Monday, December 1, 2008

Dan Tetrault Lied

Dan Tetrault lied. A few months ago, a Downtown Eastside resident asked Carnegie Assistant Director Dan Tetrault and Security Co-ordinator Skip Everall if she would face retaliation if she made her story public by telling it to bloggers. Hers was yet another story of civil liberties abuses under Carnegie Security boss Skip Everall, Director Ethel Whitty, and Assistant Director Dan Tetrault.

Like other Carnegie members, this woman knew how Carnegie member William Simpson had been treated when suspected of chatting with bloggers. On two occasions, he was chased across the gallery on the third floor of Carnegie into the stairwell by Board member, Bob Sarti, who repeatedly yelled, "Tattletale Queen of the Carnegie!" This happened twice. Then Simpson was banned from Carnegie entirely under pretenses that involved fraud. If she was going to be subjected to this type of backlash, she wanted to know in advance.

Everall resisted giving the woman assurances that she would not face retaliation. Tetrault was reluctant at first but when she pressed him on it, he told her, "No", she would not face retaliation.

Guess what the woman is now experiencing? Retaliation. She says the retaliation began shortly after her story was published on the Downtown Eastside Enquirer.

Under the Whitty administration, staff, volunteers, Board members, and a number of regular users of Carnegie have been told not to speak to her. One longtime friend told the woman that she had been warned twice by two different people not to talk to her as anything said "will end up on the blog." The two friends still talk, but trust has been eroded.

The woman has been chased into the stairwell at Carnegie and yelled at -- sound familiar? -- by a guy who writes plays, according to witnesses who were having dinner at Carnegie this month. Witnesses say the playwright, whom they identify as one of Whitty's "pets", lives outside the Downtown Eastside but is paid to write plays in which he provides a 'voice' for Downtown Eastsiders. Like Whitty, he apparently has little tolerance for Downtown Eastsiders providing their own 'voice' by speaking to bloggers. According to witnesses, this playwright chased the woman into the stairwell and yelled "Blogger! Blogger! Blogger!" after her as she climbed the stairs.

I asked the woman to corroborate witnesses' account when I saw her at Quest food store last week. She remembers the incident and she remembers that the playwright seemed "wound up" But she couldn't make out what he was saying, recalling only that, "He was shouting one word over and over. It could have been 'blogger....I was almost at the top of the stairs before I stopped to see who he was yelling at." There was nobody else on the stairs or in the stairwell at the time, but she didn't know what was going on so she continued up the stairs.

The woman feels most harassed, she told me at Quest on Saturday, by the brazen breaches of confidentiality involved in the "leaks" from the Whitty regime that she was the focus of a "security" report. When you're banned from an area of Carnegie for alleged misconduct, the ban is supposed to be confidential, she explained. Only staff with access to the Carnegie Security log book and computer database are supposed to know about it. (It hasn't been bloggers who have breached confidentiality, as we did not publish this latest victim's name to avoid extending the defamation she had already been subjected to by Whitty, Tetrault, and Everall.) Come to think of it, the Carnegie Security log book and data base would be covered under BC's confidentiality legislation.

Whitty is blatantly classist in her breaches of confidentiality. She vigorously upholds the right to confidentiality of staff accused of misconduct, but she allows the names of low income people barred for alleged misconduct to be spread far and wide. This woman estimates that 50 people have now been told of her banning and that she is somebody to be wary of as she talks to bloggers. This information spread to povertarians as far away as the Learning Exchange in Chinatown. (More will be written on Whitty's breach of confidentiality as we collect more information on it.)

The woman says that Whitty has been breaching her confidentiality from late 2006 to the present, approaching one of her male neighbors on two occasions to discuss her, fish for information, ask him leading questions, and encourage him to "turn me in for things I didn't do." All of this was done on regular City work hours.

"Incitement of hatred" is what an advocate she spoke to calls this.




11 comments:

Dag said...

If one were to ask a person known to be dishonest if he is going to be honest, the conundrum should be fairly clear beforehand. On the bright side,it reminds me of Epimenides of Knossos, circa 600 B.C., quoted here from the Paul's Epistle to Titus, 1:12: "One of Crete's own prophets has said it: 'Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons'. He has surely told the truth."

Most people will likely recall it as: "All Cretans are liars. I am a Cretan; therefore I am a liar."

