Twenty-five years after Ontario introduced its independent police oversight unit, Ralph Agard — who helped push for the unit in 1989 — is satisfied with what it’s done, but many others who’ve been watching closely aren’t as convinced.

The Special Investigations Unit, often referred to as the SIU, is an independent unit which looks at any serious civilian injury, death or sexual assault involving police officers in Ontario.

The unit was introduced in 1990 to address misconduct and regain public confidence, particularly after a series of police shootings against black men in Toronto.

The SIU was inspired by a recommendation in the 1989 Clare Lewis report. Ralph Agard was a member of the original task force that wrote the report.

At the time, tensions were high between the black community and the Toronto police force.

“There were protests and marches….I remember stepping out of a coffee shop and you could cut the tension with a knife,” Agard says.

He says it’s not the same today, and he believes the SIU has been “an instrument of change.”

Not everyone agrees with that success story, though. At least not entirely.

In the early years of the SIU, high expectations were met with disappointment. The unit had a lack of legislation, limited resources and high turnover at the director level. This continued for quite a few years.

In 2008, the Ombudsman of Ontario — also a former director of the SIU — released a report which compared the SIU to a “toothless tiger.”

He found that the unit was “under-resourced, slow to respond to calls, and soft on police services that failed to follow the rules.”

Every year, the amount of SIU cases continue to increase — but relatively few charges have been laid. In their 2012-2013 fiscal year, 3.8% of cases resulted in charges.

According to Doug Hatlem, who recently produced a documentary about police brutality in Toronto, the number of officers actually charged by the SIU is “atrocious.”

Peter Rosenthal — the lawyer who represented police-shooting victim Sammy Yatim’s family — says Yatim’s case was unique. Massive public outcry spurred from the viral spreading of a video of the last few minutes of Yatim’s life in 2013. James Forcillo, the officer who shot Yatim on a streetcar in Toronto, was later charged with second-degree murder. Most cases don’t end that way, Rosenthal says.

But Agard warns against judging the effectiveness of the SIU based solely on the number of charges laid —  as there’s nothing to say the cleared officers weren’t all innocent.

But there’s still a lack of trust in the system.

Hatlem says that, although none of the investigators at the SIU are currently police officers, the majority of them used to be— mostly because they’re experienced in criminal investigations. But “there is a sense of camaraderie that doesn’t really disappear,” he says.

Two years ago, the Independent Investigations Office of B.C., a similar police oversight unit, began moving towards full civilian staffing — and Hatlem argues that Ontario should be doing the same thing.

“The more independent something is, the more confidence the people have in the conclusions,” says Michael Kempa, a criminology professor at the University of Ottawa.

Additionally, the antagonistic relationship between the SIU and the police force has been a struggle since the start.

The Ombudsman’s 2011 review of the SIU revealed that the unit had experienced everything from passive non-compliance to outright lack of cooperation from the police force. According to the report, they had been denied access to crime scenes and weren’t always immediately notified of incidents.

Jasbir Dhillon, a spokesperson for the SIU, says the unit has also had problems with officers hiring lawyers to help write their reports.

In 2014, the Supreme Court decided that police must make duty notes for the SIU independently — without a lawyer or other officers. Dhillon says this decision will help ensure that the reports show a more truthful account of what happened.

Dhillon says the SIU’s been making slow but consistent progress since 1990, and Kempa says they’ve shown “promising signs” in recent years.

The legislation that the SIU relies on was recently toughened, which helped give them more power, but many criminology experts agree that they still need more if they’re going to be effective. “More needs to be done,” says Hatlem.

Twenty-five years after the nation’s capital was awarded an NHL franchise, the Ottawa Senators’ biggest victory is arguably their community work.

That may not have been the vision of the team’s founder Bruce Firestone when he won a bid for the franchise on Dec. 6, 1990. He spearheaded a two year campaign with business colleagues and friends Cyril Leeder, now the Senators’ President, and Randy Sexton to bring an NHL team back to Ottawa.

Two and a half decades later, the team has yet to win a Stanley Cup for the city. But they’ve invested more than $100 million into the Ottawa community.

While the team has donated to charities and financed scholarships, the players have become regular visitors at CHEO and given their free time to champion causes like mental health awareness.

“I believe that they have probably been as strong a community organization as an NHL franchise,” said Michael Allen, CEO and President of the United Way.

Allen was “thrilled” when he learned Ottawa was gaining an NHL team. He had recently moved from Winnipeg which had just lost its franchise to Phoenix. 

Since the early days, Allen has worked closely with the team. In 2007, the Ottawa Senators Foundation contributed $1.2 million over 10 years to a United Way project tackling youth drug addictions through counselling, treatment and early intervention.

The Senators have also supported United Way’s Social Rec Connect project.

“In many communities across Ottawa, for a variety of reasons, some of them socio-economic, lack of facilities or cultural barriers, kids don’t participate in the same way in sports across all our neighbourhoods,” said Allen. 

Allen explained that with the foundation, counsellors go into at-risk communities to get youth involved in sports and try to overcome those challenges.

“We are committed to ensuring that kids are given the opportunity to be active, engaged and to feel good about themselves,” said Brad Weir, who oversees community investments with the Ottawa Senators Foundation.

The foundation was launched in 1998. Since then, the players have used their celebrity status to attract attention and raise money.

“What makes us special is our ability to leverage the brand of the hockey club and get our players involved in generating funds and awareness for organizations, programs and initiatives we support in the community,” said Weir.

Their largest investment is Roger’s House, a palliative care home built by the foundation for children and their families right next door to CHEO. Weir said the foundation has set up an endowment fund to ensure it’s still operating for many years to come.

