Downtown Eastsider who sent Obama a Threatening Letter Arrested

Photo: George stands in front of the UBC Learning Exchange. He asked a Downtown Eastsider with a camera to take this photo; I think it was taken in early 2009 but I haven't had a chance to talk to the photographer. George was wearing his Alaska t-shirt but did not yet have his Sarah Palin glasses.

I asked Dale, a homeless guy with a shopping cart who hangs out in front of McDonalds restaurant at Terminal & Main, where George was. "You know George, the guy who wears the navy blue t-shirt with FBI on the front," I said, prompting Dale's memory. "The cops picked him up," said Dale who used to sleep in the same spot as George under a bridge. "He was threatening people."

Don't get me wrong, George wasn't threatening his friends and acquaintances around the Downtown Eastside. He was actually quite affable, always quick to call out, "Hi!"

Downtown Eastsiders had cautioned George, who was a fixture around the Downtown Eastside with his shopping cart -- "my carriage," he called it -- that he couldn't go around threatening people. You just can't send President Obama a letter warning him,"You're dead", he was told when he showed the letter with the fax receipt stapled to it. You can get arrested for that; you can do jail time, people warned him. But George would remind people of the reason he was immune from prosecution. "I'm George Washington incarnate."

George had recently been notified that he had inherited money from his half-brother. He showed the will to people on Whopper Wednesday at Burger King, and at other places too; it had an official red seal in the upper corner. He said that when he got the inheritance, "I want to get a room in a rooming house." On the front page of the will was the name of a Montreal law firm, along with their address and telephone number. George said he phoned them and threatened them.

Long before George learned of his inheritance or threatened Obama, he had been regularly dropping into the University of British Columbia Learning Exchange on Main St. near Keefer to use the free phone. He would phone the Canadian Security Intelligence Service [CSIS] and threaten to bomb them. Once CSIS returned the call and spoke to a staff person at the Learning Exchange, according to George. The staff person told George not to use their phone again.

But George needed access to a telephone on another day, so he told staff at the Learning Exchange that he just needed to make a quick call. He made it quick, the call to CSIS, threatening them.

UBC Learning Exchange staff banned George from the premises. I know that because I was walking past with a couple of friends in the spring when George, standing out front on the sidewalk, asked a woman with us if she would do him a favor and go inside and fill up his coffee cup. The Learning Exchange provides free low quality coffee to attract the poor, keep the sign-in numbers up, and keep the funders believing they are helping ahelluvalot of down and outters turn their lives around.

UBC President Stephen Toope who helped himself to $565,000 in income and perks last year will never mention George, the guy they kicked to the curb. All the networking these UBC povertarians do at their catered openings and socials at the Learning Exchange -- Toope gave a speech at one last November -- you would think they would have a few names in their Rolodex like homeless advocate Judy Graves to call and ask, "Is there anything you can do here?"

Standing on the sidewalk out front of the UBC Learning Exchange, George was always friendly, stopping people to chat, most recently about his new Sarah Palin rimless glasses that he got a kick out of wearing with his Alaska t-shirt. Dionne, the Learning Exchange Co-ordinator, a white woman who likes to remind people that's she's really Black -- a sort of Michael Jackson in reverse -- would stand just feet from him when she ducked outside to stand in the sunshine on her breaks, taking long drags from her cigarrette, escaping into her novel.

"They were looking for him," Dale said. Vancouver Police spotted George standing with Dale last month on Hastings St. across from the First United Church. They grabbed him. They told him they were sending him back to where he'd come from; George had always claimed he had been born in the U.S. and had Canadian status. The police took the cheap handcuffs George carried with him -- he claimed to be an under cover FBI agent, which would explain the handcuffs -- and handcuffed his shopping cart to Dale's, creating a headache for Dale. The police told George, "You've been threatening people," Dale recalls. "The cops were laughing at him."

"Car 87" Abuse Raised by Mayoral Candidate for the First Time in a Vancouver Election

Soviet-style political psychiatry practiced in Vancouver has been attracting attention internationally but I’d never heard it mentioned by a candidate in the civic election campaign. Until Monday. At an All Candidates meeting in the theater of Carnegie Center, Independent mayoral candidate Golok Buday (pictured above in black cap), said:

“Car 87 forces it’s drugs on you and forces you to go places based on arbitrary political reasons. And I think that should be acknowledged.”