The point is that we all know that the Carnegie ruling class are liars, and if they claim they'll tell the truth we can know a priori that they are lying because they are liars. If they say they won't tell the truth, we can't be sure if they're lying or not in this instance; thus we shouldn't believe them regardless.

Carnegie Centre is one small branch of the Corporation of the City of Vancouver. It's part of a corporation, not different from an oil company or any other corporation. You'd have to be pretty determined to think a corporation will treat you better than its own bureaucrats. Why would they? How could they?

reliable sources said...

"You'd have to be pretty determined to think a corporation will treat you better than its own bureaucrats. Why would they? How could they?"

You're right.

But because Carnegie creates a veneer of being a "family" and part of "community", people are taken aback when Whitty and Tetrault reveal their true allegiances. (Clague used to put posters up referring to the "Carnegie family".)

..........
ANOTHER LIE
I was reminded this morning that Tetrault actually lied twice in the case discussed in the post. Tetrault told this woman that he wasn't "familiar" with her case. (Staff taped that conversation so that fact can be corroborated.) Yet she knew that he was familiar with it as she had seen Skip Everall brief him. When she had previously met with Everall to discuss her case, she recalls that at the end of the meeting Everall telephoned upstairs to Whitty and Tetrault, then darted up to the third floor and met with the two of them. The woman walked upstairs at the same time as Everall. She says Everall stood talking to Tetrault and Whitty for some time; a witness saw them too. Tetrault's claim that his is not "familiar" with this case is just not credible.

Maybe Tetrault would be more familiar with this woman's case and those of the hordes of other people stripped of civil liberties over the last two decades, if he had not been focused on getting familiar with his subordinate at Carnegie, Rika Uto.

Nobody would have cared about the fact that these two staff persons had entered a sexual relationship if Tetrault hadn't conveniently banned her husband from the building. Tetrault has been complicit in literally hundreds of bannings which have stories of unfairness attached to them.

Tetrault was one of the interrogators during the last witch hunt for bloggers and he was complicit during the alleged use of banning to deter sexual harassment complaints as far back as the Clague administration.

There is one good sign though. According to columnist Allan Garr, there is a move at City Hall to dump City Manager Judy Rogers. He says she's created a "toxic" environment, a culture of "dread", at City Hall -- the same sort of culture that has been encouraged under her oversight at Carnegie.

Dag said...

The practical thing to do is organise the willing to demonstrate on the street corner at the Carnegie building, the willing holding placards with intelligible slogans explaining clearly the nature of the problem of abuse of authority at Carnegie and beyond. One needs leaflets to hand out to passers-by so they have a clear idea of what the point of the demonstration is and-- how their tax dollars are being wasted.

One must send out press releases to the mainstream media so they cover the event and get the truth out. Then there is some hope of the people refusing to tolerate this further. But to rely on people at Carnegie to stem this flow of abuse is hopeless. It needs city-wide support for an effective service, which Ethanol and company are not providing, even though the city's tax-payers are pouring money into the place. The majority of the city's residents likely have no idea how things work at Carnegie, and they likely assume things are as they are because the patrons of Carnegie are out of control lunatics selling drugs on the corner. With that public impression, Ethanol could very likely get away with murder, or at the very least, in the creation of dead bodies by tossing people into the elements to freeze to death or to die of pneumonia and so on.

It requires some effort on the part of those involved as patrons, if they can manage it, which is the one thing Ethanol and company are likely sure will never happen. Until the people organize, they will continue to be abused, some of them dying on the streets, all the while, Ethanol and company collecting executive salaries for doing harm to the city's poorest.

Dag said...

Here's some odd coincidence. Taking a break from the usual grind, I came across this:

"[C]onsider the statement 'This sentence is false.' If the sentence is true then it follows that it is false. If the statement is false, then the sentence is true. Or consider the statement 'I am a liar.' Then I am only a liar if I tell the truth. Goedel then formulated the statement 'This sentence cannot be proved true.' If the sentence is correct, then it cannot be proved to be correct."

Michio Kaku, Hyperspace. 1995: p. 242.

reliable sources said...

That was fun to read. Thanks.

Dag said...

You've started a full-blown trend here:



Larrey Anderson, "The New American Ethic: Lie, Cheat, and Steal," American Thinker. 04 Dec. 2008

"A new survey of American high school students has just been released. 30 percent of young Americans admit to shoplifting and 60 per cent confess to cheating on tests.

