Just When We Thought Nobody Could Match City of Vancouver 'Blog Burners' . . . .

Just when we thought nobody could match City of Vancouver 'blog burners', Sam Sullivan, Jacquie Forbes-Roberts, and Ethel Whitty, we discover Dean Steacy at the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

Here's what Dean Steacy, the primary internet "anti-hate" investigator for the Canadian Human Rights Commission, said when questioned by Barbara Kulaszka, a lawyer for a website owner in the human rights case Warman vs. Lemire:

MS KULASZKA: Mr. Steacy, you were talking before about context and how important it is when you do your investigation. What value do you give freedom of speech when you investigate one of these complaints?

MR. STEACY: Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don't give it any value.

MS. KULASZKA: Okay. That was a clear answer.

MR. STEACY: "It's not my job to give value to an American concept."

There are concerns amongst Canadians, as expressed by dag, a Vancouver blogger who wrote "What Price Free Speech" at No Dhimmitude, that investigators such as Steacy have been granted the power by the Canadian state to, " 'cleanse' the Internet of critical opinions, ideas, and speech they don't like. And unfortunately for Canadians, they have the authority to assess fines of up to $50,000 and incarcerate would-be 'haters.' "

Was the Governor General Duped at the Downtown Eastside Women's Center?

On Thursday, the Vancouver Sun ran an article about Governor General Michaelle Jean's meeting with Bernie Williams and other women at the Downtown Eastside Women's Center to discuss homelessness. The lead in the article was: “In the bitter cold one night this week, Bernie Williams took photographs of 59 homeless people she found sleeping along three blocks of Hastings Street.”

Is Bernie Williams a mathemagician?

I’ve lived in the Downtown Eastside for 20 years and I’ve never spotted 59 people sleeping on the street at night in the entire neighbourhood, let alone on a mere three blocks of Hastings.

But don’t take my word for it. Walk along Hastings yourself some night; see if you come across 59 homeless people sleeping.

When I asked other Downtown Eastside residents about the 59 sleeping homeless people Williams claims to have photographed, two showed their skepticism with similar comments: “Where are the photographs?”, “Let’s see the photographs.”

One skeptic, a 35 year resident of the Downtown Eastside, said that if you walk along Hastings as far as First United church at Gore, you will see homeless people sleeping on the steps. Or if you go to the Main St. side of the old bank at Main & Hastings, there are three or four people who sit there drinking during the day, and sleep there at night. But he said that the maximum number of homeless people you would come across walking along Hastings – and he’s counting those mentioned above – would be ten.

But even the people who usually sleep on the steps of First United would possibly not have been there on the "bitter cold" night on which Williams was supposedly out photographing the homeless. On extremely cold nights, Downtown Eastside povertarians create extra spaces indoors for people to sleep. At Carnegie Center, I saw several "Extreme Weather Alert" notices last week, advertising a list of places people could go to get out of the cold. A man who occasionally goes to the Evelyn Saller Center -- a place where the poor can go to shower, get laundry done, or eat a subsidized meal --told me that they had turned their large recreation room into an over-night shelter during the cold weather, allowing people to sleep on the floor. And you can bet street workers roaming the neighborhood are directing homeless people on the street to these and other emergency shelters.

Another thing: if you think you can photograph 59 people on Hastings St. without getting people pissed off, maybe even getting your camera grabbed, good luck. Nancy Graves, a
street worker assigned the task of walking around and approaching homeless people to get them expedited welfare and housing, has told the media that she uses cigarettes to break the tension when she approaches homeless people. She holds out a cigarette as an offering, as she finds
they can be suspicious and hostile.

Before Williams claimed to have photographed 59 homeless people sleeping on Hastings St., she had earned a reputation for seeing more homeless people on the Downtown Eastside than Downtown Eastside residents are seeing. Last year, I picked up the Metro News and saw an article on the front page in which Bernie [Bernice] Williams claimed she had driven around the Downtown Eastside and in two hours counted 70 homeless women sleeping out. At the time, Williams was making a case for governments to give the DTES Women’s Center funding to allow women to sleep there over night.

How come I have never seen these 70 sleeping women? I do occasionally see a woman sleeping in a doorway. I recall on two or three occasions, over the past 12 months or so, seeing a woman sleeping with a man in a doorway. I have also on two occasions seen a woman sleeping alone in a doorway, although the one I saw on Main St. near Chinatown appeared to be passed out on drugs. At least some of the people I’ve noticed hidden under blankets in doorways could be women too. But if there were 70 women sleeping outside, I would notice. How could you not notice?

