’t before the onslaught of industrialization. And onslaught it is. There is no disputing the numbers. In 1995, 1 in 5 U.S. residents could expect to die of cancer . Ten years later it is commonly accepted that that number is 1 in 3. To be sure, most human cancers are not considered to be caused by environmental factors. Or they weren’t until the link between breast cancer and air pollution was accepted. When I first started Health Restoration research that revealed for me in 1980 , the profound direct connection between constipation and cancer, it quickly became apparent to me that in twenty years (2000) we would have a cancer epidemic. In 1990, I said we would have a diabetes epidemic in fifteen years. That is happening now (2005). In another ten years I know we will have a Candidiasis (2015) epidemic. My first prediction was met with laughter and skepticism. My second was met with indifference. No one is laughing now and when I say Candidiasis, rather than laugh, people tend to take me seriously. My point is this: when you understand what the factors are and the results of combining factors, you don’t need to be an astute mathematician to anticipate a likely outcome. They are too obvious. Newsflash! As I was typing this, I received an update from the BBC: Toxic chemicals that poisoned your great-grandparents may also damage your health, US research suggests. “Research on rats indicates man-made environmental poisons may alter genetic activity, giving rise to diseases that pass down at least four generations… …The researchers found the damage was not caused by alterations in the DNA code, but changes in the way the genes work… …These epigenetic changes, as they are known, are caused by small chemicals that become attached to the DNA, modifying its activity.” Poisons may pass down generations, BBC World News, 3 June, 2005, 10:20 GMT 11:20 UK The report goes on to say that the rats were exposed to very high levels of toxins that may be artificially high, but then, a lot of people were and still are exposed to high levels of toxins in all industrial societies. June 4, 2006 A few months after I wrote about the link between solvents in air and frog mortality, number of scientists “ found compelling links between frog extinctions and changes in temperature. They believe the perfect conditions are being created for the spread of a fungus that is deadly to amphibians.” “A chytrid fungus (Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis) has been suggested as the prime suspect” "We have found evidence that global warming is causing widespread amphibian extinction by triggering outbreaks of disease," said lead author Dr Alan Pounds. "Night-time warming and day-time cooling means that you are producing conditions more favourable for the fungus," the scientist from the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve in Costa Rica told the BBC News website. In my view, this is nonsense. Species take millions of years to evolve and planet earth has had any number of spot warming and cooling trends within that time. If a multitude of frogs died off every time earth went through a warming and cooling phase, we’d have no frogs left. I don’t believe only one eco-niche within an eco-system could fail without other obvious evidence within the system. There would have to be more than just frogs dying or their prey species would become super abundant in a very short period of time. Their main predators would be going hungry. That would have to have had discernable impact. It doesn’t seem to have happened. Most of earth’s species evolve to accommodate a range of naturally occurring temperatures. There are exceptions such as the Devil’s Hole Pup Fish in Nevada. But that is a far more secluded environment – a rock cave with a small shelf with its own constant microclimate that literally can’t change. Other closed ecosystems in caves have been found. But the frogs were not living in anything like a closed system. Certainly there was cloud cover, but temperatures did rise and fall over time. My view is that the fungus was an opportunist. The fungus could not penetrate the frogs’s mucus layer regardless of temperature. But the fungus could certainly penetrate if the mucus layer had been compromised by air-borne solvents. No doubt, the fungus spores are a common and pervasive component of the air in those tropical forests. And equally beyond doubt, the frogs would have evolved to resist them in any naturally occurring circumstances. Solvents are far from naturally occurring circumstances. In my view, so far, nothing else makes sense. I later discovered that in the late 1980s, aviation fuels had been reformulated from straight kerosene to new high octane super fuels to increase mileage performance. The added chemicals were benzenes. Since that time, aircraft have been spraying the planet with high strength pesticides. How could that be? When fuel is burned, there is no such thing as a complete burn. Raw fuel is exhausted along with spent, burned carbon dioxide and many other transformed but still lethal chemicals. In effect, aircraft are gigantic pesticide applicators. All life on earth is its target. We humans have a good chance of prolonging our stay beyond that of other species because we have doctors and for the most part, wildlife does not. So understanding that you could expect that people populations would be exploding and other species populations would be on the wane. In that assessment you would be right. The most tolerant species; those that have adapted to live in close proximity to human populations have increased their numbers – like raccoons and leopards. Those that cannot tolerate human interference are losing ground or have lost it altogether. Unfortunately, we have only an incomplete understanding of why we need those other species. But Einstein said it best when he observed that when the bees go extinct, humanity will follow in four years. The bees are in the process of going extinct right now worldwide.

