63 HOOLIGANS ARRESTED AT VICTORIA CANADA DAY DEBAUCH: including 16 underage drinkers incarcerated

SHOP WINDOWS BROKEN, 4 BUS WINDOWS BROKEN,

140 COMPLAINT CALLS TO POLICE

The Times Colonist’s resident buffoon writer, Jack Knox asks the rhetorical question in today’s frontpage headline: IS CANADA DAY WORTH THE TROUBLE?

He suggests the jury is out.  This Citizen-juror has made up his mind.  NO, IT MOST CERTAINLY IS NOT.

Would Victoria’s new Police Chief Jamie Graham be smirking while being interviewed on tv, downplaying the havoc and mayhem, if these sixty-three arrests had been due to overindulgence in heroin or crystal meth?  Why is the man so blase about this alarming phenomenon when it comes to alcohol abuse and mass public intoxication? 

Equally stunned by the ‘patriotic’ booze bash are Victoria City Councillors Charlayne Thornton-Joe and John Luton, who both think ‘its worth keeping Victoria’s Canada show alive,’ as Mr. Knox puts it.

They must think it is normal to have helicopters buzzing around in the middle of the night, hearing dipsomaniac teenagers screaming “F___ing Canada rocks!” and urinating wherever they please.  One new City-approved urinal is certainly no match for this lot of louts.

I’m just old enough, I suppose, to be dismissed by these young people as a cranky old man (being born in 1952), but I do not remember feeling the necessity to display my love for my country in this obnoxious manner when I was their age.

In fact, it is my impression that this whole upsurge in faux patriotism is commensurate with the start of our foreign war adventurism at the behest of the Gringos, starting around 2001 with the Liberals’ foolish commitment to the unjust war in Afghanistan.

Is there a correlation between loutish behaviour and Liberal and Conservative WAR PARTY propaganda that attempts to gloss over the glaring injustice of our futile and vicious foreign policies?  I believe a serious case can be made that in fact, the more we try to export democracy through the barrels of guns, the less civilized we become at home, with the predictable reductions in freedom of speech and movement that inevitably come with a fascist police state, which is what the scene looked like the other night in the streets of Victoria.

Instead of fighting that war with civilized non-violent protest activity in the streets, these kids have been thoroughly brainwashed, it seems, into thinking we live in a free country.

Try telling that to the Canadian citizen who has been festering in Guantanamo prison in Cuba, Omar Khadr, for about the same length of time, without ever having been found guilty of a crime.

Try talking about the freedom of speech denied to Cecilia von Dehn and Donald Spratt, recently arrested in Vancouver for protesting peacefully against the notorious Bill 48, which prohibits peaceful protest activity in front of abortuaries.

Try talking about so-called ‘freedom’ in Canada if you are an anti-Olympics protester, many of whom  have already been hassled by the Vancouver Police for organizing against that obscenely wasteful folly, while the poorest of the poor are ignored or arrested, again and again …

Try talking about  so-called ‘freedom’ to the homeless, needing a safe place to camp, and constantly getting arrested in Victoria (and in other provincial cities) for the ‘crime’ of being poor. 

CANCEL THE DAMN THING NEXT YEAR

- Gregory Paul Michael Hartnell, President

Concerned Citizens’ Coalition

CCC