I told other Downtown Eastsiders, including a woman who frequents the Downtown Eastside Women’s Center (she can’t be named as there can be retaliation on the DTES against people who contradict the script used by povertarians for the media or government funders), about Williams’ numbers. Not one person I spoke to, felt these numbers were anywhere close to accurate.

One person I spoke to was Kevin, a homeless man who sleeps in the Terminal and Main area and often sits in front of the McDonald’s restaurant near that intersection. He also goes to Carnegie Center at Main & Hastings, just a few blocks from the DTES Women's Center. Kevin has been homeless on and off for years and, at the time I spoke to him last year, he had been homeless for 6 months. When I asked Kevin about Williams’ claim of seeing 70 homeless women sleeping on the streets, he smiled a little and said, “That’s a stretch.”

He said he does notice more homeless women now than he saw ten years ago, but it’s still "not common" for him to see one. He has not come across anywhere near 70 homeless women sleeping outside. He pointed out that when women are homeless, it is not easy to spot them by driving around. “They tend to sleep in out of the way places where they won’t be seen.” When I told Kevin that Williams was lobbying for money for the homeless, he no longer wanted to contradict her or comment on her statistics.

Kevin believes that if inflated statistics are a means to the end of attracting more government money for the homeless, “Then that’s a good lie.”

SFU Prof Allegedly "Fixated" on Student's Breasts

What man would put his name on a Simon Fraser University Department which for years allegedly operated a sexual harassment ring?

Michael Audain, that’s who.

Audain, Chair of Polygon Homes Ltd., slapped down $2 million dollars for the SFU Center for the Contemporary Arts where the main exhibition hall will be named the Audain Visual Arts Teaching Gallery. His donation will also establish an Audain Visiting Chair in Visual Arts.

The Visual Arts Department appears to have been the worst offender when it comes to sexual harassment in the Center for the Contemporary Arts. That’s according to a woman who dropped out of Visual Arts due to being chronically sexually harassed by two professors in the 1980’s. She claimed in a written statement to SFU that her life was ruined by being unable to graduate.

“All studio courses were taught by male professors,” says the woman who dropped out, “and all of them were trying to get laid.” She adds, “This was going on for years.” It started long before she arrived, she says, and she doesn’t believe it suddenly stopped when she dropped out.

She believes though that the sexual harassment would have diminished in the years after she dropped out, as two of the offenders eventually left to teach at other institutions. But one offender remained and was promoted to Head of the Visual Arts Department. “They promoted him after I exposed him,” she says. She suspects this professor became more discreet after she exposed him but she doubts he stopped treating his classes as “harvesting sites” for sex partners. “He was so compulsive about it, I just can’t see him quitting completely.”

She provides one graphic example of his compulsive sexual harassment, an incident which occurred during a first year studio class. As was typical in studio classes, the professor would rotate around the room, visiting each student at their small work space to discuss the project they were working on. These visits would last at least 15 minutes. When this professor arrived at the work space of the woman who would eventually drop-out, she was talking to him about her project when he locked his eyes on her nipples. “He stared and stared at my nipples,” she says. “He wasn’t hearing a word I was saying.” He never once looked up from her nipples to her face while she was talking. She still remembers what she was wearing that day, a navy blue ski turtleneck; the studio could be cold at times. “I was talking to him about my project and he wasn’t hearing, he was fixated on my nipples [she makes googly eyes to illustrate]; he was in his own little world; it was like he was in a trance. He was getting aroused right there in the studio! I just kept talking, trying to act normal; I thought he would snap out of it.” Then he abruptly walked out of the studio, without saying a word. "It was rare for him to walk out of the studio while class was in session,” she says. “I remember it happening one other time; it was when an older student named Daniel told him he thought his wife was on campus looking for him.”

This professor as well as all other Visual Arts professors trying to get laid had spouses and children. One was reportedly separated — but as one Dance student who entered a sexual relationship with him found out, he had no intention of divorcing his wife. He later re-united with his wife.

The woman who dropped out says sexual harassment was a problem not only in the Visual Arts Department but throughout the Center for the Arts – which housed departments of Film, Dance, etc. — as early as the 1970’s. She refers to it as the ‘Center for Tits and Ass’.

But it could now be called the ‘Center Flush with Cash’.

