Dog Disappears at Sally Ann Soup Line

The dog on this poster, Pariah, shows up regularly with her owner at the Salvation Army truck which gives out free soup to the poor on Sunday and Tuesday nights. The soup truck arrives at roughly 10:15 p.m. and parks in front of the court house at Main & Powell St.

Last week, the dog disappeared.

One guy who regularly shows up at the soup line says he thinks somebody may have stolen the dog.

This dog, like many of the poor humans at the Soup Line, did not look like she was getting top-notch nourishment. But she didn't seem unhappy with her owner. People would give her attention and she would wag her tail.

The owner has plastered the Downtown Eastside with posters looking for Pariah. The phone number on the poster is 604-307-1548.

Gang Unit Enters No. 5 Orange

Last night, members of the Integrated Gang Unit entered the No. 5 Orange strip bar at Main & Powell St. They could be seen by a man standing in the free soup line up at the Sally Ann which parks across the street on Tuesday nights. "There were six of them," he says. "They had yellow stripes up the sides of their pants so I knew they were RCMP. They had dark jackets with 'Gang Unit' or "Gang something' on the back." They arrived in unmarked cars.

A few minutes later, two additional officers whom the witness says "looked like detectives" arrived in an unmarked car. They were looking at a laptop in their car, he noticed as he walked by with his hot soup. Then they got out of their car. "They were well dressed and they had briefcases." They spoke briefly to the other officers. Then all entered the strip bar together.

A woman who lives just a few doors up from the No. 5 Orange, which is rumored to be operated by the Hell's Angels (although an older man in the neighbourhood says he doesn't think that rumor is accurate), says a year or a year and a half ago, she was awakened one night by what sounded like gun shots. She looked out the window and saw a twenty-something East Indian male and another guy whom she couldn't see clearly, taking cover between parked cars. The East Indian guy told the other guy not to be crazy as he could get himself shot. There was a Jeep in the middle of the street with the door open and she got the impression that somebody in the vehicle had a gun. The guys on the street acted as though they had been drinking but she doesn't know if they had left the No. 5 Orange. There are other bars west of that block.

This woman, who is not criminally involved, didn't call police because, like many DTES residents, she is aware of evidence that the VPD can be "dirty" and she prefers to avoid them.

David Frum Weighs In on Human Rights Commissions Acting as Idea Censors

David Frum, a Canadian-born former speech-writer for George W. Bush, weighed in this morning on the persecution of writer Mark Steyn and publisher Ezra Levant by Human Rights Commissions in Canada.

Speaking on Vancouver's CKNW radio, Frum said that the hauling of his "friends" in front of the Ontario and/or B.C. Human Rights Commissions to answer for material published is so "egregious" that it may be a turning point for Canadians. He pointed out that Human Rights Commissions were set up as an inexpensive way to resolve housing and employment disputes, as an alternative to a trial, but were never meant to interfere in the "marketplace of ideas".

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.’