Don't worry Angus, there is plenty to back up what I said. Hitler was trivial not in what he did, but by comparison with what was done to aboriginal cultures by Europeans world wide. There is a difference. Hitler did not wipe out most of the populations of an entire continent - not even close. You might think that concentration camps were a Hitler thing. But if you read about life on reservations here in North America, you find that concentration camps were a big deal here before they were a big deal in Europe. Reservations didn't have gas chambers, but they did have starvation, disease, social amputations, sexual abuse and psychological destruction. The pictures of concentration camps in Europe could have been taken all over North America as Aboriginals and Inuit literally starved to death after the buffalo and caribou were decimated almost to the point of extinction. The caribou didn't get quite as close to the brink, but considering how many were needed to support Inuit life in the Arctic, it didn't matter much one way or the other, the people who really needed them for food starved to death searching for food. Literally walking until they dropped in their tracks dead after eating bones, their clothing and even the nearly inedible lichens that grew on the rocks. The genocide in the Eastern GTA is well documented but not on line. I've worked with quite a number of prestigious scientists on it. The information is in my book LAND GRAB IN NORTH PICKERING. In 2005, every Liberal Cabinet Minister received a signed for copy. That was to set a known by date so that should I ever be able to publicize what was going on, people would be able to prosecute government officials personally who could have averted what will become a widespread chemical disaster and didn't when they had the chance. In choosing not to follow the points set down in my book, the government committed a series of criminal code offences against the residents of the Eastern GTA besides genocide. That included fraud and breach of public trust. The frog and insect extinctions are related to the same chemicals that the Eastern GTA is going to be saturated with. What kills frogs and insects - crude oil emissions kills people as well. Technology is developed enough now so that it can be tracked. It's quite an interesting story. Very complex. That's why I wrote the book. It isn't something you can explain in a few sentences. Not one person of the literally thousands of people I made aware of the problem successfully disputed that information including politicians, scientists and doctors. When I ran for Mayor of Pickering, and started telling the public what was going on (and the genocide was just one aspect of it) the media blacked out my campaign right across the GTA. But I still managed over 5,000 votes on a shoestring budget. Those weren't kooks voting for me. Those were people who understood the chemical ramifications of living downwind from new, enormous sources of air pollution that didn't have to be upwind from us. Unfortunately due to circumstances I just didn't have the time or the money to get a really good professionally run campaign going. I didn't decide to run until it became clear the pro-development incumbent would get in unopposed and consider that an endorsement to develop huge chunks of Pickering's important natural and agricultural areas. At one point I considered running for the Provincial Conservatives in the last provincial election. Before they would accept me as a candidate, they wanted to ensure that what I was saying was not something that would get the party in legal trouble or was something they could not back up in terms of a legal challenge. So I gave the book to a party official and it was vetted by them - especially by a current chemical engineer working in the oil and gas sector. They approved the book without reservations. Eventually, I decided not to run as a Conservative because I didn't like their nomination process. The melting ice caps are definitely part of Global Warming and that is a direct result of the European Industrialization process. What is going on in China is their response to western urbanization. With industrialization comes Chemical Winter and the acidification of the oceans. This is also science that is irrefutable. If you don't think acidification of the oceans is a problem, my suggestion is that you take a step back and do a little reading on the importance of oceans to oxygen production and thus life on earth. When I referred to the British in particular sending their children off to boarding school I was referring to a well-known well documented practice. It has been going on for centuries. It is very disruptive to families and keeps families who practice this sort of social engineering from the closeness enjoyed by societies that don't do that sort of thing. There was an article in the Toronto Star a week or so ago about how disruptive a process the British habit of sending boys in particular off to boarding school is. The practice is well known to cause social problems and deep personal problems and now they're starting to realize just how bad it is. It's a big part of the European image - how callous they can be when social brutality is called for. It takes a personality whose capability for empathy has been amputated. When you have nations run on a lack of empathy you have what happened at the end of the Middle Ages - a race for resources and domination. But farming out family members to boarding schools and apprenticeships is one of the reasons why European civilizations were able to spread their influence around the world. For the first time in history, families were so loosely knit that losing family members for long periods while they travelled to distant places was socially tolerable without causing the destruction of the societies from which they came. Close knit social entities do the opposite. They either migrate en mass or as family units from place to place or stay where they are in known territories. Certainly there were exceptions or humanity would never have populated the entire planet. But even so, most human movement were in the form of migrations with maybe advance scouts. They rarely sent expeditions. When they did, they were historical. Like the Mongols. But after that most major influences came from Europe, not the other way around. And if you study the history of degenerative disease, you'll find that for the most part, disease originated and spread from densely populated areas along trade routes. In short, disease followed the trail of human filth not the reverse. Aboriginal societies were especially vulnerable to these diseases because they had never lived in filth. When they had worn out the ability of a locale to sustain them, they moved on. Since they