Fifty million dollars is being given to the Center for the Contemporary Arts by the Liberal government, B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell announced last year. The Center has set a goal of raising another $30 million from the private sector. So far $17 million has been raised. This is upsetting to the woman who dropped out and now lives a few blocks away in the impoverished Downtown Eastside.

The woman who dropped out says there is a possibility that SFU President, Michael Stevenson, concealed from Audain the festering issue of the sexual harassment ring that harmed her ability to graduate. “There is no doubt that Stevenson is aware of this issue and he should be disclosing it to donors,” she says. She was in email contact with Stevenson as recently as last year; his receptionist acknowledged that he had received the email. Stevenson was also copied a letter addressed to Dr. Ernie Love last year. Love, Head of the SFU’s new Segal Graduate School of Business, was told in the lengthy letter that it was inappropriate for SFU to be building a global reputation with ‘expansionist projects’ while continuing to bury it’s history of operating a sexual harassment ring.

But Stevenson would not have been entirely able to conceal SFU’s alleged sexual harassment record from donors now that the story has broken on the internet. “If Audain had done a Google search, he would have come across it,” says the woman who dropped out. Articles criticizing Premier Campbell for handing $50 million to a Center which has persisted in evading its sexual harassment history, have appeared on internet news sites, Blogger News Network and NowPublic, as well as on the Downtown Eastside Enquirer blog.

Despite the internet raising public awareness about the Visual Arts Department’s reputation as a haven for professors who “preferred to teach female students flat on their backs”, the woman who dropped out doesn’t expect to see him take a stand on the issue any time soon. She points out that he’s established a business relationship with SFU that he would no doubt want to preserve: he was the developer of a housing project at SFU. “He may owe them a favor; maybe he expects there to be another housing project up there in the future and he’d like to get in on it. I don’t know but it looks to me like he has an ‘I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine’ relationship with SFU.”

When SFU granted Audain an honorary doctorate, he was described in their literature as a lifelong civil rights activist, starting as a young man by “joining the Mississippi civil rights marches against racial segregation.” He was once even thrown into prison in Mississippi for standing his ground in the Black section of a restaurant in a bus depot, refusing to leave. Audain went on to hold the first meeting of the BC Civil Liberties Association in his living room. According to SFU literature, “Michael Audain puts his beliefs into practice.”

“I’d like to see him put his beliefs into practice”, says the woman who dropped out of SFU due to alleged chronic sexual harassment. “I was denied my right to an education.” She would specifically like to see Audain put his beliefs into practice by putting a ‘Stop Payment’ on his cheque and, “at the very least” taking his name off the Center for the Arts until the it’s history is addressed.

Last week, a Downtown Eastside Enquirer writer emailed Audain — SFU published Audain’s email bbinns@polyhomes.com on their website — and asked if he saw a contradiction between his history of taking a stand on Black civil rights issues and his current endorsement of the SFU Center for the Contemporary Arts which has a reputation for interfering with the right of females to an education. No response was received.

Audain may not acknowledge receiving the email but, being a product of 1960’s activism, he would surely acknowledge having heard the John Lennon/Yoko Ono tune, “Woman is the Nigger of the World.’

Raise Welfare Rates to $1,300/Month, Says Activist Group

photo: welfare office, Powell St., Jan. 23, 2008

A group calling themselves, "Raise the Rates", wants welfare rates doubled in British Columbia. They want the Campbell government to pony up $1,300 per month for each welfare recipient. That figure is based on the Market Basket Measure, anti-poverty activist Rolph Auer explained in the Jan. 15th Carnegie Newsletter. The MBM calculates the cost of food, shelter, transportation and other commodities a person needs just to get by.

Raise the Rates would also like people on welfare -- Income Assistance is what it is officially called -- to be allowed to earn at least $500 on top of their welfare cheque. On this point, they have something in common with the right-wing Fraser Institute which supports an earning exemption for welfare recipients. The Fraser Institute believes that allowing welfare clients to earn a bit of money keeps them connected to the work force. Oddly, welfare recipients who have "unemployable" status due to either a temporary or longterm disability, are the only ones allowed to earn extra money while on welfare. Employable people are forbidden from taking jobs without having the amount earned deducted from their cheque. If they don't report the earnings and are caught, they will be kicked off the welfare rolls and possibly charged with fraud.

