Time Immortal

A Sudanese immigrant convicted of raping an Edmonton woman has gone missing after being freed into the community to await deportation.

Freed into the community? Was anybody using their brain that day? You don’t free someone into the community whom you intend to deport, especially not a convicted rapist. Or is that how we do things in this country?

Even when the guy is obviously a dangerous thug?

In the five years he has been in the country, Luin has accumulated 16 convictions, ranging from causing a disturbance to assault causing bodily harm and sexual assault. Luin’s violent tendencies continued in jail, where he was involved in seven attacks on other inmates and corrections staff.

…

At an Immigration and Refugee Board admissibility hearing last July, Luin was ordered deported to Sudan.

But under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, as a Convention refugee he can only be deported under a document called “a danger opinion,” signed by the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Canada, a process that can take anywhere from six to 18 months.

A danger opinion is issued if the minister, after reviewing the person’s history, believes the individual poses a danger to the Canadian public or Canada’s security that outweighs the risk of deporting him or her back to the country of origin. The person is allowed to make submissions arguing to stay.

An application for a danger opinion in the Luin case was submitted Nov. 13.

Under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, federal authorities could not detain Luin until they received the danger opinion, since he has already served his sentence. At an IRB detention review hearing Dec. 3, Luin was ordered released despite arguments that he posed a danger to the public and was unlikely to show up for deportation.

According to the transcript from the hearing, Luin’s criminal record shows he twice failed to attend court after convictions, once failed to appear in court and once failed to comply with a recognizance order.

“It seems to me that the minister is about 16 months behind in doing that which the minister ought to have started … a year and four months ago,” IRB adjudicator Paul Kyba wrote in his decision. “This submission to the minister for an opinion that you pose a danger to the public, in my opinion, should have been made very soon after your last conviction in July of last year, and I see no excuse; I see no valid reason why the minister chose to delay this procedure.”

Well…he’s out there now. In the city where I live. Thanks, everyone.

But remember, in Canada it’s racist to suggest that there needs to be any sort of reform or re-evaluation of priorities in the immigration and refugee claims process.

Let’s hope that they don’t make this mistake with Mohamed Parvez.

Update: Luin is back in custody after reporting to a job site near 97th Street and 63rd Avenue as a temporary worker. Hey! That’s just down the block from my office!

The reader may remember this incident, in which a nine-year-old girl was reported as having escaped an abduction attempt…by planting her boot into the attacker’s groin region.

It may have been a false claim.

“Investigators have some concerns regarding the content of the version of events provided by the nine-year-old girl, that they believe places the overall veracity of her story into question,” a police statement reads.

The nine-year-old said a man ran up to her near 102nd Avenue and 114th Avenue, covered her mouth and grabbed her arm. The girl said the man left after she kicked him in the groin and ran for help.

I guess that’s one way to try and get some attention…

Related:

Defence Minister Peter MacKay says the greatest threat facing North America is international terrorists smuggling a nuclear weapon onto the continent through a busy container port.

At an Ottawa conference of transportation security experts on Wednesday, MacKay raised the spectre of radicals detonating a crude radioactive device or a conventional nuclear bomb after smuggling it in one of the millions of cargo containers arriving annually on foreign ships.

“The greatest threat to North America right now is on the water,” he told the audience. “With the number of movements of containers coming into this country today, this is an area we have to be completely and extremely vigilant and rigorous in terms of security.”

His assessment of the maritime threat is the bluntest yet and echoes concerns U.S. officials have expressed publicly for years: al-Qaida has nuclear ambitions, is working to develop [its] nuclear capabilities, and just one of the containers arriving annually on North America’s shores could be a Trojan Horse harbouring the unthinkable.

Your daily dose of the new global reality, O Reader.

That would be a kick in the pants:

A nine-year-old girl escaped an abduction Friday afternoon by kicking her would-be kidnapper in the groin, Edmonton police said today.

That’s style. I’m sure this little girl was frightened as all heck, but kudos to her for keeping her head and landing one good kick on the guy’s…er…guys. Hopefully this creep will think twice before attempting another snatch and grab. In a slightly more ideal scenario, she’ll have hit him hard enough that he’ll eventually run to a hospital concerned about bloody urine.

Thank goodness. There’s only so much political grandstanding I can stomach in any given year.

Peace has been made in the war of the poppies. Sort of.

Edmonton antiwar activists, who outraged war veterans by selling white poppies last fall to symbolize a desire for peace, say they won’t offer the flowers again this year.

They still believe in the cause, but don’t want a long, costly legal fight with the Royal Canadian Legion which has threatened to sue for infringing on its trademark poppy.

…

The legion frowns on any modification, [Alberta-Northwest Territories legion vice president Rod] Stewart said. “It takes away the integrity of the poppy.”