Car 87 is a police car, carrying an armed police officer and a psychiatric nurse. There is a stockpile of documented evidence that it is being used by the Vancouver School Board and other organizations to smear critics. Politically vocal people against whom no evidence of wrongdoing can be found too often find Car 87 arriving at their homes to assess them for “apprehension” to a mental hospital.

Vision Council candidate Andrea Reimer (on left in above photo), who took Al Gore’s training program to become a presenter of his “An Inconvenient Truth” seminar, didn’t look up when Buday mentioned Car 87 civil liberties abuses. But an inconvenient truth is that Reimer has been implicated in a cover-up involving fraud of Car 87 abuses while on Vancouver School Board in 2003

The alleged cover-up came after several adults had independently lodged complaints about a verbally and physically abusive teacher. VSB sent Car 87 to the home of the last complainant, identifying the fact that she had made “freedom of information requests” as the official reason. The only evidence they turned over to Car 87 to be used against her, though, was a document indicating that she intended to campaign about their mishandling of bullying complaints in a School Board election. Police-School Liaison, Sergeant Garry Lester, admitted that the Vancouver School Board had pressured him to send Car 87 to the woman’s home even after he had emphasized to them that there was “nothing untoward” about her conduct.

How did Reimer and her colleagues address this Car 87 visit arranged by the VSB under fraudulent pretenses? With more fraud, says the victim. Reimer and her fellow elected School Board trustees arranged for an “in camera” review of the case, which they conveniently concealed from the victim. They invited a primary offender in this case of criminal wrongdoing to brief them. He re-offended. He fabricated claims such as that the teacher didn’t actually work for the VSB when her abuses occurred. This cover-up has contributed to the international boycott of VSB diplomas organized by Canadians Opposing Political Psychiatry.

The use of in-camera meetings by elected officials in Vancouver to ensure secrecy was mentioned at the All Candidates meeting by mayoral candidate Betty Krawczyk (in top photo wearing yellow scarf) of the Work Less party. “When they have something important to do, they do it in camera.”. Krawczyk told the audience that she had moved to Canada from the U.S. because she was opposed to the Vietnam war. “Every year I’ve been here, there’s less democracy”.

Krawczyk was referring to what others had said earlier. Nicholai, an audience member, had said, “When I arrived in Canada as a political refugee, the democracy I expected was not so much in place.” Buday had added, “My father is a refugee from Hungary and he told me that Canada was less of a democracy than his family expected too.” But by being the first politician in Vancouver to mention the use of Car 87 as a political tool, he has moved us a step toward more democracy.

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Who's Who in the above photographs?

Top photo: (left to right) Ellen Woodsworth, COPE councillor candidate; Mark Emery, mayoral candidate; Golok Buday, Independent mayoral candidate; Betty Krawczyk, Work Less Party mayor candidate; Lea Johnson, Independent councillor candidate

Bottom photo: (left to right): Andrea Reimer, Vision councillor candidate; Michael Geller, NPA councillor candidate; Ivan Doumenc, Work Less Party candidate for Park Commissioner; Jamie Lee Hamilton, Independent candidate for Park Commissioner; [name unknown] Work Less Party; Geri Tramutola, Work Less Party councillor candidate.

Trafficking in Disruption: Insite Supporters Hold Street Party in Rush Hour

I have an insight. The block party Insite supporters held yesterday afternoon was an attempt to embarrass freshly re-elected Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Insite supporters -- particularly the Portland Hotel Community Services Society executives and staff who operate Insite -- don't want Harper to shut down this space where junkies in Vancouver can drop-in to shoot-up. The Harper government is appealing a court decision that the nurse-supervised drug injection site must be kept open because it is a health service to which drug users have a right. The use of tax dollars to finance a cocaine and heroin shooting gallery is enough to make Harper shiver in his trademark sweater vest.

On Thursday, a party was held on the street in front of Insite on the Downtown Eastside in support of keeping the facility open. It was a party against the Conservative party.

The dark green building in the background with people clustered around the door is Insite.

