The 17-year-old arrested in racist and anti-Semitic graffiti attacks last Saturday was allegedly carrying a knife and BB handgun when he was apprehended by the Ottawa Police.
According to police reports entered into the court record, the teen was caught in the early hours of the morning on Saturday, Nov. 19, while vandalizing the Soloway Jewish Community Centre on Nadolny Sachs Private.
He appeared in court late this morning via video feed from a holding cell in the basement of the Ontario Court of Justice.
Prior to addressing the accused, the Justice of the Peace asked those in attendance whether the parents or guardians of the boy were present. A man and woman seated in the court raised their hands.
The accused stood before the camera, his wrists in handcuffs, wearing all black and sporting a shaved head. The Justice asked the teen to state his name for the record and announced the adjournment of his hearing.
The case is set to resume next Wednesday, Nov. 30, when the youth will appear in court yet again via video feed in the early afternoon.
In the meantime, the accused, whose name is protected under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, will be held in custody.
The young man was arrested and charged with six counts each of uttering threats and mischief to property following six incidents of racist and anti-Semitic graffiti being spray-painted on various places of worship throughout Ottawa. Police allege he is responsible for all of the attacks.
The graffiti, including swastikas and derogatory language, was found spray-painted in red on the doors of a prayer centre, mosque, church, a Jewish community centre, and two synagogues.
The young man also faces two counts of possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose, and six counts of failure to comply with a sentence or disposition. According to court records, the youth was on 18 months’ probation for previous charges of assault, robbery, and bail violations committed last August.
By Floriane Bonneville, Lauren Sproule and Bronwyn Beairsto
Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan announced this afternoon Canada would acquire 18 Boeing Super Hornet jets to replace the military’s current 35-year-old CF-18 jet.
Sajjan said the government was not willing to carry the risks of continued reliance on the aging jets.
The Super Hornets are an interim solution until the contract for a more permanent fleet is awarded in “an open and transparent competition,” said Minister of Public Services and Procurement, Judy Foote.
Foote would not say how much the planes would cost.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau defended this afternoon’s announcement in question period. “We right now have a capability gap, we cannot fulfill our NORAD obligations.” He said that it is necessary to get new jets “to protect our sovereignty and support our allies.”
Carleton researchers Jeffrey Monaghan and Andrew Crosby say they found Project SITKA almost by accident as part of a wider search for government documents that illustrate surveillance techniques. After filing one of their many routine access to information requests, they found a 2015 RCMP report listing 89 indigenous rights activists who were closely profiled and monitored by the police.
Created by the RCMP’s National Intelligence Coordination Centre in 2014, the database originally contained 313 individuals. Those were grassroots indigenous activists. Many were deemed “passive,” and were dropped from active consideration, the report says.
According to the report, the 89 who showed potential for “criminality” were further scrutinized and added to a database to be shared with front line officers and industry partners.
Monaghan, a criminology professor at Carleton, said that this report is part of a long history of indigenous people in Canada being placed under far more scrutiny than other people.
“SITKA is notable because its scope is not just the really prominent actors,” said Monaghan. “It shows us how much information’s being accumulated, and stored.”
Monaghan’s research partner, Crosby, said the 89 individuals under surveillance are unaware of it, and therefore have no recourse to challenge the activity.
While names are redacted from the report, it breaks down where the scrutinized activists are from. The majority, 35, are from New Brunswick, but 15 are from Ontario.
Metis activisit Gabrielle Fayant said she found only one thing notable about the report: they now had proof of surveillance. “People have been watching indigenous people very closely for a very long time,” said Fayant, who is from Alberta. But now, she says, “It was laid out in a report, ‘we’re watching you’.”
Gabrielle Fayant (left) participating in an Idle No More protest on Parliament Hill. (Photo Gabrielle Favant/Instagram)
The Metis woman calls herself “oskapewis”, which means “helper” in Assiniboine. She helps when she is needed. An active indigenous rights protector since the round dances of Idle No More in 2013, Fayant believes that she has been watched for her activism in the past.
The report names dozens of indigenous groups of particular concern including Unis’ot’en Camp in British Columbia and Idle No More. Fayant says she has been involved with all of them. She’s confident that of the 313 people on the original list, she knows over half of them.
But Fayant is optimistic: “Being under surveillance, in many cases, means that you’re doing something good.” The tension between state surveillance and indigenous activists is ongoing.