Not much else to say, really. I don’t have the time of day for pacifists, unfortunately — that’s not to say that I’m big on war, but I think that a blanket opposition to it is (at best) an intellectually and morally weak stance. As a Christian, one ought to desire peace, but even Christ recognized that sometimes we would be faced with the need to trade our cloaks in for swords.

More to the point, I really do not have time for any kind of political grandstanding. There’s nothing to prevent antiwar activists from selling something else on and leading up to November 11th — why not a white ribbon, since so many different causes and issues these days seem fond of using ribbons as a lapel adornment? Why not the hippy ‘Peace sign’ just for old times’ sake? The choice of the poppy — a highly visible, easily recognizable symbol in its own right — was a deliberate attempt at showboating, and that’s exactly the wrong way to sell the pacifist message.

“I think technically I could win,” said Michael Kalmanovitch, owner of Earth’s General Store, on Whyte Avenue. He teamed up last year with Women in Black to take donations in exchange for white poppies with the word “peace” in the centre.

Kalmanovitch says his customers can turn their red poppies into “peace poppies” by replacing the black centres with stickers adorned with peace signs.

I guess I know where I won’t be shopping any time soon. Hopefully the organic food store near to where Grace and I will be living after the wedding doesn’t try and sell this crap.

One one hand, I’m still not sure exactly how I feel about the death penalty — while I acknowledge that there are some arguments for its use, I also find it difficult to reconcile with the teachings of my faith.

Still…sometimes it chagrins me that the most we, as a society, can do against people like Mountie killer Emrah Bulatci is to declare them a dangerous offender and lock them away indefinitely. Indefinite incarceration is all well and good, but it also seems inadequate sometimes.

One question the news article doesn’t ask is how fast the Camaro must have been going when it struck the teenager’s bicycle. Bikes are pretty strong pieces of material…you have to hit one with a fair bit of force and energy to spread pieces of it along a 10-metre stretch of roadway.

Edmonton motorists and cyclists have never really…gotten along, shall we say. And yes, I know that some cyclists are reckless with how they ride…but then, so are some motorists. I walk to work every day, and every day I see the same black truck race away from the traffic light at 99th Street and the westbound exit ramp from Whitemud Freeway. He’s gotta make the light up the street, I guess…and he’s willing to go from zero to eighty to do it. And it’s those sort of people who pose a real danger to even law-abiding cyclists (who cannot, legally, ride on many of the city sidewalks, and who are entitled to a minimum of 1 metre of distance between themselves and the curb).

It’s those sort of people who, upon realizing that they’ve run down a cyclist, stop only to extract the bicycle from the front of their Dodge Ram before speeding away.

Heck, I’m a fairly careful cyclist when I actually care to get up on two wheels, and I don’t try do anything reckless. I keep to my metre and fire off signals when there’s traffic around and I need to make turns. I’ve been hit by a car once, clipped once, and nearly run down at least five times that I can recall. The incident where I was hit, the driver sped off…fortunately, I managed to twist as I landed, and got her plate number. The incident where I was clipped, the guy swore at me, even though I was riding straight through a green and he was making a left turn across my lane. And in all but one of the cases where I had a near miss, the most I got from the motorist was a honk of the horn…again, in each case, in spite of the fact that I wasn’t in the wrong, “rules of the road”-wise.

And it’s not just cyclists that are in danger on the streets of this city. I don’t know how many times I’ve been crossing at a crosswalk, and some idiot coming on in a hurry thinks that the stopped car in the right lane provides him a passing opportunity on the left. In winter, I carry a snowball with me when I cross the roads…if I hear someone coming on in the second lane as I begin to cross, I lob it lazily in front of me — if the driver tries to go through, he’ll have a nice snowy windshield, and hopefully will crap his pants in the fear that he just ran a kid over.

Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned in more than a decade as a law-abiding cyclist and reasonably cautious pedestrian, it’s that Edmonton drivers generally don’t care that other things besides cars will sometimes be on the roads.

Oh. Thank. God.

That intersection is one of the worst in the city, with traffic volumes much larger than it was ever built to handle. Situating South Edmonton Common (guys…what’s with the drab website?) on its south-east corner was one of the dumber moves the city has made in recent memory, because even though the Common has grown up as a thriving commercial centre on the south side, it has meant that 23rd Avenue, between Calgary Trail and 91st Street, experiences levels of traffic daily that are typically reserved for freeways…and along at least part of that stretch, it’s really just a widened two-lane road.

Hazard much? It’s a wonder there aren’t more accidents.

An interchange is not really an option at this intersection anymore — it’s a necessity. And hopefully it’s the first step on the long road to getting rid of that quintessentially Edmontonian habit of placing traffic lights along provincial highways.