weren't eating anything unnatural, their excrement did not create the environmental disasters ours does today. As well, there wasn't enough of it to overcome the ability of the environment to neutralize it and make use of it. Their living conditions were exceptionally clean by comparison with Europeans. That is not to say they didn't have problems. But theirs were very simple by comparison with the problems Europeans brought. As soon as Aboriginals were forced to live on reservations in one place and the ability to move away from their own excrement, that brought on another strata of enforced depravity and despair. They had never lived like that. Essentially, they were forced to live the forerunner of factory farms. It ain't good for cows, pigs or chickens and it ain't good for people. But the Canadian government made the aboriginals live that way. They had no choice by then because so much of the wildlife had been shot, there wasn't enough left for the Aboriginals to live on anyway. If this doesn't sound like genocide to you Angus, maybe you need to look up the definition of the word. I spent a lot of time agonizing over the use of the word and its legal definition before I used the term in my book. There was no doubt I'd be challenged on it by political heavyweights and I was. The bottom line was that my assessment of the situation here in the Eastern GTA is right on the money. When I had the McGuinty government investigated by the RCMP over it, they took my information seriously - and then stopped several months later. They gave back the information and refused to go further without explanation. They did not say to stop what I was saying the McGuinty government was doing or that what I was saying was wrong or that the RCMP disagreed with my statements. They are caught between my findings and the government and we remain at a stalemate until somehow, enough people find out what's going on and the media finally gets the nerve to print it or air it. Angus I don't make any statements without ensuring I know backwards and forwards what I'm talking about. I make outrageous claims at times but not until I've found plenty of evidence to confirm my position. But keep poking away. Good User Name too Thermopyle. I hope you look a little better in real life than he did in the books. You have quite the IQ to measure up to as well.

From my view having studied the Aboriginal situation not in school but in newspapers and books on the subject and from Aboriginals I’ve known, the native peoples encountered by Europeans were systematically denied rights and lands everywhere on earth. North American indigenous peoples got off relatively lightly because the conditions here were, especially in northern areas so harsh and unfamiliar that the Europeans didn't dare exterminate them or there'd have been no fur trade and exploration would have taken much longer. In the process relationships were forged but also disease was spread. The native food supply was decimated and those events caused a form of genocide on a scale that to that point had likely never occurred before in history. Entire ancient races and tribes were wiped out mostly by starvation and smallpox. By now you would think everyone would know this. In Canada, until the mid-thirties of the twentieth century it was still legal to hunt and kill indigenous people with impunity. The social damage done to these people has been profound and so deep; nothing can begin to repay what was done. What Hitler did in the Second World War was trivial to what was done to indigenous cultures all over the world by Europeans. The rage for the murders and indignities that were perpetrated on native Americans and other indigenous cultures around the world are well stifled compared to what would be the repercussions should anything similar happen to Europeans. Compared to Europeans, the indigenous peoples have been models of restraint. Christians as a group for sheer devastation, we have no equal when it comes to the wars, genocides, rape, pillage, torture and other atrocities that are still occurring today including right here in civilized Ontario. Anyone who thinks the Caledonia incident is a big deal needs to be forced to sit and study what has been done to native peoples here in Canada and Ontario. You need to sit and think about what is going on right now in the Arctic. That is another form of genocide - the melting of the polar ice cap. Arctic species going extinct is to them not a matter of a bunch of wild animals disappearing from view. It is their food sources they've evolved with. They can't eat our food and thrive. Besides that, at some point, our civilization is going to die back. When it does, we will leave the remnants of Arctic peoples without a source of food should they survive our acquaintance. Does that sound fair to anyone? What part of having your relatives wiped out, raped and otherwise brutalized do people not get? What part of real estate thuggery do people not get? Of course we can always look at it in terms of survival of the fittest. We superior Europeans simply move in and annihilate everything and everyone in sight. With our ability to thrive outside nature's sustainable level for a while, we have forced practically every living thing to accommodate us. In the process we have destroyed most natural resources on earth and are in the process of bringing about a wave of extinction humanity may not survive other than in some sort of pre-agricultural form (most developed people can’t farm). Knowing the value of land and resources due to overpopulation in Europe, we came here to sack the land first and steal the land second. You can't call the land deals made with the aboriginals any sort of fair. It was two different cultures with completely different values and understandings. If we ran families the way Europeans treated the planet during the last thousand years or so, no family would have more than a single surviving child. The oldest would always kill the youngest and be rewarded for it. But at the same time we have religion. Christianity - as two faced a concept as there could ever be. On the one hand teaching grace and forgiveness and on the other operating by genocide and extinction. Some of the religious leaders actually believed the bilge about grace and forgiveness and it was that carbuncle on an otherwise ruthless religion that allowed any indigenous cultures to survive at all. That any survived is more a testament to how tough human beings can be than any sort of tribute to the milk of human kindness that might have been generated. Proof of that trait in our nature is the Caledonia issue. A further proof is going to come to light in the eastern half of the Greater Toronto Area where a form of genocide is being put into place by the McGuinty