March 22, 2004
Councillor Pam McConnell has plenty of time to press ahead with an obsessive anti-cop agenda. This is a councillor whose salary and co-op townhouse digs come courtesy of the public purse. The NDP councillor, who got her start 25 years ago as a trustee with the Toronto Board of Education, has social activism down to a science. McConnell, who can match spleen any day with anti-cop Coun. Olivia Chow, admits to a three-week vacation each year. (Her colleague Coun. John Filion, another lefty with a seat on the Toronto police services board, takes 10 weeks off, according to court documents retrieved by the Toronto Sun). Before city council bowed to public pressure and axed its chauffeur-driven city limousine service, McConnell took more limo rides around town than any other councillor.
The soft, perk-laden life of a municipal councillor is the reason why the New Democrat Party (NDP) councillor can remain indefatigable in a relentless anti-cop agenda.
McConnell is this year’s vice president down at the fractious Toronto police services board, where her politics are poisoning police. Not police brass housed at police headquarters or the big boys inside the building housing the Toronto Police association, but the rank and file--the average beat cop.
Unlike comfy politicians, the average beat cop’s job comes with inherent danger, stir politics into the bubbling cauldron, and out comes a cake called demoralization.
Now in a city grappling with death by gunfire, more than 900 frustrated Toronto cops are thinking about giving up on crime.
ask anyone married to a cop or related to one, it’s becoming more and more of a thankless job.
Cops are being pelted with rocks and bottles while attending at crime scenes. They’re cursed at, insulted and spit upon walking the streets. Self-appointed single-interest watchdogs are on a roll, and hardly a week goes by without another cops-are-racists story in the inexorable Toronto Star.
a left-wing dominated city council has now coalesced around left-wing Mayor David Miller, who’s hinting that he’ll be sticking around for at least another two terms; wishy-washy Dalton McGuinty runs the Queen’s Park show; and unless the new Conservative Party can pull its act together, McGuinty’s masters in Ottawa won’t be vacating their seats anytime soon.
Indeed, the socialist agenda has never looked so forthcoming.
as vice-president of the police services board, McConnell is out to impress activist friends that she’ll succeed with plans to have the board push through an airtight system to deal with public complaints against police. Since an even playing field would only stand in the way of guaranteed success, the board is working on muzzling the police association from endorsing political candidates committed to law-and-order issues.
For the thousands of beat cops out there protecting us, the day-to-day work environment couldn’t possibly be any worse.
No one is happier than the criminal element that moves out of the back alleyways to celebrate the new status quo. With McConnell and Company making it de rigeur to be anti-cop, criminal confidence is bolstered now that they can operate free of fear.
That it is the little guy and not the brass getting the knife in the back gives new meaning to the hypocrisy of the union-loving NDP.
David Miller and Dalton McGuinty should be worried. In the current administration, police officers are being forced to spend more time defending themselves than they are protecting the public from perps.
Meanwhile, McConnell may think she has a political agenda bound to get even with Julian Fantino and Rick McIntosh, but hers is a deadly agenda that jeopardizes human life while only getting even with the rest of us.
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