I do not really respect politicians. As far as I am concerned, they are in it for the power, the glory and the money and nothing else. They will do anything to get into office and stay in office.
Robo-call is a term for an automated phone call that uses both a computerized autodialer and a computer-delivered pre-recorded message. The implication is that a ‘robo-call’ resembles a telephone call from a robot. Robo-calls are often associated with political and telemarketing phone campaigns, but can also be used for public-service or emergency announcements.
Robo-calls were made during the 2008 North Carolina Democratic primary, targeting African-American voters in the days leading up to the primary in late April 2008, which essentially told registered voters that they were not registered. According to NPR and Facing South, these calls were made by the organization called Women's Voices Women Vote. Voters and watchdog groups complained that it was a turnout-suppression effort to prevent certain people from voting and subsequently state Attorney General, Roy Cooper ordered them to stop making the calls. The group stopped the calls and no further legal action was taken.
Consider for instance what has occurred in Canada with respect to Robo-call messages sent to citizens to trick them into voting in the wrong polling stations.
Elections Canada and the RCMP are currently investigating a large number of claims by citizens who have said that Robo-calls (telephone calls) were used during the 2011 Federal Election in an attempt to dissuade voters from casting their ballot.
This was done by automated and live callers claiming that they were calling from Elections Canada and sending the people they called to the wrong polling stations. Elections Canada has traced those calls to an automated calling service called RackNine, a firm that multiple Conservative Party election campaigns have used in the past.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party of Canada as to be expected have denied any knowledge or involvement with these improper calls however a Conservative party staffer resigned soon after the scandal was reported but later came forward stating that he was not involved in those calls. If that is so, then I am forced to ask, why did he resign?
It is highly possible that the digital trail may very well end in the Conservative’s own computer system. The computer program they use is called CIMS. It is supposedly a secured program but few people really believe that suppression campaign could have been conducted without having someone having access to the information in CIMS. That program has the names of the Conservative's supporters. The last thing that those involved with the suppression would want to do is to call the Conservative’s own supporters in order to misdirect them as to where they have to go to vote. But by knowing who not to call, it would make it easier for them to call others who may be supporters of the other parties.
Here is what happened to Ken Hancock on Election Day in 2011. The voice at the other end of Ken Hancock’s telephone line sounded official enough to him. The caller was a woman who claimed to be calling from the Conservative Party of Canada telling Hancock that his voting location had been changed from the usual location — a local school not far from his Pender Island, British Columbia home to the municipality of Saanich which is on Vancouver Island. The supposed new location meant that Hancock would have to drive to the ferry dock at Otter Bay on the northwest side of Pender Island, then he would have to take a 40-minute ferry ride south to Vancouver Island, and then drive another 30 kilometres to Saanich in order to cast his ballot. Of course, his name wasn’t listed as a voter living in Saanich so he wouldn’t be able to vote in that riding. This meant that such trip to and from Saanich would be for naught. I don't know if he then went to the proper place he was to cast his vote but such an experience would be enough for him to swear off voting in that particular election.
“It was very strange,” Hancock told the Toronto Star when speaking about the female caller. “When I started asking her questions, she shut me down pretty quickly and actually hung up.” Obviously her hanging up on him is proof positive that something was definitely amiss.
Stories like Hancock’s are attracting attention as Elections Canada investigates complaints that voters received harassing phone calls and Robo-calls during the 2011 general election campaign that misled people about the polling location changes.
The alleged election fraud appears to be spreading to several locations in Ontario. Ridings with close results and alleged suspicious phone calls targeted voters and are shaping up to become potential battlegrounds in the continuing ‘Robo-call’ saga.
In six sample ridings out of the 55 that the Liberals and the NDP said had reports of suspicious or harassing calls during the campaign, most were incumbents and nearly all were Liberals, who lost by thin margins, and in many cases, they saw support drop substantially compared to the 2008 general election results.
Now we are learning of thirty-one thousand complaints were being filed with Elections Canada. All the parties know that voter’s lists they receive from Elections Canada are often incorrect. But even if they are, Elections Canada spokeswoman Diane Benson says the agency does not have phone numbers of electors and does not call to advise of changes to voting locations. She says Elections Canada mails out revised notification cards to voters when changes occur. Benson noted that 127 of 15,262 voting locations across the country — fewer than one per cent – were changed during last year’s campaign.
Outraged opposition MPs continued to hammer the Conservatives over the allegations and they repeat their calls for an independent probe into the tactics, which they say were used in at least 40 ridings nationwide. The outrage grew as court documents from the Elections Canada probe showed that a disposable cellphone behind Robo-calls to Guelph voters was registered to Pierre Poutine, of Separatist Street in Joliette, Quebec. Why would this man use a disposable phone in the first place? Didn’t he know that his calls could still be traced to him?