government right now. This is a form of genocide so pervasive that not one single person will avoid the coming chemical devastation of McGuinty's Smart Growth Program. Every single person in the eastern GTA will suffer chemical injuries and a large number are going to die as a result of the government's intentional disregard for public safety. The object is increased tax revenue and the chemical injuries and deaths of one half of the downwind GTA is acceptable collateral damage. Money is the driving force of this genocide just as it was in all the others. Money is the ultimate justification and everything is cool right up until you are in the way of the anticipated cash flow. I wrote a book on the subject: LAND GRAB IN NORTH PICKERING back in 2005. It detailed how the genocide in the eastern GTA is going to happen. It has started. The thing about genocide is that usually it's done in a sneaky fashion. The people being exterminated generally don't understand they are being wiped out until there aren't enough of them left to fight back. The Caledonia situation is very unusual because there are enough aboriginals left who care and are willing to put their lives on the line. As nasty as they may seem to those living in the area, and I have no doubt there have been some scary times, these people have legitimate beefs and they deserve to be heard - properly heard I mean. Aboriginal peoples, it has been proven, are people just like any other people. The differences are mostly in the customs. But customs aside, we all think, feel and live with similar needs, ambitions, and desires. You know yourself it can take a lot to get most people riled up to the point they will raise their voice at another person. Aboriginals it is well known are much more reticent and withdrawn than Europeans. It takes a lot to get them riled up to the point where they will collectively take a stand or force an issue. All of their known history shows this. That is not to make out that they were collectively saints. Their ways are profoundly different than ours so we are not in a position to judge. But one thing you can be sure of. For the Caledonia situation to have gotten this far bespeaks a camel and one extra piece of straw that tipped the balance. The situation is not going to be resolved without compassion, understanding, honesty, skill and an integrity no Canadian government has so far had the courage to exhibit. For that to happen, the negotiations have to be conducted by men and women who possess those qualities. Right now the Ontario government is virtually devoid of people with those qualities. The Federal government has the same problem - no credibility with either side. If the government can't find someone capable of dealing honestly with the Aboriginal Claims how then can the situation be resolved to anyone's satisfaction? Until that someone is found who both sides trust to do the right thing, and then abide by the outcome, there will be no permanent resolution and no happy outcome for either side in Caledonia. This is not something that can be dealt with in a matter of hours or days. This is a huge problem that will have a domino effect right across Canada. So whatever happens; has to be done right the first time or even more trouble is on the horizon from coast to coast. There is another aspect to consider. Most Canadians have no contact with Aboriginals. For many, the only ones they see are drunks in city cores. Those drunks didn't just happen. They were made by Europeans. Each and every one of them represents a major social tragedy that tears families apart. Aboriginal families are much closer knit than European families, especially those of British descent who often farm their children off to boarding schools. So there was often little or no comprehension of the devastation alcohol had on Aboriginals until it was way too late. That was just as much of the genocide as smallpox and the simple tactic of starving people to death in the wilderness. Those of you who haven't read Farley Mowat's accounts of the devastation white people brought to the Arctic should take the time to read it. Anyone who can read that work and still blather on about Caledonia has lost some essential humanity if they ever had it. Certainly the circumstances today are different. But the circumstances today are built right on top of history - events these people’s forebears lived through. Most likely the none-native people in Caledonia had nothing to do with those past events. They are caught in the crossfire. They are today's victims of the past abuses just as the Aboriginals are. If you relocate your family to the side of a volcano and no one tells you it's a live volcano that could blow at any time, do you make war on the volcano? Or do you go after the people who allowed you to invest in the land knowing that they were taking your money in the hopes the volcano wouldn't blow? If you bought on the side of the volcano knowing it was a volcano; when it does blow, do you blame the volcano or yourself? In the Caledonia situation, the Aboriginals are the volcano. Their issues have transcended generations. Just because nothing happened in the past was no guarantee of nothing happening in the future. And as nasty as the Aboriginals have been, they are nowhere near as nasty as they have a right to be given half a chance or as you would be yourself. The fact that the Aboriginals and the townspeople of Caledonia co-existed for so long in apparent peace and harmony should tell you an important thing – how little those townspeople really knew their neighbours or what motivated them. Europeans have very short memories because we can consign our memories to books and forget them. We don’t have to carry the mental burden from generation to generation. Consequently relatively few people know beyond two or three generations who their forefathers were, let alone their histories. Aboriginals without written words have been forced to keep their histories alive by retelling the stories over and over again. Aboriginals know their ancestors as people as family kept alive with constant repetition that bind their families together very tightly. We don’t. Their memories of the past have been found to be very accurate. Especially when you consider they had no watches or calendars. They have family histories that our culture can only envy – those whose families weren’t totally blown apart by government intervention – another form of genocide. So any of you who are feeling rage or some other form of injustice over the Caledonia issue, you might just want to take a long hard look in the mirror and ask yourself just how much of the Aboriginal point of view you understand. Without that thorough understanding, you have no call to be voicing an opinion one way or another.