A week after the Project SITKA report was released, Carleton coincidentally held a lecture on campus called “Infrastructure Security and Resilience.” According to the agenda, the evening’s speakers were to include a former Assistant Deputy Director for CSIS, as well as the COO for a major North American energy regulatory authority.
The night’s facilitator, Martin Rudner, said that the lecture’s speakers were looking at the critical infrastructure needed for Canada’s security.
Carleton student and activist Ashley Courchene said he was incensed by a security industry presence on campus and quickly took to Facebook to gather a group of similarly concerned people. After a quick briefing session, the group set about shutting down the lecture.
Courchene said the group was “protesting the criminalisation of indigenous people,” reasoning that when industry and government talk of “protecting the critical infrastructure,” it can often be in opposition to indigenous peoples.
Security guards block protesters from entering Richcraft Hall during last Tuesday’s protest. (Photo: Ruth Yohanes-Tecle)
Crosby was not at the protest, but commented later that organizations concerned with National Security, like CSIS, have reframed their role as protecting infrastructure from domestic extremists and terrorism. He says this leads to the troubling association of “indigenous activism” with “terrorism.”
After a conveniently timed fire alarm, protesters were successful in shutting down the lecture series.
Rudner said that he was disappointed that the protesters did not attend the lecture and ask questions rather than shutting it down.
“It was an outrageous violation of the right of academics, professors and others, to have an open discourse on issues of national security,” said Rudner.
The refrain from the activists and academics in the wake of Project SITKA, is that surveillance will not put a stop to their activism.
“My parents have been watched,” said Courchene, who is Anishnaabe from Sagkeeng First Nation, “so I’m carrying that on if I am.” He added somberly, “I’m not scared.”
Fayant draws strength from the veteran activists who mentored her during Idle No More. Surveillance is part of life for them. Fayant keeps their message in mind as she reads Project SITKA: “If you want to watch, then watch. But we’re not doing anything wrong.”
A Neo-Nazi newsletter started showing up in mailboxes in Ottawa during a week already marred by several incidents of anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim and racist graffiti appearing on religious buildings.
Vanier resident Amanda Carver, a registered psychotherapist and mother of two, found a copy of Your Ward News in her mailbox last week.
While some of her neighbours dismissed the newsletter as junk mail and threw it out, Carver did not.
As Carver flipped through the pages of the self-proclaimed “world’s largest anti-Marxist publication,” she found a graphic depicting Minister of Public Services and Procurement Judy Foote being gassed in a chamber operated by US President-elect Donald Trump.
“There are sections in here where he advocates for sexually assaulting women,” Carver said.
But what concerns Carver the most is not knowing who delivered this publication to her home.
After receiving the newsletter, Carver contacted the police department and took the publication to the Ottawa police headquarters on Elgin Street.
“They flipped through it. They said it was disgusting and distasteful, but it’s free speech,” she said.
A photograph of an illustration featured in the latest issue of Your Ward News.
Another woman, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal, also received the newsletter in the mailbox of her Old Ottawa East home.
The woman said she received the pamphlet Thursday afternoon, and immediately called the Ottawa Police.
She said a police officer arrived at her home later that evening and left with a copy of the controversial paper.
Media relations officer Const. Marc Soucy of the Ottawa Police told The Drift that they have not received a single complaint about the publication to date.
The newsletter was so controversial that this past spring, Canada Post was ordered to stop delivering it.
The editor-in-chief of the Toronto based newsletter said in an email interview that he intends to “test various markets” for the publication and that the target for the fall edition was the GTA, Ottawa, Montreal and Niagara region. He said he has been using volunteers to hand deliver the publication.
He said he has been able to continue delivering the newsletter without Canada Post.
“The Canada Post ban was initially an administrative inconvenience,” he said. “But once we reorganized our distribution and we assembled a combination of private delivery companies and volunteers, things went back to running smoothly.”
The publication’s editor said it was no accident the publication tried to make inroads in Ottawa and the Niagara region, where provincial by-elections were taking place.
The goal, he said, was not to influence the elections, but to take advantage of the politically charged environment.
What is considered Hate Speech?
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects freedom of expression, however there are limits, explained Richard Moon, a Professor of Law at the University of Windsor.
“Even prior to the Charter, there has always been a recognition that freedom of expression matters,” Moon said. “But there are ways in which expression can be employed that are harmful to others.”