A white tent at the block party in front of Insite housed speakers blasting recorded music and a huge poster with the words, “Play Music Not Politics”. A band was scheduled to play but the cops put a stop to it, as organizers did not have a permit for this rush hour street party.

Don’t ask me how Insite supporters believed they could get public sympathy by suddenly disrupting traffic on the 100 block Hastings St. during rush hour, just after 5 p.m. That’s a six lane — four lanes of moving traffic and two parking lanes — major commuter artery. A witness who arrived early at the party, says there was some traffic flow until police arrived and shut down the entire block, apparently for safety reasons.

Photo: A cluster of Vancouver Police stood on Hastings, a few doors east of Insite, watching the party.

The City of Vancouver had refused the Portland Hotel Community Services Society a permit to hold the party on Hastings at rush hour, but organizers did so anyway. Breaking the law may not be a way for the Portland Hotel Community Services Society to convince Prime Minister Harper, who ran in this month’s federal election on a ‘law and order’ platform, to allow them to continue to operate Insite. (Insite needs the Harper government to renew it’s exemption from the law, an exemption granted temporarily by a previous Liberal government since Insite provides a place for injection of illegal drugs.)

Photo above: Motorcycle cops parked on Columbia St. to prevent cars and buses from traveling onto the 100 block Hastings once the party got going.

Anyone who listens to Vancouver talk radio knows that inconveniencing commuters by blocking traffic on streets and bridges is becoming an issue. This year commuters have demanded to know why police blocked them during rush hour on the Lions Gate bridge for a film crew and for hours on the Second Narrows for somebody threatening to commit suicide.

Photo above: Vancouver Police were preventing pedestrians from using the sidewalk on the south side of the 100 block Hastings, across from the party.

There were lots of placards saying, “Trust the Evidence.” Such slogans are often used by Insite supporters despite the fact that the evidence for Insite has been mixed. Margaret Wente of the Globe & Mail, Canada’s most liberal national paper, wrote a column in July, “We Still Await the Scientific Proof of Harm Reduction’s Success“, outlining just how mixed the evidence is.

The propaganda at the party was effective. There were several black and white posters of children, posters the size of bus shelter images — one of a kid posing with his bicycle, another of a kid posing for what appeared to be a school photo — with captions, “Before they were “junkies” they were kids.”

This party was a made-for-media event, like so many political events on the Downtown Eastside. Lots of media had obviously been notified of the event as they were everywhere taking photos and interviewing people. The mainstream Vancouver media is sympathetic to Insite and tends to accept the prepared scripts they are fed. As media personality Pia Shandel, who opposed the supervised injection site said while a host on CFUN radio, the Vancouver media seem to make up their minds early on to support Insite.

Once media are invited to a political protest on the Downtown Eastside, a crowd is attracted by giving out free food. A couple of hundred poor people lined up at yesterday’s party waiting to be served free burgers. Potato chips and pop were given out later. The line-ups may have been longer if the monthly welfare checks hadn’t come out Wednesday.

Photo above: A man serves burgers wearing a t-shirt reading, “Do what’s right, support insite.”

Note the bars on the windows of the shop in the background. About 20 years ago, I was in a bus going up Main St. and an American tourist said to his fellow travelers in a New Jersey accent, “What do you notice about this city? No bars on the windows.” Now there are bars on most shop windows. Cops say “drug sick” people needing fix are pulling many break-ins.

Photo: As soon as the party started on Hastings St., numerous police moved in and limited it to a couple of lanes. Police refused to allow any traffic onto the opposite lanes, apparently for safety reasons.

Vancouver Police spokeswoman Jana McGuinness said police and other City of Vancouver staff had discussions with the PHS Community Services Society about a less disruptive spot to hold the event. "We offered them a permit on a location 100 feet away on Columbia [Street] where they could party all night if they wanted to", McGuinness said. But these events are above all about attracting public attention to a cause. Disrupting Hastings St. traffic during rush hour, resulting in an inevitable clash with police, could draw more attention and get more press than a party on a side street.