Regardless of the current low welfare rate which, according to Auer is $610 per month for a single person, there is a healthy demand for welfare judging from Wednesday’s line ups. There were two line ups at one Downtown Eastside welfare building at Powell & Main St., one line up along Powell St. and another along Main Street. There are two welfare offices in the same building, one upstairs and one downstairs. Most clients lining up for a welfare cheque are male, and one client pointed out that many in the line ups this month were young. The above photo of a line up was taken around 3:30 p.m. and there was still a line up. It lasted until after 4 p.m.

At least one line up at the welfare office continued all day Thursday. [Update: Again on Friday, there was a line up.]

Clients line up at their welfare office if they have not arranged to have their cheque mailed to their home or directly deposited in their bank account. They also have to line up if they have neglected to sign and turn last month's cheque "stub" -- a short form attached to all welfare cheques -- in to the welfare office. The stub acts as confirmation that you will need assistance again next month (i.e. you haven't found a job.)

Welfare day on Wednesday ended a "five week month." That means welfare recipients had to make their December cheque last five weeks, rather than the usual four weeks. But the amount of the cheque is the same whether it's a four or a five week month. Anti-poverty advocates would like the government to put an end to five week months.

At the end of a five week month, if a person is hungry, they can sometimes get away with hitting a welfare worker up for a $20 food voucher. But welfare workers don't like clients to make a habit of asking for vouchers. If you regularly show that you can't manage your money, the welfare office will manage it for you. The welfare worker may put you on what Downtown Eastsiders refer to as "administered", which means you are issued a small cheque once a week.

The long line ups at the welfare office this month are a mystery as Vancouver’s pre-Olympic economy is going full tilt and employers are begging for workers.

Did Criminal Allegations Contribute to United Way's $3 Million Campaign Shortfall?

At breakfast Thursday, United Way of the Lower Mainland President, Michael McKnight, did not utter a word about criminal allegations swirling around United Way. He was speaking to over 1,000 people on at the United Way breakfast awards ceremony at the Westin Bayshore Hotel. The early morning breakfast was to recognize the 5,000 volunteers, 56,000 donors, and 1,100 workplaces involved in last fall’s United Way fundraising campaign.

Truth is though, United Way fell almost $3 million dollars short of this year’s $34 million goal. They raised $31.2 million.

McKnight may not be solely to blame for the shortfall though. For one thing, he inherited baggage from former United Way CEO, Ron Dumouchelle. Dumouchelle left United Way shortly after a woman surfaced documented evidence of persistent fraud in a police report written when Dumouchelle lodged a complaint against her with the Vancouver Police. Dumouchelle lodged the complaint in an apparent attempt to stop her from making a Report on United Way available to donors. Dumouchelle stated in an internal document that if donors got even “a whiff” of scandal, it could reduce donations.

On the first page of the police report, major United Way donors were named as witnesses in the case: Canada Safeway, Revenue Canada, Canadian Red Cross, Canada Post, Westminster Savings, even the President of the Toronto Dominion Bank. But woman calls this an exercise in “public mischief”, claiming that there was never any evidence of criminal conduct on her part. Indeed Constable St. Amant wrote in his report that he and Dumouchelle agreed that this was “not a criminal matter.”

When having the woman treated like a criminal failed and she invoked her right to remain silent, a new tactic was employed against the woman. She was targeted for a VPD “Car 87” psychiatric visit under what she alleges – and the paper trail lends support to her allegations — were fraudulent pretenses. This tactic led to accusations of “political psychiatry” by Canadians Opposing Political Psychiatry. Although Dumouchelle left United Way — no reason given publicly — these allegations didn’t leave with him.

This case of alleged fraudulent evidence and political psychiatry dates back to Dec. 2002 — but what a difference five years makes. Now that anybody can publish on internet news sites, this story finally caught up with United Way during their fall 2007 fund raising campaign.

Another political psychiatry case exposed during this campaign causedembarrassment for United Way. It was a political psychiatry case that Chris Kelly, the United Way Board member who made the speech kicking off the fund raising Campaign, has been sitting on for years in his role as Superintendent of the Vancouver School Board. The School Board had allegedly used political psychiatry to counter criticism of their handling of bullying complaints, and Kelly, upon taking the job as Superintendent, appears to have done diddley squat to resolve one particularly scandalous case. Also Kelly has apparently done nothing to ensure that the evidence of fraud against School Board employees in this political psychiatry case is investigated; he has allowed all staff involved to remain unscathed.