When Mad Cow disease struck, fingers were pointed in every direction to place blame except the right one. At the time of the first outbreak, the Federal Agriculture Minister was Lyle Vanclief. "The first case, in 1993, involved a single cow in a herd near Red Deer, Alta. It turned out that animal had been shipped from Britain. The infected cow and its herdmates were destroyed and the disease contained... ...The breeder cow, they noted, was effectively removed from the food chain on Jan. 31, after a provincial inspector at an Alberta abattoir noticed it looked underweight and deemed it to be suffering from pneumonia." Link: http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/ind...s=M1ARTM0012479 It took 3 1/2 months to identify that that cow had the disease but it escalated from there. When the cat food situation hit and cats started dying all over North America, the blame settled on the manufacturers and they were found liable. With Mad Cow, the blame settled on the farmers who were using federally approved feed. Farmers went bankrupt over feed they had no control over. I talked to my MP Mark Holland about it in 2005. I asked him to get to the bottom of the Mad Cow situation. I wanted to know why the farmers were being victimized when the fault was in the feed. Mark tried to talk to the Federal Agriculture Minister, Andy Mitchell on my behalf. As soon as Mitchell understood what Mark wanted to talk about, that was it. A virtual steel door came down between the two MPs. Further research determined that the disease originated in the cattle feed. Cows being fed offal - cow guts in other words. Herbivores had been transformed into cannibals. By 2006 it was well known that "Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as Mad-Cow Disease (MCD), is a fatal, neurodegenerative disease in cattle, that causes a spongy degeneration in the brain and spinal cord and also causes red eyes... ...A British inquiry into BSE concluded that the epidemic was caused by cattle, who are normally herbivores, being fed the remains of other cattle in the form of meat and bone meal (MBM), which caused the infectious agent to spread." Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongi..._encephalopathy My question to the minister was "Why are the farmers being penalized for Mad Cow Disease" and not the Cattle feed producers? The bottom line turned out to be that Agriculture Canada was deeply involved in the formulation of the tainted cattle feed from an approval basis at the very least. The food could not have been marketed in Canada without Ministry complicity at some level. So my question remains: Why did the farmers take the economic hit for a government and industrial screw up that any sane person involved in the feed formulation process should have seen coming? That question is still unanswered.

Danny Williams has another problem. You might have heard about the 400 women who were misdiagnosed and told they didn't have breast cancer. Then they started dying. Last I heard over 100 had died and there is a federal enquiry going on to figure out what went wrong. At the outset the presiding judge stated that the purpose of the enquiry was not to find criminal culpability but rather to find what went wrong and ensure that it didn't happen again. It didn't take long to find out that one of the reasons the enquiry isn't looking for criminal wrong doing is that information about what was going wrong was given to the Nfld Premier two and a half years ago. It sat on his desk for an undetermined (to my knowledge) length of time and he did nothing. It is a federal crime to know that something of that nature is going on and not taking steps to deal with it. It's a case of should have known or did know. Either way, he appears to be criminally liable in the case along with quite a number of others. Over six months ago, I asked a Provincial Health Minister who is also a litigation lawyer what would happen if after the enquiry was over, I pressed criminal charges against the Nfld Premier. He had responded twice previously to other communications with me but not to that one. I haven't begun to investigate that case yet but if I get time I will. If I find evidence of criminal wrong-doing I'll go forward and press the charges. The viability of the charges rest with the perception of public good. In this case, the Premier's career might be considered to be worth more than the lives of the four hundred abused women. Or it might be that the Crown might feel that no useful purpose would be served even if he were found guilty. The challenge is to overcome those views in the face of a potentially highly biased judiciary. Regardless, the details that would come out should I decide to investigate would probably be difficult to ignore since I'd make sure every elected federal and provincial official got a copy of my findings. There is no shortage of crimes being perpetrated right under our noses by government officials. The key is to be familiar enough with the legislation to understand when a crime has been committed. Having uncovered a potential crime, there remains the effort and considerable luck needed to bring it to the point where it can be prosecuted. The way to prosecute these things is to dump it on the police force with jurisdiction in that area. The first thing that'll happen will be the police will say they cannot prosecute for whatever reason. At that point, your communications with the police have to be well documented and added to your research records. You go through a series of denials and each one is an obstruction of justice. At some point, when you have enough evidence, you can either go public or start doing what I do and e-mail the information to every public official that matters to ensure that the police don't get away with continued obstructions. I'm at that point with a case right now and will be doing the publicizing of the case in short order unless I hear from the police that they are going to act on information I supplied rather than "act appropriately" which is what their lawyer said. By that, the response could easily mean the police intend to do nothing. About three months or more have elapsed since the lawyer responded to my queries. I've been waiting until the Ontario Legislature resumes before I act. Before I do, I'll give the lawyer one last chance.

