Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Save outrage for drunk drivers: Day

Outrage for drunk drivers is safe political ground even though MADD has been caught out paying like drunken spenders for fundraisers. The comparison shows the lack of training in elementary logic on the part of Day. I wonder how the RCMP likes being compared to drunk drivers? There really does not seem to be much basis for the comparison and in any even surely we do not have a limited supply of outrage. We should be able to summon up enough outrage for both if we just try a bit harder!
I could add my own irrelevancy: We have long waiting lists for operations and an infrastructure in dire need of repair while we spend billions on an illegal campaign in Afghanistan helping out the hegemon USA. Where is the outrage?

Save outrage for drunk drivers: Day


`Where's the shock and horror' for road crime, asks minister of public safety after Taser death in B.C.

Nov 19, 2007 04:30 AM
KELOWNA, B.C.–Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day says he wishes Canadians were as outraged over impaired driving deaths as they are over the death of a Polish immigrant shot with a Taser by police.

Worldwide condemnation has been heaped upon Canadian authorities after a video was released showing RCMP officers using a stun gun on Robert Dziekanski only 30 seconds after encountering him at the Vancouver airport last month. The 40-year-old man died shortly after.

Day has refused to comment about the Vancouver incident, saying he wanted to wait until various investigations and reviews are complete, including one he ordered four days after the death.

The minister told a crowd in the B.C. Interior on Saturday that Dziekanski's death was "tragic."

"Quite rightly, the whole nation is aghast.... One person was killed who didn't have to be killed," said Day, MP for Okanagan-Coquihalla.

But he says drunk-driving accidents also claim the lives of fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters and other loved ones, "and where's the shock and horror?"

The Tories introduced new legislation last month that would see harsher fines and sentences for impaired drivers and give police more powers for roadside testing.

This weekend, Gary Bass, RCMP deputy commissioner for the Pacific region, said in a statement he had invited Ontario Provincial Police to conduct an external and independent review of the investigation into the Vancouver Taser incident.

The RCMP announced the officers involved in the incident have been reassigned to other duties pending the outcome of the probe.

RCMP Commissioner William Elliot also said in a statement this weekend that the force still supports the use of Tasers but agrees further research is needed into its impact on people suffering from a medical condition known as excited delirium.




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