A crowd of several hundred people tuned out on a rainy day in Surrey to protest against the recent wave of gang-related shootings in the Vancouver area. The two organizers were Paul Hillsdon, a 19-year-old who ran for Surrey's city council last year, and Trevor Loke, a 20-year-old who is the Green Party candidate for Surrey-Newton in the provincial election in May.
Paul and Trevor deserve a lot of credit for putting this together, and I'll credit Trevor with this quote from his blog: "Community is fundamental to ending violence, and I don't care how young or old, gay or straight, communist or capitalist, partisan or apathetic, man, woman or gender-queer...you are all welcome to stop gang violence."
OK, Trevor, here's a couple of ideas from somebody who has been a Green Party candidate twice, and is happy to see people like you picking up the ball and running with it.
One of the first things that the BC Liberals did when they took power in 2001 was to close many courthouses throughout the province. It's commonplace for people to say that our crime problem is caused by lenient sentences given by judges.
These two things are related. Nobody wants to pay taxes, but the hard reality is, prisons, police, judges, and courtrooms all cost money. Judges could hand out ten and fifteen year sentences on a daily basis, but it won't have much effect if there's no place to keep the convicts locked up. Where is the pressure on judges and parole boards coming from to keep the prison population down? That would be a good election issue for you to develop, Trevor.
Let's dwell on the courthouse closures a bit longer. One of the courthouses that was closed was in Squamish. The result is, every time a police officer writes a ticket on the Sea-to-Sky Highway, he has to go to court in West Vancouver in case he is called upon to testify. This takes up a full day of his or her time, and this is time that will not be spent investigating local gang activity. I say that the courtroom closures were a classic example of false economy by the BC Liberals, and Liberal candidates should be called out on this.
Here's something else that should move up a few notches on the public agenda. At the same time that the wave of shootings has been taking place, a hearing has been going on at the Federal Courthouse in Vancouver about the fatal tasering of Robert Dziekanski in 2007. This hearing started on January 19, and is still going on.
Now, I have no doubt that the Dziekanski inquiry deals with a number of significant issues, such as how appropriate use of tasers by police should be defined. But, is six weeks (and counting) of expensive court time really an appropriate use of resources? Did the Picton trial need to go on for as long as it did? And who is it that sets the priorities for the allocation of the time of judges and courtroom space?
We read and hear about crime every day in the mass media. Let's bring money and resources into the discussion.
