Category Archives: Assignment 2

More Marijuana Charges in Rideau-Vanier than Next Five Wards Combined

Assignment 2, Database assignment two
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Police laid more marijuana charges on people in Rideau-Vanier Ward than the next five wards combined in 2013, according to an analysis of Ottawa police crime data.

The number of marijuana charges in Rideau-Vanier totaled 302, more than four and a half times as many as the next largest ward, Capital, with only 67 charges laid. Adjusted for population sizes, Rideau-Vanier has a rate of 6.3 charges laid per capita, while Capital’s rate sits at 1.8 charges laid per capita.

The Ottawa Police declined to comment, presumably due to a backlog after Wednesday’s War Memorial shooting and subsequent investigation.

One marijuana activist thinks people in Rideau-Vanier are unfairly targeted. Russell Barth, an Ottawa-based marijuana legalization activist, says police must be targeting youth, minorities, and low income.

“If you are poor, you are much more likely to be stopped by police. If you’re a rich white kid, you’ll never have a problem,” Barth says. Barth contends that low-level possession charges leave people with a criminal record, doing more harm than good. The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police agree with this.

“I think any cop that has nothing better to do than give a 15 year old kid a ticket for possessing marijuana is incompetent, and should lose their badge,” Barth says.

However, 2011 census data reveals Rideau-Vanier’s youth between ages 15-29 make up nearly 30% of the population, well over the Ottawa percentage (21%) but only marginally larger than Capital Ward (over 26%).

According to 2006 census data,the most recent municipal data with ethnic statistics by ward, 26.8% of the population of Rideau-Vanier is a visible minority. Somerset, with a fraction of the marijuana charges laid, has 31.0% visible minority. In Capital Ward, the ward with the second-highest number of charges, 21.9% of the population was made up of visible minorities.

Eugene Oscapella, lawyer and criminology professor, does not jump to that assumption so fast. Oscapella lectures at the University of Ottawa, and in 2011 was awarded the Kaiser Foundation National Award for Excellence in Public Policy for his research on drug policy reform.

“Since it is ‘charges laid’ [and not simply ‘police incidents’] police discretion factors in,” Oscapella says.

“Are police more willing to charge people in problem areas? Is there a preference for people to be charged more often in poor areas? Or vice-versa, it could be that police see a well-off person and try to throw the book at them.

“These are the sort of questions you need to ask; Are police using their discretion in a way that people with certain characteristics over others? Police have a broad discretion… they might see a well-dressed, polite person, maybe they have the “right” skin colour, and they decide to let [that person] go.”

But Oscapella did not rule racial profiling out, noting that the United States as a “racial dimension” to petty crime. He says Ottawa needs to ask itself if it does too.

“Probably,” he says. “It’s hard to say but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was.”

In 2010, University of Montreal sociologist Chistopher McAll released a report finding that the arrest rate was double for black teens than white teens. Citing 2001 drug charges, he found that black teens caught smoking marijuana faced charges while there was not a single white teen charged with marijuana possession. The study prompted hearings from the Quebec Human Rights Commission and a damning internal study by Montreal police. 

However,  the Ottawa data do not distinguish between the three types of marijuana charges police lay: possession, possession for the purpose of trafficking (over 30 grams), and marijuana production (grow-ops). Oscapella says that makes it very difficult to distinguish how the charges are being laid, and therefore draw concrete conclusions.

Oscapella says that questions need to be asked about how the Ottawa Police use their discretion to lay charges.

“Sometimes they target certain areas… especially if crimes are more visible,” he says. “It’s possible police spend more resources targeting [Rideau-Vanier] because it has high instances of other crimes. If you have more people looking for something, you’re going to end up with more charges.”

Rideau-Vanier Councillor Mathieu Fleury, facing a municipal election Monday where crime in the ward has been a major campaign issue, could not be reached for comment.

Assignment 2
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Ontario man Manfred Loerzel’s livestock shipment business is still up and running after being fined twice for inhumane transport of horses.

Last year, Canadian Food Inspection Agency fined him and his company Loerzel Farm Transport Inc. $26,000 for causing the death of two horses during transportation. The agency’s investigation suggests the trailer that his company used had projections that injured the horses, which violates of the Health of Animals Act.

According to the agency’s prosecution records, that act brought in $297,000 through fines since 2011, the highest among other regulations. And of all the eight prosecution cases, four are about inhumane transport of horses, and Loerzel’s company are involved in two of them.