Not only is there no reporting duty, they don't show up on the DOT statistics. Where they do show up is in the wrecking yards - it's an excellent way to get a good lightly used drive train for a custom hotrod with modern emissions controls for peanuts. In terms of getting hit by a cop car, I had a narrow escape a few years ago. I avoided the accident that if it happened would have killed the officer. Then he tried to charge me with a whole slew of infractions after I saved his life. Luckily, there were other officers present that he couldn't bring onside since the street racing legislation didn't exist yet, nor the on site training. If it had, I'd have lost my car for saving the twit's life. Matthew Power's death as a result of a street racing incident takes this entire class of accident to the federal level where it is dealt with as a Criminal Code offence. That is as it should be in terms of dealing with the offender. The province has no say in the matter. Bear in mind also that despite the hype about the speed, the accident could have still happened at a much lower speed. There were all sorts of aspects of this case that made it a criminal offence. Ontario's street racing law was no deterrent to the offenders and in that respect has essentially failed. You don't stop a social problem with a traffic law anymore than you treat a broken left leg by putting a cast on the right arm. There are lots of reasons why street races occur but so far I haven't seen a single action taken by the Ontario government to use anything like a constructive win/win solution to solve the problem. The bottom line remains - the government wants the money. How do you suppose the OPP aircraft was paid for? In one weekend? Can you see the government walking away from a cash cow like that? Certainly no one in the government is using that language but when you read between the lines, that's part of what is driving the excessive and illegal legislation. Strict legislation that delivers a harsh sentence without solving the problem is junk legislation. The street racing legislation was a knee jerk reaction to public opinion and understandably so. However, knee jerk reactions are always vulnerable to being as bad or worse than the offence they were meant to stop. The street racing legislation is so full of mistakes it's unbelievable. That's why so many people are being pled down or being found innocent. Judges are charged with upholding the law. But if the law is flawed, they have no choice but to find the person guilty of a lesser more applicable charge or being tossed altogether. Judges are people too. They don't want to set abusers of any sort free. But if you want convictions, you have to write the laws in such a way that the convictions are inevitable within the framework of Canadian Law. The street racing law is so poorly written it's a wonder anyone is convicted. It's so bad it looks like it was written by a first year law student without a driver's license. How tight can you imagine a law like that could be? So before anyone starts asking for stiffer sentences, you might take a look at the legislation yourself and be prepared to be disgusted at the lousy effort your tax dollars funded. Then you need to look at the Ministry of Transport's charts for accident statistics. When you're done, your head will be spinning. That's because so much of it exists in a confusing format with a lot of the information being totally irrelevant to the legal system that is trying to make sense out of it. A big part of the problem is that the people who are assembling the statistics have no idea what the people who need the information want. That apparently is because no one has ever told them exactly what information is valuable and what isn't. There are no historic numbers specifically for street racing of any sort in any of the charts. The OPP must have researched their files for the numbers they gave the public. However, what they gave the public says that over the last eight years varies from 34 deaths to 39 deaths and everything in between. But just a few weeks ago, Fantino said that 82 lives had been saved as a result of the street racing legislation. Huh? Up until 2006, only approximately four death a year could be attributed to street racing. What happened? Our rights were denied on the strength of those charts that tell you that empty cars are responsible for twice as much carnage on our roads as street racing. Anyone want to write up a law harsh enough to stop all those evil empty cars from killing people?

