Supply Side Boom.........

Will they sell RCMP buildings so they can give their friends favorable government leases??

"Bill Casey says he can’t believe the federal government wants to get rid of the buildings housing the regional RCMP headquarters in the four Atlantic provinces.

"It just doesn’t make sense to sell these buildings and put those offices into rental facilities, especially when we live in a time of heightened security and new threats that we’ve never seen before," the Cumberland-Colchester-Musquodoboit MP said Saturday.

"It also doesn’t make sense to do it at a time when the auditor general just came out and said the RCMP doesn’t have the resources they need to work with.

""Taking their headquarters and privatizing them is an idea I just can’t fathom."

Pretty condescending way to treat the Canadian public- inferring that the Liberals would know how to spend your money better than parents

Mark Steyn.........

Nice piece of NDP sleuthing......Man on the street interview?

Zuckerman-

Parents of slain teen say prime minister's proposed handgun ban will do nothing to stop youth violence-via jacksnewswatch.info

"Once steadfast Liberals, Huxtable and his wife Yvette, both Jamaican immigrants, now say Liberal crime policies help create teen gang violence.

Sitting in the comfortable living room of their Maple home yesterday, the couple noted they once lived in the Driftwood "ghetto" where Martin announced he would ban guns.

A few years ago, when the Huxtables had put together enough savings -- Theodore from his job with Lufthansa and Yvette from Shopper's Drug Mart -- they moved their sons Jason and his younger brother Justin, now 15, to Maple.

They note the much- maligned Driftwood area has produced doctors, engineers and Olympic athletes.

Poor parenting, a lack of core values, inappropriate role models and few, if any, consequences, due to soft youth laws, fuel the gun violence, Huxtable said.

Building more community centres in the "ghetto" areas is not the answer, Huxtable said, because it will only create more "headquarters for criminals."

Existing centres need more staff, programs and security, he said. "

Protecting Canadians? Looks like they handcuffed the Mounties and left the criminals free to prey on Canadians

"The registry was a bureaucratic nightmare which was so over-budget and underperforming that it became a constant source of embarrassment. MPs and ministers who had guns (and there were many) complained they couldn't even get through on the toll-free line to register. Eventually the whole mess was turned over to the RCMP."

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Anybody think it was a mere coincidence that while massive funds were poured down the gun registry black hole, the RCMP were understaffed by about a couple of thousand officers but not many in the media seemed to notice? -closing detachments close to the U.S. border and taking years to perform investigations are not signs of having proper resources.

This latest announcement is basically an admission of understaffing since they are going to add about 100 officers/year.So after 10 years they will have an additional 1000 officers- yet they were downsized by about 2000 officers over the past 12 years.In other words, in another 10 years we will still have 1000 fewer officers than 12 years ago.So the RCMP will have been understaffed for over 20 years but we are to believe smoke and mirror figures about protecting the public? Thrown into the mix is that there were even more demands placed on the services of the RCMP after 9/11 -air marshalls, intelligence, infrastructure protection which required even more officers.Throw into the mix the fact that there is a lot more paperwork after the Charter was implemented without a corresponding increase in manpower to deal with the demands.Basically the RCMP have had more restrictions on them than the criminals.Also coming up is the loss of many more experienced investigators due to retirements so we are going to have a lot more novices doing sophisticated investigations- advantage , crooks.

Too bad we have a media clique more interested in acting as cheerleaders for the government than in looking out for the protection of the public.Instead they appear to have been relegated into merely regurgitating Liberal press releases without questioning the validity of the statements.

The government claimed ad nauseum they had already put $10 billion into public security-some enterprising journalists should find out how many RCMP "officers" have been already hired over the attrition level with that $10 billion?


If they were fully staffed why the need for additional officers?If they were truly interested in protecting the public they would have added 500 officers/yr for 5 years but it's all smoke and mirrors anyway.In fact they should have been added just after 9/11.It's not like they didn't have the money available or anything.

"Investing in law enforcement, including $225 million over five years for an RCMP Advanced Community Safety and Rapid Enforcement Team, $10 million a year for 10 years to increase the number of graduating RCMP officers, $50 million over five years for a Rural Community Safety Plan to provide resources for crime prevention initiatives in communities with less that 100,000 residents, and investments to stem the illegal smuggling of firearms into Canada.")

Ron Moran, CEUDA's National President, says, "If the Liberals want to be taken seriously about stopping crime and murders from handguns in Canada, they have look at the flow of those guns across the border; they have to make our border more secure. Simply making handguns illegal is almost pointless when the border is so porous and unarmed. All we hear from them is they've spent in the neighbourhood of $9 billion on security since 9/11, but who's kidding who?"