In Canada, the federal Criminal Code is the main legal route for dealing with hate speech said Moon. However, the definition of hate speech under this provision is narrow. There must be willful promotion of hatred and the expression must be extreme.
Moon says he recognizes how difficult such a narrow definition can make it to legally draw the line between freedom of expression and hate speech.
Back in her home, watching her daughters play, Carver mentions something else that worries her about receiving the newsletter.
“The thing that is really disconcerting to me, is that this seems to be coinciding with all the hate graffiti in the city,” said Carver.
A 17-year-old boy who was arrested Saturday following a string of racist and anti-Semitic graffiti, is set to appear before an Ottawa court this morning.
The youth faces 20 charges, including six counts each of uttering threats and mischief to property, and two counts of possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose.
Court records show that the teen was in violation of his probation at the time of his arrest this past weekend.
Between Monday and Saturday of last week there were six incidents of hate graffiti throughout the city of Ottawa. Six buildings, including a mosque, church, and synagogue were vandalized. The incidents all included spray-painted swastikas with racist and anti-Semitic language.
The way to fix homelessness is to permanently subsidize housing for the poor, a community forum on ending homelessness heard today.
Professor Marybeth Shinn from Vanderbilt University used a keynote speech at the 13th annual Community Forum on Ending Homelessness to make a plea for affordable housing.
“Homelessness for families in the United States is really a housing affordability problem,” Shinn told hundreds of workers from the public and private sector. “You fix the housing affordability problem, you fix homelessness.”
Data retrieved from Alliance to End Homelessness Ottawa’s Annual Progress Reports[/box]
The “intervention” of permanent subsidies was one of many different options explored as part of the research conducted by the Family Options Study in the United States. The federally-funded project compared the effectiveness of different interventions for homelessness. But subsidies, Shinn admitted, are not a new idea.
“Some of the lessons are not so surprising; so you give people housing subsidies and that fixes homelessness,” Shinn said dryly to chuckles from the audience.
Shinn was quick to point out that there were “benefits that radiated beyond housing stability” that emerged from the permanent subsidy experiment. According to Shinn, the study indicated a reduction in substance abuse, partner violence and psychological stresses that contribute to homelessness.
Professor Marybeth (Beth) Shinn detailed the findings of the Family Options Study in her keynote speech on Tuesday. Photo by: Matthew Olson
“The study suggests a clear winner among interventions for families experiencing homelessness in the United States,” Shinn said. However, the professor admitted that she wasn’t sure how these results might apply to services in Canada, saying, “you’ll have to tell me.”
Deputy Mayor Mark Taylor, who acts as the City of Ottawa’s Special Liaison on Housing and Homelessness, said he believes there are already good programs in place.
“Right now, the scenario that exists is we are supporting people across a whole variety of different needs, so someone might receive a subsidy for transit – we’re bringing in a low-income transit pass in Ottawa – they might receive a subsidy to send their kids to school,” Taylor said. “They might collect a couple of meals a month from the Food bank – so in a sense, they’re receiving a subsidy on food.”
Deputy Mayor Mark Taylor opened National Housing Day on behalf of Mayor Jim Watson at the forum. Photo by: Matthew Olson
“Beth Shinn’s principle of ‘housing subsidies work’ comes as no surprise. In fact, we’re looking at taking it a step further and saying ‘life subsidies’ can sometimes be of a real benefit, especially to a family.”
It is this kind of talk that makes the annual forum so important, said Executive Director Mark Bulthuis from the Alliance to End Homelessness Ottawa.
“I often describe the day as… a dialogue between researchers and practitioners, the folks who are on the front lines doing this work day in and day out and wanting to make sure they have access to the latest research,” Bulthuis said, adding that researchers also needed to be aware of “local realities” in the city.
But for Bulthuis, there is always more work to be done.
“I think we’re moving in the right direction,” Bulthuis said. “I think there’s lots of reasons to be optimistic right now; some of that just has to translate to new investments to help us work.”
A National Defence Committee meeting on Tuesday that was supposed to provide a briefing on current military operations was instead dominated by questions about Canadian troops in Iraq.
Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Jonathan Vance faced scrutiny from committee members about Operation IMPACT, which the Canadian Armed Forces has been participating in since Oct. 2014, with the goal of defeating the group known as Daesh, or the Islamic State. The operation, which currently involves 650 Canadian troops, is set to continue until Mar. 31, 2017.
