Thank you very much. I'm just going to manage myself here.
I've asked the person responsible to give some material to different persons. I'd like to just be assured that that's been done.
I wish to speak today as a person who has a wonderful family, and over and above all of this, it's a family that has a father who's dyslexic. I will be 65 years old this August. What has happened to me in my life, as a dyslexic person, and being able to understand and manage my life through the eyes of a dyslexic person, is the information that you're seeing now. You'll have to excuse me for breaking up now and again.
My goal today is to explain that there are key areas that are of serious concern. I'm a fifth-generation Canadian, born in Montreal. I've lived on the west coast for the last 35 years and have brought up two fantastic sons. In my second part of my life, in 2000, I became divorced and entered into a relationship with a wonderful woman by the name of Mary Barber, who had an incredible son, Jonathan Barber, and a daughter, Colleen. These people have been the mainstay in my life.
I'd like to lay out my life because it is so important for everyone here to understand. I'm hoping this commission can get to the bottom of what's happening here, because it is so severe. We all put on a facade at times to protect ourselves, to survive. Unfortunately, I don't like to say this, but I feel the justice and human rights systems in Canada failed us drastically over the years that have been my life--and I'm sharing it through my eyes, as an individual.
My feeling is that the study of organized crime needs to be broadened. Not only do I see that as being organized crime, I see organized crime being in the church, the corporations, and the illegal drug groups in Canada. The reason I say that is because the terms “crime”, no matter how you look at it, and “organized” mean a group of people together doing something that's totally inappropriate and is against all systems out there.
When we can allow the gangs, as an example, to operate freely, when I see the Bacon brothers roam the streets, when I see police following them everywhere and taking care of them, it scares me. It scares me because when I see what's happened to my family, when I see my partner trying to survive.... She's a wonderful woman, an incredible woman. She's a teacher trying to survive losing her son.
The unfortunate side of it is that it's taken ten months for the police to decide to tell her that her son was not involved with the group. We knew that from the beginning. I believe they knew the same thing. That's a tragedy. That should not have happened. She's lost ten months of her life. Believe me, there was some guilt involved. Those are the kinds of issues that are important.
The victims' assistance is pathetic. It's just a charade. It doesn't represent anything of substance. I've met and talked to the clerks, to the people who are there, and I've realized that even they say, “Well, you know, the government's ripped it from the bottom, there's nothing here. All we can do is do our best. Can we get her a psychiatrist? Can we do this?” There has to be a better way. We need intervention teams.
When the incident first took place, and the person came over to our home and expressed opinions about how we could survive, what to do, unfortunately the person hadn't had the training or they were just young--whatever it was--but they didn't have the skills to communicate. It was so formal. It was so government-directed.
They had no sensitivity to what's going on. The reality is that the family is destroyed. There are five people involved here. There's Mary, Colleen, her beautiful 16-year-old daughter, Michael her ex-husband, and myself. All of us involved have had severe effects as a result of this murder, and Jonathan was an innocent young man.
He was an incredible young man who loved doing stereo systems in high-end vehicles. That was his life. He loved it. I remember when he was in high school, he did it all the time. He became expert. It was just unfortunate that a friend of a friend asked him to put in a stereo in the vehicle that unfortunately was owned by the Bacon brothers. A few days before, the Bacon brothers had done some damage to the United Nations Gang, so he became their target. The Bacon brothers used him as bait to see whether there was something out there.
Great attention is given to the crime and the criminals. They get protection. What about the families? That's my concern. The families need support. The families need intervention. The father can't work. He's totally destroyed. Mary can barely hang on. She goes to work just to survive. Her daughter's looking over her shoulder believing she's going to be murdered.
I saw someone coming over the fence on my property downtown the other Saturday morning. I freaked out. I saw the Bacon brothers coming after me. So those are the issues that seriously need looking at. We have to stop focusing on the criminal. We need to deal with the criminals in the way they should be dealt with. For a long time, we've been giving them too many freedoms. We need to give the police the authority necessary to monitor everything that they're doing. We've become too much of a civil libertarian society. We give all our freedoms to these people who aren't worthy of it.
I've included in one of those pieces of paper that I gave you the documentation of a friend of mine. A long time ago, he told me about this wonderful thing that really changed the justice system—it was called the strap. And if you have a moment, I'd like you to have a look at this. It describes what it was and how it cleaned up the penal system. I think we're giving it to them too easy. We're not only letting them get away with murder; we're also letting them continue to murder and destroy families.
It destroyed our families on the human rights side of things. We're doing everything to hold on. My partner and I are seeking counsel. We're doing everything we can. The issues are so major. That's where the intervention needs to be done. We need to bring back the money. I don't want social systems. I don't want more counsellors on government. I want more assistance to help the family, because we are getting no help at all.
I talked about the family and the gangs and what's going on and how it's affected our lives as people, but that's just one aspect of it. The other side of it is the church, the government, and my faith in the justice system. In 1989 I came down with asbestos lung disease as a result of exposure to asbestos in a museum in Victoria. The government tried to cover it up. I spent two years in hell. I ended up on the streets of Vancouver going to the food bank, getting my food. I lost my family, I lost my home. There are ten boxes like this of human rights cases. I was successful in getting a legal aid lawyer to help me through this case. We won the case, but the sad part was that the government chair at the time was married to the senior partner of the law firm representing the government side.
It was a circus. It was a disgrace. I've never seen anything so disgusting in all my life.
WCB.... I have asbestos lung disease. This is a very small part. Three boxes later.... The fact is, we don't have an organization like WCB and governments to fight for us. We need the support. We need the help to be able to express our opinions as lay people clearly.
A person like myself who is dyslexic, who sees everything in 3-D, sees things differently from what you would. I can't even write a letter properly, the way things are.
It has taken me 65 years to discover how serious this has been. What we need to do is to look at ways of streamlining the process for lay people, streamlining the process to help other people.
Just in closing, I've left a piece of black material in there, a black cloth. The reason I did that was because human rights failed me when I was a child. As a twelve-year-old, I was raped and molested by a priest. Those kinds of things are horrible. Those kinds of things need to change.
We need stronger laws. I attempted in Quebec to deal with the issues. They told me I didn't have a hope in hell of dealing with those kinds of things. You're clearly aware of the thousands and thousands of young people and other people, I'm sure, of how horrible it is for them to defend themselves from the large corporations or from large government organizations.
What I'm saying to you, and I'm pleading with you, is streamline the system, simplify it. Einstein said to keep it simple and short. That's the way we have to do it. That's the only way we can survive in this world or we're going to hell in a basket.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.