What part of the law itself being illegal are you people not getting? This is not about whether or not you should get this fine or that fine or be executed for doing a certain speed. This is about the government having used an illegal process to deny a civil right. It's about the process whereby the very fabric of Canadian society is threatened. It's what this forum is all about. As for the speed itself, in this context, the speed factor is totally irrelevant except in terms of the word racing being applied to the act of travelling at or above a certain speed. That certain speed could be any speed. OPP Commissioner Fantino is on record as having said he wishes now the law was set at 30 kph above the limit. In miles per hour, that translates to 18 miles per hour. Do you still want to see someone executed for doing that? How many drivers on Canadian highways can honestly say they've never driven 30 kph over the limit. No one I know could say that. In fact there are many places in Canada where, if you didn't keep your foot on the brake, you'd be 30 kph over after traveling down a steep hill. You don't need to be in the Rockies for that to happen. Who is going to execute someone for that? If that were to happen, virtually every driver in Ontario would have been executed. Then you have to consider the numbers that were used to convince the Ontario Legislature they should endorse Bill 203, the street racing bill. The numbers used were intentionally taken out of context and embedded in new contexts. There was no lie involved but what was done was deceptive and misleading. If the Ontario Legislature had understood the enormity of the deception, the bill could never have passed. Essentially the government was tricked into breaking a law to enact a law that does not meet the standard criteria that would have legally enabled them to deny a right. Having passed the law based on a number of false pretexts, the government set about the process of ensuring that the illegal law was complied with. Part of what has been done is the steering of the prosecutors who by law are not supposed to be tampered with. But I have evidence and names that suggests the opposite. The other aspect of the law that people need to comprehend is the latitude for police abuse this law presents. The abuse is already happening and it's serious stuff. The very people who are victims are those who think people who are travelling too fast should be executed. They are stunned when they are caught speeding or something called stunt driving. They are visiting lawyers and paralegals in droves. The street racers are not the drivers being caught doing over the 50 kph limit. The street racers are being unjustly targeted and discriminated against. I witnessed an example of it last weekend on the 401 where of a line of four cars going to Mosport, all travelling the same speed, the two cars that were cars dealer prepped for that day's racing at Mosport were pulled over and the cars towed. The two normal rice racers were not dealt with at all. I stopped and gave a copy of my book 'ABUSE OF POWER - seizure and extortion by an organized gang the Ontario Government?' to help their friends defend themselves in court where the possibility of a fair trial can be fairly remote due to police 'testilying'. As I mentioned in the last post, stunt driving can be anything including changing lanes while forgetting to signal. There are plenty of people who don't signal lane changes. The Ontario Traffic Act does not require anyone to signal a lane change. You have to signal a turn but not a lane change. There is no language for it in Ontario law. But now, if a cop sees you doing it, you lose your car, your license and thousands of dollars. This is not described in the the new legislation either. If you are a low income earner, losing your car for a week could spell the loss of your job. That as well as the new financial burden could cost you your living accommodation at some point. Not being able to get to school for an entire week could cost a school year if this happened at a critical point in the school year. Any university student who commutes knows how that is. So for not signalling your lane changes, and despite the fact you are not breaking any law, you could suffer a life altering introduction to an unfriendly cop who needs to meet a quota. Now imagine yourself as a single low income mother or father with a number of children to feed and cloth (by law) and this happens. What do you do? You can't afford a lawyer and you can't afford not to have a lawyer. You may be found innocent, but that does not get your job back or the thousands of dollars spent defending yourself that you now owe. To make matters worse, since the police continually harp on speed which at best is no more than 7% of the problem on Ontario roads, they are not focusing on what the public and the Insurance Bureau of Canada sees as a bigger issue - that of in vehicle distractions. In vehicle distractions are likely the real cause of accidents. By ignoring this aspect of accidents and diverting attention to speed, the police are ensuring that accident numbers don't fall. In short they are guaranteeing their own futures as traffic cops. The speed aspect is important in one sense. The faster you're going when you hit something or something hits you, the more likely there is to be loss of life. The police aren't trying to prevent collisions. They are trying to prevent fatalities without disturbing the accident rate. There is at least as much if not more work involved in a non-fatal as a fatal accident but there is less on site blood and guts. If the actual accident rate plummeted due to people not being distracted in their cars, there would be much, much less police work to do assuming that speed was then declared irrelevant. Speed by itself does not kill anyone. Dangerous driving at high speed, weaving in and out of traffic while street racing, that does kill people. In terms of fatalities, it amounts to three tenths of one percent of the total accident problem. It accounts for four fatalities on average annually. Empty cars - that is cars with no people in them kill twice as many people annually than this form of driving does. Debris and wild animals each kill more people a year on Ontario roads than street racing does. The number of non-fatal accidents in each case far exceeds that of accidents caused by street racing. The point is this. Millions of people fought and died for our right to remain innocent until proven guilty. It is a concept that is a cornerstone of democracy. You don't throw an important right like that out the window based on false pretenses. And you don't allow all of your current legislation and your future legislation be laid open to the kind of abuse just visited on the Ontario Highway Traffic Act. These are very simple concepts. I hope the issues are now clear.