Good thing the Auditor-General was on the ball to highlight these items

Auditor-General's 2004 Report


Criminal associations are a significant threat to air transport security

3.143 Increasing level of criminality. Transport Canada exercises considerable discretion in the granting of clearances to restricted areas at airports. A criminal record may be the outcome of some offence unlikely to reoccur or to pose a threat to air transport. Individuals with a record of such an offence may be given a security clearance.

3.144 We examined persons holding clearances at five Canadian Airports—Toronto, Montréal, Vancouver, Halifax, and Winnipeg—and found that about 3.5 percent have criminal records. In the general population, 9 percent of Canadians have criminal records. However, based on our analysis about 5.5 percent of clearance holders hired between January 2001 and May 2003 had criminal records. While this is still lower than the Canadian average, the upward trend over the last two years is of concern.

3.145 Transport Canada officials told us that the clearance program focussed on a relatively narrow concept of "unlawful interference with civil aviation," which concentrated on the risks of hijacking and sabotage. This concept has been derived from international conventions. The risks of drug smuggling and other criminal activity were not necessarily regarded as grounds for denial of a clearance.

3.146 Number of active investigations. The Canada Customs and Revenue Agency and the RCMP both investigate criminal conspiracies at Canadian airports; generally these involve drug smuggling. We reviewed the investigation files at the five airports we visited. Police and Customs had identified 247 individuals with clearances to restricted areas who were involved in criminal conspiracies, almost all of them in Toronto and Montréal with a few in Vancouver (no such individuals were identified at the airports in Halifax and Calgary). Customs and police officials consider that even a small percentage of clearance holders with criminal intent poses a serious threat. A single criminal may bribe or coerce entire work teams to facilitate smuggling. Those involved rarely know what is being smuggled.

3.147 The RCMP's assessment of clearance holders indicates a greater problem than is indicated in the criminal conspiracy investigation files at airports. At the two airports where police and Customs had no active investigations, clearance holders included individuals who may have significant criminal associations.

3.148 Extent of criminal association. Each of the 405 individuals in our sample was assessed for criminal association by the RCMP's Criminal Intelligence Directorate, based on its information in three databases—the Canadian Police Information Centre, the Police Information Retrieval System, and the National Criminal Databank. We asked the RCMP if its intelligence files indicated any associations that might preclude the issuing of a clearance to a restricted area. Such associations would include, for example, membership in a biker gang, a spouse or close relative involved in organized crime, or an address associated with criminal activity. It is important to note that such individuals would not necessarily have a criminal record themselves or be active in organized crime; we also note that none of the 405 clearance holders in our sample had been assessed by Transport Canada for criminal association.

3.149 Based on the results of the RCMP's database search on the 405 persons in our sample (generalized to the total number of people holding clearances to restricted areas at the five airports), we estimate that about 4,500 persons or 5.5 percent have possible criminal associations that warrant further investigation and possibly withdrawal of some security clearances. This represents a serious threat to security at airports.

3.150 In addition to identifying individuals with criminal associations, the RCMP identified 16 businesses operating at airports that were linked to criminal activity such as providing travel arrangements for organized crime, facilitating identity fraud, and selling stolen passes. The firms were associated with biker gangs, organized crime, and drug trafficking. No firms with terrorist associations were discovered. At the two airports where Customs and the RCMP had no active criminal conspiracy investigations, nine companies with criminal links were operating.
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(Then there's this little gem.-)

Intelligence lessons learned from critical incidents are incomplete

3.69 It is unreasonable to expect that the government can gather sufficient intelligence to protect Canada from all attacks. What is reasonable to expect is that after any significant incident, an organization will analyze how it responded, identify the lessons it learned, and apply those lessons in the future.

3.70 Learning from Ressam. On 14 December 1999 a Montreal resident, Ahmed Ressam, was caught attempting to smuggle explosives into the United States from Canada. The Assistant Deputy Minister Committee on Public Safety commissioned a lessons-learned study that looked at operational deficiencies in the handling of the case and at vulnerabilities in the system. However, the Committee had no authority to direct departments to correct the problems or deficiencies that the study identified.

3.71 The lessons-learned report (30 August 2001) noted that a number of the identified problems had been fixed but that several significant issues remained unresolved. The report was based on separate lessons-learned reports submitted by individual departments and agencies. However, some agencies had not produced reports. For example, we found that while the Passport Office was significantly involved in the Ressam affair, it did not conduct a lessons-learned analysis.

Liberal promises seem like the Seinfeld show about nothing