Several hours of surveillance footage recorded at Vancouver airport the night Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski was Tasered and died were inadvertently erased by the Canada Border Services Agency a week after his death, The Vancouver Sun has learned.

The CBSA is claiming the deletion was unintentional — a result of “confusion over how long the footage would be stored before being erased.” If this is true, then the CBSA is criminally incompetent. I sure hope it’s true, because the alternative is that the CBSA deliberately deleted footage of their own misdeeds. But the authorities would never mislead us about something like that, right?

Either way, the results are the same: Robert Dziekanski was murdered by bureaucratic incompetence and police brutality.

Fortunately, the cops aren’t worried about it:

The Integrated Homicide Investigation Team, which is investigating Dziekanski’s death, said Thursday it wasn’t aware the CBSA’s original footage had been erased.

However, IHIT spokesman Cpl. Dale Carr said the team is not worried because one of its investigators reviewed the complete footage before it was erased and was confident all clips of Dziekanski are on the DVD.

“What? They destroyed evidence that might have been crucial to our investigation? This is the first we’ve heard of it. Hey, Jim, you watched all that footage, right? Do you think we might be missing anything important?”

“Gee, Lieutenant, I don’t know. I only watched it that one time, and that was just a few days after the guy died.”

“Before he had that unfortunate reaction to a 50,000-volt shock, you mean.”

“Uh, right. And it was a lot of footage, too — six hours of it! And boy, was it boring.”

“That’s why you made this videotape of all the important parts, right?”

“Well, yeah, but if I’d known they were gonna delete the tapes on us, I would have been a lot more careful about — ”

“You’re not saying you might have … missed something, are you?”

“I sure hope not, Lieutenant.”

“Right. See, folks? Nothing to worry about. Everything’s under control.”

It would be cheaper to provide actual housing and support for BC’s homeless than it is to provide existing non-housing services to the same people:

A new study says providing shelter for the homeless with severe addictions and mental illness throughout British Columbia could save taxpayers millions of dollars.

“Addiction is the most prevalent mental health problem in both the street homeless and at-risk populations, followed by concurrent disorders and, less frequently, mental illness alone,” the Simon Fraser University report says.

The paper — titled Housing and Support for Adults with Severe Addictions and/or Mental Illnesses in British Columbia [warning: 15-page PDF] — says providing non-housing services for such people currently costs the public system more than $55,000 per year per person. It says providing adequate housing and supports could reduce this cost to $37,000 per year….

“The costs of providing supported housing and other health services to this population … is lower than the cost incurred through the use of emergency departments, the corrections system and emergency shelters when they are homeless,” the report says.

(Hat tip: David Eby. If you are at all interested in poverty, homelessness, or the social impact of the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver — and if you live here, you ought to be — I strongly recommend reading Eby’s blog. He works with the Pivot Legal Society, a non-profit that provides legal assistance to people in the Downtown Eastside.)

From the Vancouver Sun:

The B.C. Court of Appeal has backed B.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Don Brenner’s decision to kill the Canadian Bar Association’s landmark attempt to force governments to provide adequate civil legal aid to poor people.

In a majority ruling Monday, the court agreed with the province’s senior trial court judge and said he was also quite right to assess costs against the CBA. […]

“Although the action is intended to assist low-income members of the pubic and its spirit is commendable, I do not consider that the altruistic nature of the action should be afforded much weight until at least the [bar association] has established it can meet the minimal test of disclosing a reasonable claim,” [Court of Appeal] Justice Mary Saunders wrote. […] “Access to legal services is fundamentally important in any free and democratic society. In some cases, it has been found essential to due process and a fair trial. But a review of the constitutional text, the jurisprudence and the history of the concept does not support the respondent’s contention that there is a broad general right to legal counsel as an aspect of, or precondition to, the rule of law.” […]

For almost two decades, legal aid across Canada has been a growing concern because of government cutbacks.

Provinces have curtailed legal aid services, narrowing the types of cases they cover, raising the eligibility criteria, making it harder to qualify.

(Originally posted to The Information Policy Blog.)

The provincial government’s internal Internet filter is affecting ordinary Internet users in Tahsis, a small community on Vancouver Island.

An attempt to visit a pornography site, for example, would return a red screen with a British Columbia logo and a “** WARNING **” message: “This connection has been refused. The Internet site you are attempting to access has been designated by a web classification service as containing material that contravenes the BC Government’s Internet usage policy.”

The warning linked to a page that said, “Users must not access Internet sites that might bring the public service into disrepute or harm government’s reputation, such as those that carry offensive material.”

The local ISP is blaming the problem on “crossed wires” somewhere. Apparently, the ISP’s Internet connection is routed through the government’s network (presumably because Tahsis got Internet access through a provincial government rural broadband initiative). The filter is being incorrectly applied somewhere along the way.

According to the article, the same problem once affected the nearby town of Woss. It took six months to get the filter removed.

(Originally posted to The Information Policy Blog.)

Back in June, a group of activists in the Lower Mainland distributed a parody issue of the Vancouver Sun, highlighting what they saw as the paper’s strong pro-Israel bias. As you can see, it was extremely well-executed. When I saw a copy at a local cafe, it took me a few moments (and a closer examination of the content) to realize that it was a parody. This press release from the Palestine Media Collective has more details.

Unfortunately, the giant media corporation that owns the Vancouver Sun is suing the parody’s creators.

A writ of summons filed by CanWest Mediaworks Publications alleges that long-time left-wing activist Mordecai Briemberg, other unidentified activists and Horizon Publications conspired to produce and distribute a phoney edition of The Vancouver Sun on June 7, 2007. […]

The suit said the defendants were “motivated by hostility to the principal shareholders of the plaintiff and by a desire to undermine, or hurt, the business of the plaintiff and its principal shareholders.”

The plaintiff’s writ, submitted by lawyer David Church, said Briemberg and six other unidentified people are involved in anti-Israeli, pro-Palestinian media activities.

The writ alleges that the defendants “harbour antagonistic views towards the plaintiff, its principal shareholders and the reporting and editorial opinions expressed in the plaintiff’s publications, including in The Vancouver Sun.”

Just as a reminder, CanWest owns the Vancouver Sun, the Vancouver Province, the Vancouver Courier, the Victoria Times-Colonist, the National Post, the Ottawa Citizen, and a few dozen other major and minor Canadian newspapers — not to mention Global (one of the major Canadian television networks) and several cable TV channels. Clearly they have trouble with the concept of dissenting opinions.