The percentage of students who lie is a much trickier to determine. (Question: Do you lie? Answer: Yes. Is the answer a lie or not? I feel sorry for these pollsters.)"

Life was so simple before the liars at Carnegie waded into the clarity of my mental pool.

Anonymous said...

Incitement of hatred, yes, that is exactly what Miss Whitty gets into. She came here from North Shore Family Services, and you know it ain't keeping families "together" that "Family Services" excels at.

And how has she done with our little family in the DTES? Very well, the city would think.
The Carnegie Board is now entirely controlled by CCAP, their own paid protestors that let us think we're getting somewhere when all that's happening is we're being allowed to let off steam in a socially acceptable way, by meeting and "Visioning" endlessly.
The Carnegie Newsletter is now completely dominated by CCAP too, pumping out numerous articles every week defending their agenda, but never bringing up the over $50,000 pay check that "WP" gets. Any articles that disagree with CCAP or Carnegie policies or.....well, they just never get published.

She's a paid politician, the only difference is that NO ONE VOTED HER IN. Who pays her? I've heard it's the Real Estate Board that is the main donator to CCAP. It always works best for the powers that be if the protestors are paid to protest, then they can be frightened of losing their paycheck and kept to the party line.

No Shelters, according to powers that be at CCAP, Just homes only. Because Shelters would have to be paid for NOW> Homes are far away and could take forever, and we can just spend our time planning and "VISIONING" ( since when did "Vision" turn into a verb!?) it now, and get some future government to actually do the paying for it part........later

The people on the third floor use EVERY goddamn tool at their disposal. Lies and Rumors are just legitimate tools in their arsenal against the people they are supposed to be serving, to their way of thinking.

Did you see the article in the Georgia Straight entitled, "Democracy and Accountability are an Illusion" by Paul Palango? These things are true all the way up and down the line of power.

Dag said...

Ethanol is an mid-level executive in a large corporation, the Corporation of the City of Vancouver. She is the head administrator of an adult day-care centre. She is accountable to the corporation, not to anyone else.

If Ethanol spends much of her time gerundizing, well, that's harmless at least. It's the rest of what she does that should worry you all. And that should propel at least some to resist, given that lives are on the line, maybe yours.

Dag said...

I like neologisms, but only if they add to the language in a beneficial and beautiful way rather than detract from language by making it confusing and redundant and ugly, jargonizing the language, as it were. Bat Ye'or coined the term dhimmitude, which is a proper word these days because it filled a need in the marketplace of ideas. From that I coined the term whimmitude. Poligion is a near neologism from, as far as I can find, some time in the 1940s, from social sciences, particularly Philosophy of History. Allahdammerung is just funny, a nonce word, but a good one. "Visioning" is one more flaccid attempt by an idiot to give himself an intellectual veneer, at leat before his audience of fellow know-littles. The transparent effect of such "verbing" is to make oneself appear trite. Such attempts are common among low-level bureaucrats attempting to create from nothing legitimate an "intellectual" register, i.e. a "sophisticated" and setting-based vocabulary. "Verbing" is the pretentious result, all too often.

I used the word gerund above to describe verbing. I'm surprised no one jumped in to claim that if I was wrong about that that I must be wrong about other things, and probably wrong therefore about everything I write. But no reductio ad absurdum. Maybe most people make the same hasty mistake and didn't notice or didn't reflect as yet.

"Verbing." Gotta wonder. "Visioning." I can see it now....

Calvin and Hobbes, two well-known philosophy of language theorists, conclude: "Verbing weirds language."

I'll be envisioning you.

Rachel Davis said...

I read all this with interest. I've been lied to myself by Tetrault, and gossiped about by Whitty.
As far as "Visioning" goes, I noticed this word when I saw the 2nd floor CCAP board had a big sign pointing to an attached folder that proclaimed "THIS IS YOUR VISION!"
when I opened up the attached folder to see what "MY VISION" was, I had to laughed pretty hard when I saw it was completely empty!
At last they admit they cannot see inside our heads and discern our Visions, good for them!!

Rachel Davis said...

by the way, where does CCAP funding come from, is it really the real estate board? That would be so Machiavellian! Wendy, Jean, care to tell us interested parties on the DTESenquirer? Anonymous? Perhaps you will speak up.......