While the forces are supposed to be training, advising and assisting Iraqi security forces, Liberal MP Mark Gerretsen wanted to know the difference between “train, advise and assist” and “train, advise, assist and accompany.” According to Vance, these two phrases are very different —the first term is an advisory role, which is what Canadian forces are actually doing.
“The first mission, train advise and assist, is the mission that we are on,” said Vance. “The ‘accompany’ is used to describe that you are actually with them, in the fight, on the front lines.”
To further illustrate his point, Vance pointed out that when Canadian troops were in Afghanistan, they were actually fighting with Afghan soldiers. He said that in Operation IMPACT, troops support Iraqi forces in a medical capacity, help commanders maintain control, and train soldiers. They also, however have rules in place that allow for defence and fire in the event of an attack or approach that may overwhelm Iraqi troops, he said.
“It is absolutely a part of the fact that we are there with them. We have the responsibility to protect ourselves and as we have explained repeatedly, have the responsibility to the defence of others if they are overwhelmed,” said Vance.
According to Vance, Canadian forces have the weaponry that allows Canadian troops to stay off the front line but still eliminate threats, such as heavily armoured vehicles that may threaten Iraqi Peshmerga forces.
Conservative Committee Member Pierre Paul-Hus, MP for Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, was not convinced. He continued to ask Vance whether or not Canadian Forces are engaging in offensive attacks but the general held his position.
“If you are suggesting that our forces have been maneuvering so as to provide offensive fire, thereby taking the fight to the enemy, then you are wrong,” Vance responded. “We have responded only to provocation by Daesh where the intensity of their force could not be stopped by any means and I need to be as unequivocal on that as possible.”
After the meeting, both Vance and Paul-Hus continued to speak on these points with Vance maintaining that Canadian troops are merely assisting Iraqi forces and Paul-Hus saying he believes that the whole truth is still not being told.
It’s obvious why everyone wants to be Bardish Chagger’s friend. The novice MP—already the Minister for Small Business and Tourism and now also the government House leader—looks naturally at ease among her constituents in the Kitchener Market on a recent Saturday, offering broad grins and friendly waves to all those passing through, sipping her Tim Hortons coffee through a straw.
Not so long ago, a politician like Chagger—young, female and a visible minority—might have been relegated to the backbench. But instead, she’s been handed real decision-making power, and there are some changes she wants to make.
“We need to be able to shake them up a little bit,” Chagger said, in an interview, adding that the best way is “to bring in somebody that’s not been in the halls of Parliament for too long, somebody who does question and challenge decisions that are being made.”
First elected in October 2015 as the Member of Parliament for Waterloo—22 years after she first planted a Liberal sign on a front lawn for the then MP, Andrew Telegdi, whom she later served as executive assistant—Chagger is also the first woman to be appointed Leader of the House.
The position calls for a steady hand and a thorough knowledge of parliamentary procedure, the kind of job not usually assigned to a young, first-time MP. At 36, Chagger is one of the youngest members in the cabinet, second only to the 31-year-old Maryam Monsef. Given that she was one of the co-leads for Trudeau’s Southwestern Ontario campaign, few observers were surprised when Chagger was named Minister for Small Business and Tourism. But her appointment as House leader, this August, certainly made waves, Jim Bronskill wrote in the Huffington Post at the time.
“By having a government that looks like Canada, I believe, we’re more relevant because people can relate to us as well,” Chagger said.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hasn’t just paid lip service to diversity, appointing more women, visible minorities and people with disabilities to his cabinet than any previous PM. There are now 18 rookies and 15 women in a cabinet of 30. Jodi Wilson-Raybould of the Kwakwaka’wakw peoples, a former Crown prosecutor from British Columbia, has become the first indigenous Minister of Justice. Trudeau gambled by appointing so many novice MPs to cabinet, but it may pay off, especially with Chagger.
“She was always very interested in policy,” Telegedi said over the phone, “and always well-liked.”
Telegi said Chagger has the diplomatic skills necessary to navigate the role.
Eric Davis, a lawyer who knew Chagger when they were both Young Liberals at the University of Waterloo, says Chagger has “always been community-minded and an exceptionally hard-worker.”
Chagger recognizes the value of maintaining an open line of communication with the opposition, and plans to focus on teamwork rather than control in her role as House leader.
“It’s not about one individual, it’s about the team that one comes with, one builds, one empowers,” said Chagger.
She understands that the government can’t be “everything to everyone,” but Chagger and her fellow ministers are willing to try.