The Comaraderie of Cab Drivers

This morning at 1 a.m., a few cabs pulled up on Richards St. beside Waves Coffee Shop at Richards and Hastings. A few guys jumped out and there was some pushing and shoving. I dug for my camera but by the time I got it, the commotion had ended. Uniformed police arrived immediately and grabbed one guy and handcuffed him. He didn't resist. There were undercover cops standing around too; they may have been there earlier.

A cab driver with a white turban walked over to another cab in which the driver was sitting behind the wheel writing a statement for police. I asked the guy with the turban what had happened and he said the guy writing the statement had been assaulted. He asked me if I had caught any of the action on camera.

Another cab driver was sitting at an outdoor table at Waves Coffee Shop writing a statement while a police officer sat at another table writing a report. (see photo above). I asked the cab driver if someone had been assaulted. He said no, that a guy had "damaged my car", and pointed to a large dent on the hood of his cab. He appeared angry. A police officer was examining the dent.

What amazed me about this event was how many cabs immediately showed up to help a fellow cab driver in distress. At least 7 cab drivers showed up to help an 8th cab driver. It was like a tribe of yellow cabs blocking Richards St.

Comment Published on CNN About Parallels Between Blog Burning by Vancouver and Saudi Arabian Governments

Carnegie Board member, Rachel Davis, notified the DTES Enquirer of a CNN piece by Hala Gorani, "Friends Stand Up for Jailed Blogger", about a jailed blogger in Saudi Arabia. There are parallels between this case and the Bill Simpson case. The following comment by the DTES Enquirer was left on
Inside the Middle East, Gorani's blog on the CNN website.


The jailing of a blogger in Saudi Arabia for criticizing the government is not that different from what has happened in Canada.

Police were called by Vancouver City government staff and managers on citizens believed to be associated with the Downtown Eastside Enquirer blog which criticized City government supervisors and managers. In fact a comment remains on the DTES Enquirer blog from Vancouver Police Detective Mark Fenton requesting that someone from the blog contact him.

One suspected blogger received a visit from a police detective at his home. The detective admitted that no charges would be laid as it had been determined that the content of the blog was not false, but he issued a warning that he had grave concerns about the content of the blog.

Even a homeless Vancouver man, William “Bill” Simpson, received an email from a Vancouver police officer who wanted to speak to him about the content of the Downtown Eastside Enquirer blog on which he was believed to be blogging. Simpson told the officer that he wasn’t a blogger.

The calling of police on citizens suspected of being associated with the Downtown Eastside Enquirer blog is part of a campaign of harassment by the Vancouver City government to apparently deter blogging. In Jan. 2007, a Carnegie staff person led Simpson to the office of Carnegie Head of Security where he was told that he was banned from the Carnegie Learning Center (on the third floor of Carnegie Community Center) for daring to blog on the Downtown Eastside Enquirer. Simpson wasn’t even a blogger.

In June 2007, Simpson was elected to the Carnegie Board of Directors by low income Downtown Eastside residents upset that he had been banned from the Carnegie Learning Center. Two weeks later, a City government manager, Ethel Whitty, personally delivered Simpson a letter on City of Vancouver government stationery signed by a top City manager, Jacquie Forbes-Roberts, informing him that he was now banned from the entire Carnegie Community Center. The reason given in the letter for the banning was that Simpson operates a website that “features links” to the Downtown Eastside Enquirer blog. Simpson asked Whitty if he could enter the Carnegie building to attend Board meetings and she said no. He also asked Whitty to identify anything on the blog that was inaccurate. She offered nothing.

At one point City managers and supervisors at the City-run Carnegie Community Center were accused of launching a witch hunt for bloggers. A long term volunteer at Carnegie said that four government managers and/or supervisors separately interrogated him about whether a female friend of his was blogging. Two teachers also teamed up and interrogated him. And he was not the only person encouraged to turn in suspected bloggers. It was after those interrogations in Jan. 2007 that Bill Simpson ended up banned.

For the entire year of 2007, criticisms of the Vancouver City government for their persecution of bloggers were kept alive on the internet. Only in the last couple of weeks has Vancouver’s mainstream media, the Vancouver Sun and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Radio, picked up the story.

Nobody in Vancouver has yet been jailed for blogging. But the Vancouver government is moving dangerously close to Saudi intimidation tactics to deter criticism of government by bloggers.