The aim of Ontario's street racing legislation was to stop street racing on public road ways. The method was initially to use the Federal Civil Remedies Act to seize cars on the spot and extort money in the form of towing, impound and its associated admin fees as well as license suspension and renewal. Since the Civil Remedies Act is a federal act, the province could not change the wording of the act before using it. The wording of the act does not lend itself to the seizing of cars and extorting of money. In fact, since the Civil Remedies Act is based on the probability or likelihood of bodily harm caused by the offending vehicle and driver, the Act did not cover this eventuality. Essentially, this put the province of Ontario in the position of having stolen cars and extorting money since there was no way any of the cars were likely to cause bodily harm to anyone. Since the province broke a federal law each time they used the Civil Remedies Act, this put the province in a precarious position. Two wrongs don't make a right. As such, the province is liable for any damages caused to the individuals apprehended for street racing offences under this act. The province obviously realized that it was skating on thin ice and that sooner or later, someone was going to call its bluff. So it created its own legislation. It was introduced as a bill penned by Frank Klees, MPP for Newmarket, Ontario. When he wrote it he probably was not intending to deny guaranteed civil rights and freedoms. He probably didn't intend to destabilize all of Ontario's other legislation at the same time. But that is precisely what happened. On September 30th, 2007, Ontario's new street racing legislation came into effect. However, in order to bring it into being, the government changed the legal definition of the word racing as understood in the Canadian Legal Dictionary. However they did so before it could be published as such in the dictionary. The new definition of racing according to the Ontario Government has nothing to do with actual racing as a form of competition as the concept has been understood since pre-biblical times. Now, according to the Province of Ontario, the word racing also means going fast - to wit, 50 kilometers faster than the posted speed limit in Ontario. This is such a departure of meaning and use that the average driver fails to appreciate or distinguish what has happened to his or her rights in the process. When a person is stopped for travelling 50 kph over the posted speed limit there is automatic loss of vehicle, license and a substantial amount of non-recoverable money. This is a substantial penalty whose significance is that the driver is guilty on the spot without access to a fair trial. All that can happen in a trial from this point is ensure the penalties don't get unbearably worse. However the legal fees for most people almost guarantee that the financial hardship will escalate regardless of the verdict. The police regard it as a 100% conviction rate. Stunt driving caries the same penalties but the definition of the word stunt is so vague that nearly any action behind the wheel of a motor vehicle could be construed as a stunt - including doing nothing. The law gives the police the power of cop, judge, jury and financial executioner all at the roadside, all unsupervised by anyone. The potential for abuse is huge and is already a factor. However there is virtually no process by which a victimized and innocent member of the public can defend against such a malicious act. In fact a member of the public can be repeatedly victimized without recourse of any sort. I personally know of two such cases as of today's date. But what makes the law itself illegal is the fact that the Province failed to abide by the notwithstanding clause, Section 33.1 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Apparently they failed to understand the fine print and failed to create the required Act by which they could explain why there was no alternative (in the face of a number of untried alternatives) to denying the rights and freedoms of 100% of the drivers of Ontario over a problem that works out to be three tenths of one percent of the total accident problem in Ontario. In doing so, the Province of Ontario presented its case to the people of Ontario via the media using misleading numbers and various other exaggerations. Essentially their case was fraudulent. According to the Ontario Provincial Police, speed is the dominant factor in fatal traffic accidents. According to the Ministry of Transportation, speed is only involved in seven percent at most of fatal traffic accidents and even then, not generally the cause of the accidents. According to the Canadian Insurance Bureau of Canada, the most significant cause of motor vehicle accidents is driver distraction of one sort or another. According to their numbers, 80% of accidents, including fatal accidents are a result of driver distraction from a variety of causes. The Insurance Bureau of Canada has a huge financial stake in their being right. The Ontario Provincial Police also has a huge financial stake in the police position being right as does the province. The Insurance interest is due to the huge financial payouts each and every accidents costs insurers. They are extremely motivated to lower the accident rate. The police interest is due to a number of conflicting interests: The police personnel on the scene who have to deal with the carnage are traumatized over and over again. They want the carnage to end. They perceive the evidence on site and that is often highly circumstantial. Speeding convictions and other traffic violations are an easy way of tracking officer performance and ensuring cash flow. They justify policing levels. The province makes enormous amounts of money derived from moving violations - particularly speeding. If everyone stopped speeding, this would cause a budget deficit. There is no real incentive to curb speeding. Fishing holes are not placed to prevent accidents of any sort, they are strictly a cash grab. In car distractions are very difficult to prove. Cell phones are a major cause of vehicular accidents yet the government has yet to limit or end in vehicle use of cellphones and other communication devices. The police themselves are involved in a high number of single vehicle accidents. The public is never informed of how many. But police deaths from single vehicle accidents cost huge sums of public money including loss of caseloads. Quite a number of those deaths are likely needless and possibly due to diet. By diet, I mean the sugar spikes and depressions associated with coffee and doughnut consumption. The police are vehemently opposed to any public discussion along those lines. At the moment, the public in general thinks that street racers are the ones being apprehended. A very few are. But for the most part, the people who are being apprehended are the average citizens. They are people who have no clue that the street racing law was set up to nail them. The stunt driving aspect is even worse since absolutely no one understands that at all.