But it gets worse: Kelly has knowingly concealed from parents the fact that the VSB’s failure to take responsibility for it’s employment of political psychiatry has resulted in a global boycott of Vancouver School Board high school diplomas. A victim of VSB political psychiatry caught up with Kelly during the campaign and requested his resignation as a United Way Board member. Not the best guy for United Way to be promoting as a “visionary” on their website.

And then there was the embarrassing interview given to the Vancouver Sun during the United Way Campaign by an earnest middle class man and his equally earnest wife. The man said he used to be a loyal supporter of United Way -- until his mother left United Way some money in her will. When an issue regarding the will came up, he was hurt by how quickly United Way sicced their lawyers on him. He's finished giving to United Way, he said. He and his wife now give only to charities with no paid staff. This is the sort of "whiff" that United Way can't afford to have donors get in the middle of a fund raising Campaign.

The woman who alleges she became the victim of fraud during efforts to stop the dissemination of a Report on United Way, believes $31.2 million is a large enough wad for United Way to take away from their recent Campaign. “They should be able to get by on that", In fact, she believes that setting unrealistically high campaign goals is what got United Way into trouble in her case. In an internal document dated the week police were on her, Dumouchelle revealed that he was under pressure as United Way was $600,000 short of that year’s campaign goal.

McKnight faced an almost $3 million shortfall. Imagine the pressure he felt.

Alberta Human Rights Commission "Applying Saudi Values" in Canada

Last week, Ezra Levant called the Alberta Human Rights Commission every name in the book: a" kangeroo court"; "part Kafka, part Stalin"; a "joke", a "sick joke"; a "pseudo-court like Judge Judy". Levant, publisher of the Western Standard, said it was "perverted" that a so-called human rights commission was violating his human rights. Levant even called one of the human rights officers a "thug", to her face.

More than a few Canadians in the blogosphere have something to say to Levant: "You're right." Truepeers, a blogger at Covenant Zone says the Levant case has left him feeling "ashamed to be Canadian".

"We have a tradition of free speech in Canada," Levant told the Commission, after being hauled in front of it for the "political crime" of publishing cartoons critical of the Prophet Mohammed in 2006.

The cartoons, originally published in a newspaper in Denmark, became a lightening rod for tension between the Western tradition of free speech and the insistence by Muslim clerics that Islam's prophet Mohammad be protected from criticism. The Western Standard was one of many publications around the world which published the cartoons as a political statement that free speech would not stop for religion.

"It was the proudest moment of my public life," Levant told the Commission.

The complaint against Levant was lodged by a Saudi-trained imam, Syed Soharwardy. Levant told the Commission that Soharwardy is "a radical Muslim imam, who was trained at an officially anti-semitic university in Saudi Arabia who has called for sharia law to govern Canada".

On the Commission's official form, Soharwardy entered "religious beliefs" in the box requiring him to identify the "Grounds" for his complaint. Levant's response to Soharwardy was, "A secular government bureaucracy has essentially been hijacked by a radical Muslim imam. It's being used to further his fatwa against these cartoons."

For a publisher to be called to the Human Rights Commission to be interrogated about political or religious views expressed is a violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Levant pointed out. "This commission is applying Saudi values, not Canadian values."

Levant reminded the Commission that even Alan Borovoy, the prominent Canadian civil libertarian who helped set up Human Rights Commissions in Canada in the 1960s and 70s, believes that the Commission is overstepping their mandate in acting as a press censor. Borovoy wrote, in regard to the complaint against the Western Standard, that being a censor was "hardly the role we had envisioned for human rights commissions. There should be no
question of the right to publish the impugned cartoons."

Human Rights Commissions are quasi-judicial bodies set up to arbitrate rental and employment disputes, where a person believes they had been discriminated against based on race or gender.

Levant videotaped his appearance in front of the Commission as he intends to use it when he takes his battle with the Commission to "real" court. The Commission's "human rights officer" initially objected, then asked that the videotape be kept confidential. Levant later noted on his website that it came as no surprise that a censor would prefer to operate "in the dark." He then put the videotape on YouTube. It's a hit.

And on Levant's comparison of the Alberta Human Rights Commission and a Judge Judy pseudo-court, Judge Judy came out on top. "...Judge Judy actually was a judge whereas none of the commission's panelists are judges, and some aren't even lawyers," Levant said. "And, unlike the commission, Judge Judy believes in freedom of speech."

---------------------------------------

Read about another human rights case:
United Way Implicated in Political Psychiatry Comparable to China