[LINK] "TTC worker's death on job spurs calls for drug tests"

From Jeff Gray's article in The Globe and Mail:

A transit worker who died in a subway tunnel accident last year was high on marijuana when the work car he was driving crashed, according to a high-ranking Toronto Transit Commission source.

The information, contained in a report to be made public later this month, the source said, is expected to amplify calls for drug and alcohol testing that have surfaced after a TTC bus driver was charged with drunk driving this week.

The April, 2007, accident that killed Tony Almeida, a 38-year-old father of two, shook the transit agency and gave renewed impetus to a wide-ranging safety review.

That review had already put drug and alcohol testing on TTC management's agenda before this week's incident.

An improperly stowed piece of equipment on his work car caught the side of the tunnel wall and the vehicle derailed. The TTC later pleaded guilty to Ministry of Labour charges of failing to maintain a safe workplace and paid a $250,000 fine.

[. . .]

Bob Kinnear, leader of Local 113 of the Amalgamated Transit Union that represents 9,000 TTC employees, said he could not comment on the report on Mr. Almeida's death without seeing the document. But he said he would fight any move to force his workers to submit to drug and alcohol testing.

"They're out to lunch," he said of TTC management, calling the idea an invasion of privacy and vowing to instruct all TTC workers to refuse to submit to any such tests.

Mr. Kinnear said TTC management told him two weeks ago in writing that this month they would be proposing drug and alcohol testing to the commission of city councillors that oversees the TTC.

Drug and alcohol testing for transit operators is mandated by law in the United States, but has been contentious when raised in Canada both for intercity bus drivers and in other industries.

"I'm telling you right now that it is not going to happen as far as I'm concerned," Mr. Kinnear said, arguing that testing would not stop such an incident from happening again.

This report has gotten more than the usual attention because of a recent incident involving a drunk TTC bus driver, who was arrested by the police in response to passengers' complaints and whose "blood-alcohol level was found to be three times over the limit and a bottle of suspicious liquid was recovered from his bus."

[LINK] Terrorism, Canadian-style

News of the continuing saga of the 2006 Toronto terrorism case, now at trial, has gotten a considerable amount of attention. See Isabel Teotonio's article in The Toronto Star, "Court hears plan to storm Parliament, 'kill everybody'".

The youth accused of belonging to a homegrown terror plot was an ideal candidate to behead the Prime Minister because he was good at chopping wood, according to wiretap evidence heard during his trial in a Brampton court this morning.

Prosecutors played a series of car probes they say captures members of the so-called Toronto 18 plotting to storm Parliament Hill and kill politicians.

During one conversation on Feb. 4 2006, which took place during a trip to northern Ontario where they were allegedly scouting property for a safehouse, one man asks, "What happens at the Parliament?" One of the alleged ringleaders responds, "We go and kill everybody."

Chatter ensues about whether the prime minister is "Paul loser" – a reference to Paul Martin – or the "the other guy Harper." After determining it is indeed Stephen Harper, the alleged ringleader suggests the youth would be a good candidate saying, "I know he'd cut off their heads."

Another man pipes up, "Did you see him, how he was cutting the wood?"

Court has heard that about six weeks earlier some of the group's members attended a training camp near Washago, a town about an hour and a half north of Toronto.

The group is also alleged to have been plotting several truck bombs around the GTA before police busted the group in the summer of 2006, netting 14 men and four youths. Charges have since been stayed against four adults and three youths.

The Globe and Mail's Colin Freeze and Dakshana Bascaramurty have a slightly different take on the talk of beheading the Canadian Prime Minister in their article "Tapes expose tension among terror suspects" has a slightly take on the affair, suggesting that this talk was actually intended to be a sort of funny in-joke.

Tensions between two top terrorism suspects were revealed yesterday as wiretap evidence played in a Brampton court suggested the No. 1 suspect was a big talker with little expertise to contribute to the alleged plot, and his No. 2 was a quiet doer, who set about building detonators in his spare time.

"I built, uh, uh, the first, I mean ... radio frequency remote control detonator," a man alleged to be the No. 2 suspect is heard saying in a tape of a February, 2006, intercepted phone conversation played in court.

"The only problem is that you have to stay 30 away from it ... 30 feet away, which is not so good."

The other suspect, the talker, replied: "So you have to get blown up? ... "

The other person replied that he was tired of his friend failing to come through on never-ending promises to acquire money and handguns: "It's depressing me now because all you got is a pistol."

[. . .]

After the arrests, much publicity surrounded a claim that the accused wanted to behead Canada's prime minister. But an intercepted conversation aired in court suggests the discussion occurred amid laughter.

"What happens at the Parliament," one suspect said.

"We go and kill everybody," said the alleged ringleader.

"And then what?"

"... And we get victory."

[BRIEF NOTE] "Parklife -- parklife!"

On Prince Edward Island, the placename "Parkdale" refers to a former suburb and town of Charlottetown, a region that as the CBC says was transformed by strong urban growth after the Second World War from a suburban area to an urban one. The town's existence was extinguished in 1994 as part of a
controversial and thorough process of municipal amalgamation that created Charlottetown's two cities and two substantial towns, but there is still a reasonably strong community identity and the frontiers of the former town of Parkdale roughly corresponds to the frontiers of the modern Charlottetown-Parkdale electoral district. Parkdale, on Prince Edward Island, is boring.

Welcome to the neighbourhood of Parkdale
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Parkdale, in Toronto, is notorious as an area in downtown Toronto that is notably for high levels of poverty, social ills like drug addiction and street prosituttion, and negligent landlords. As one source puts it,

[a]t one time, Parkdale was a rather desirable neighborhood west of the city of Toronto. It was named Parkdale because of the park-like environment with lots of trees close to the lake. However, during the 20th century, the city encroached on, and eventually engulfed, the community. The building of the Gardiner Expressway cut off the community from the lake. The biggest blow came when deinstitutionalization of the psychiatric hospitals dumped hundreds of patients into the cheap rooming houses of Parkdale.

My sister and brother-in-law lived for several years in a cheap apartment overlooking a side street. They would occasionally see naïve suburban kids trying to score some drugs. More often than not, they would leave only with empty pockets, and perhaps, a little wiser.

The Wikipedia article cited above goes into greater detail on Parkdale's history. On the plus side, low rents and Parkdale's relative proximity to both the downtown core and the in-street of Queen Street West promise to make the territory a net beneficiary of of gentrification. (The people living there, well.)

Since I came to Toronto, living for the first portion of my stay just outside of Parkdale's frontiers (but doing my laundry just inside Parkdale's frontiers), I've always been caught by the incongruity of the fact that the same name can apply to two such vastly different sorts of communities. The psychic resonances are odd.