Allison Danyluk Roff, a veterinarian with the agency’s office in Regina, does road checks on livestock trailers along two local highways. “The most common noncompliance in my opinion is overcrowding,” says Danyluk Roff, “and people often mixing different classes of horses together in a trailer, they could get aggressive.”

Heather Clemenceau from the Canadian House Defence Coalition, says the group is working on an access to information request to try to identify more of ill-treatments to horses during shipments.

She says in one such incident, a horse fell down the trailer after the driver hit the brake suddenly. However, the driver continued on to his destination knowing the female horse was down, which left the horse suffering in pain for more than six hours.

Clemenceau says in other cases, horses coming in from the U.S. are left too long without feed and water. Canadian Food Inspection Agency staff check and seal loads of horses at border checkpoints. The agency says the horses should remain on the truck overnight so their staff don’t have to cut the seal and reseal again. But this could leave the horses more than a day without food. Canadian regulations allow horses to be transported for up to 36 hours without a break.

International horse meat supplier

Horse shipments along the Canada-U.S. border have been increasing since 2006, when the American government initially banned horse slaughter for human consumption. As a result, the number of horses slaughtered in Canada in federally and provincially inspected establishments has more than doubled from 2006 to 2008.

The Canadian Horse Defence Coalition identified five Canadian slaughterhouses, where live horses imported from south of the border are being killed.

 


 

According to figures from Canadian Food Inspection Agency, Canada exported 13,960,034 kilograms of horse meat last year. Canadian Meat Council says the major markets include Switzerland, Japan, France, Belgium and Kazakhstan.

Bankrupt farmer gets fresh start with livestock transport business

Former Ontario farmer Loerzel declared bankruptcy in 2005. According to his Statement of Affairs document, he owed $799,000 to 44 creditors, including a finance company, a farm equipment company, a cell phone carrier, a car dealer and a bank. However, at the time of the bankruptcy, he had only $3,601 worth of assets to pay his creditors.

Loerzel owned two farm properties together with his parents before running into debt, and he got the sole ownership after the death of his parents. However, the TD Bank seized and sold the two properties in 2003 and 2004 after he lost a business contract.

A year after filing bankruptcy, Loerzel was cleared from all the debt because his creditors recognized he had no money to pay back his debt. Loerzel also get to keep most of his assets, including household goods and his 1994 Ford car as those items are deemed of little value. The $100 his had on hand before declaring bankruptcy was used to cover the fee to file claim with the Office of Superintendent and Bankruptcy.

According to records kept by Ontario government services, Loerzel incorporated his livestock transport company, Loerzel Farm Transport Inc., in 2007. But two years into his business, veterinary inspectors from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency found through their routine inspections that the trailer his company used had sharp angles that caused injuries to a number of horses and death to two horses. In 2010, during similar inspections, the agency staff once again concluded Loerzel’s company did not provide an adequate mode of transportation.

However, it wasn’t until three years later, when the Ontario Court of Justice in Windsor finally registered two convictions against both of the incidents, and struck down a total fine of $72,000.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency declined to give more details on the two cases. And the Ontario court of Justice says there’s no record of Loerzel’s company being fined.

Whether Loerzel paid the fines or not remains a question. But his company, Loerzel Farm Transport Inc., is still registered with the Ontario government with an active status.

Canada exports horses for slaughter too?

An article on the Canadian Horse Defence Coalition website, dated October 18, 2012, says draft horses from Alberta being shipped to Japan from Calgary International Airport are jammed in wooden crates to the point that they can’t stand.

The group says since 2009, it has been receiving anonymous footage showing horses being loaded into trucks with electronic prods and transported to the airport.

The article reveals draft horses from Canadian producers have been routinely shipped to Japan via airports in Calgary and Winnipeg. And they get slaughtered in Japan for horse sashimi, which is a Japanese raw meat dish, once they grow bigger and meet certain weight limits.

However, on the Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s website, horses exported to Japan are only identified as for permanent stay or racing. Among the more than 30 countries that buy live horses from Canada, only the U.S. has a category that says for “immediate slaughter.”

In the Canadian Horse Defence Coalition article, it quotes a 2008 Alberta Horse Welfare Report, saying the horses exported to Japan are worth $20,000 each.