The team has also made small, but significant contributions in the community by simply donating their time.

Kanata South Councillor Allan Hubley remembers when four players and their families showed up to a community meeting where they were raising money for an anti-bullying school program. 

In the spur of the moment, veteran defenceman Chris Phillips offered to play a game of hockey in his backyard rink with the highest bidder and friends.

“We raised $8,000 on that one item off the floor. They didn’t plan it. It was just done at the event,” said Hubley.

Next week on Mar. 5, Mayor Jim Watson is presenting former Senators captain Daniel Alfredsson with a key to the city, amongst the highest recognition that a citizen can receive.

“He worked hard to be a community ambassador. His work with mental health, CHEO and the United Way, all are a testament to the kind of commitment both he and the team hold for community work,” said Allen.

Documentation

Senators Foundation Infographic

(1) This infographic represents some of the contributions the Ottawa Senators Foundation has made within the city. It includes investments of money and the team’s time.
(2) Brad Weird from the Ottawa Senators Foundation sent me the document after our interview.
(3) The infographic helped me understand the breadth of community work the team does and the magnitude of their investments. It also gave me basic facts and figures that were useful when writing my article.

Senators Sport and Entertainment Impact Study

Twenty-five years ago, vandals lit fire to a stockpile of 14 million tires in Hagersville, Ont. The tire fire that burned for 18 days has impacted waste removal legislation and today, the firefighters who worked to put out the fire are fighting for their lives.

The story made international headlines in February 1990.

“It was pretty remarkable when you got there to see everything,” recalls Dennis Friesen, a firefighter from Simcoe County. “There were hundreds of firefighters involved, doing shifts.”

“We all worked together,” said Friesen, “Anybody that could send crews were sending crews to relieve guys because they were there for so long. We did eight hour shifts.”

Friesen now works as the Assistant Chief of the Norfolk County Fire and Rescue Services. “There’s really nothing there now,” Friesen says of the site.

The 20 foot tall piles of tires are all gone. The 12 acre site has been grown over with grass.

“This opened up a whole new regulation as far as tire storage because these tires were just piled up in one big area,” states Friesen.

The Waste Diversion Act was created in 2002 to monitor the recycling of all forms of waste. The Act created the Waste Diversion Organization. However, there was still no organizational body to regulate the clean-up of tires. One year later, the responsibilities of Waste Diversion Ontario was to monitor a new not-for-profit organization, Ontario Tire Stewardship. The Ontario Tire Stewardship was mandated to clean up all of the tire stockpiles across Ontario.

Julie Kwiecinski of Waste Diversion Ontario states that Hagersville has been influential to tire removal legislation.

“If there’s a lesson to be learned it’s the importance of removing tires stockpiles and that has been the focus of Ontario Tire Stewardship throughout the years. They have made some significant progress in that regard,” states Kwiecinski.

In 2009, the Used Tire Program Plan was submitted by Ontario Tire Stewardship. The plan detailed the removal of all tires in Ontario.

“We actually completed all of that clean-up last year, in 2014, to a tune of 1.6 million tires,” states Krista Cassidy, Manager of Promotions and Education at Ontario Tire Stewardship.

Tire stockpiles are a target for arson and the Hagersville fire is just one example of many tire fires across the country. Tires must be collected because they are a fire hazard, but they also contain chemicals that can run-off into the ground or air when burned.

Twenty-five years ago, the air was thick with chemicals as the tires burned. Benzene, styrene and toluene are three cancerous chemicals found in tires. Toluene and Benzene are also in gasoline.

“We refer to them as the ‘dead-enes’,” states Jeri Ottley, a volunteer firefighter in the Health and Safety department of the Fire Fighters Association of Ontario. “Any chemical that ends in ‘ene’ can make you ‘dead-ene’.”

The Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) Presumptive Legislation covers the health of firefighters. Firefighters can receive compensation for cancers based on their number of years of service.

Since the Hagersville fire, firefighters have put in claims to the WSIB for cancer noting the “Hagersville fire”, states Ottley.

According to Ottley, the number of firefighters who have died is protected by the Workplace Safetyand Insurance Board privacy act.

“There has been a bit of a cancer cluster around Hagersville and for the firefighters,” states Ottley.

“The hard part is for a firefighter to claim. This is why the presumption legislation came in and Hagersville was part of the push,” explains Ottley.

When firefighters claim an illness to WSIB, they must medically prove what they were exposed to and for how long. They then must medically prove that that exposure can cause the kind of cancer that they have.

“Its especially hard for a firefighter, especially a volunteer to be able to say that with facts,” states Ottley.

The site of the Hagersville fire is still monitored to ensure that run-off water is not contaminated with similar chemicals.

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Documentation 1: LA Times News Article

The documentation is a news article.
I found it in my preliminary research or news stories of the event. I did this research on Google and on the Carleton library archives.
The documentation was helpful because it confirmed that the story was, in fact, a significant topic. The article addressed the severity of the chemicals released at the time. This was a starting point for my piece – 25 years later. My initial questions came from this piece.

Documentation 2: April 2009 Press Release from Ontario Tire Stewardship.

The documentation is a press release.
I found it because I googled: “tires, ministry of environment, recycling, 2009, Ontario.”*
The documentation was helpful because it served as a stepping stone in my research. From this press release I knew which official sources to contact and therefore I could create a chronology of legislative events.

*In my search I did not use quotations but it was in that order and with that punctuation. ​

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w-5PvjEHYFLxkoaaexEmb90O1ju1MIWGKpU5pj_xRxo/edit?usp=sharing