Dave Hudson, a librarian in the University of Guelph says he received a message on his voicemail from someone claiming to be from Elections Canada advising him that his voting location had changed to another location.
According to him, the female voice on the phone said, “This is an automated message from Elections Canada. Due to a projected increase in voter turnout, your poll location has been changed. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.” The message finished by urging him to call a 1-800 ‘hotline’ if he had any questions. The same message in French then followed. I should point out that the number is no longer in service. That is because the election is over. In any case, I doubt that it is one of the numbers belonging to Election Canada.
Hudson says he immediately suspected that something wasn’t right as the new voting location, according to the message, was the Old Quebec Street Mall in downtown Guelph which is much farther than the legitimate location, which is Laurine Public School, which is about a three-minute walk from his home. He had also heard reports of strange calls similar to the one he received being made to other residents in his own riding.
Conservative MP Dean Del Mastro said his party had no role in the misleading calls in Guelph. “The Conservative Party of Canada does not place intentionally misleading calls to voters. We simply do not,” Del Mastro said. Yeah, sure and the earth is flat. I would prefer to believe that last statement than what a political shill has to say about his political party.
“It does make me wonder what would have happened if my circumstances were different,” said Hudson. He added, “If I was a single parent living further from the polls and operating on a tight time frame, for instance, this might quite realistically have meant the difference between voting and not voting, especially if I were heading to the polls for the first time. It’s creepy because electoral processes don’t work if these sorts of differences in information access exist.”
Despite the large number of complaints, it appears that the most of the suppression Robo-calls were made in the area of Guelph. That being as it is, is it possible that the culprit or culprits were working on behalf of the Conservative candidate in Guelph who may not have even known that this activity was going on? And if not, then why were most of the suppression robo-calls made in that candidate's riding?
In the Ontario riding of Nipissing/Timiskaming, for example, the Liberal incumbent Anthony Rota was unseated by Conservative candidate Jay Aspin by just 18 votes. It must have seemed strange to him when he later learned of calls, allegedly from Elections Canada, telling voters their polling locations had changed.
“We were the closest riding in the country but it’s not about Nipissing/ Timiskaming, it’s about the electoral system,” Rota said. “What worries me is that this group, whoever they are, if they get away with it this time, then the next election they’ll try it again.” If that is so, Canada is no better than a Third World banana republic where election fraud is commonplace.
In Etobicoke Centre, former Liberal MP Borys Wrzesnewskyj who lost to Conservative candidate Ted Opitz by 26 votes has asked the Ontario Superior Court of Justice to overturn the result and declare a by-election in the riding. Wrzesnewskyj has alleged that there were mistakes by Elections Canada officials and “irregularities, fraud or corrupt or illegal practices” at polling stations in Etobicoke Centre on May 2nd. There are also reports of misleading phone calls made to voters in the riding. The Conservatives are naturally disputing the allegations. The case nevertheless will be heard in April 2012 with a decision expected the following month. If Wrzesnewskyj can present evidence that there were many Robo-calls in his riding, he has a good chance of having a by-election ordered by the court.
Former NDP MP Jim Maloway, who was the incumbent in the Manitoba riding of Elmwood/Transcona going into the last federal election, says Robo-calls and harassing calls contributed to his loss by just 300 votes to Conservative Lawrence Toet.
"Absolutely it made a difference,” said Maloway, now a member of the Manitoba legislature for Elmwood. “The Robo-calls were designed to get people to go on a wild goose chase and discourage them from going to the polls. I think that it would have an effect at least in some people’s minds causing them to drop into the non-voter category. I’ve had people tell me that.”
While many complaints centre on the riding of Guelph, currently held by Liberal MP Frank Valeriote, the Toronto Star has heard from people across the country that they received either suspicious robo-calls or harassing calls from people urging them to vote for a particular candidate or party.
Linda Hearst and her husband, Ken Ferance who live in Calvin, Ontario have said that they also received a strange call on Election Day. Hearst says shortly after they voted, they received a call directing them to vote in the town of Mattawa, about 20 kilometres east. They had the advantage in knowing that the call was bogus because they were able to vote in Calvin.
Both Hearst and her husband worked on Liberal candidate Anthony Rota’s campaign and are concerned the calls may have skewed the vote in their riding (Nipissing-Timiskaming). Rota lost to Conservative Jay Aspin by 18 votes. “It doesn’t seem so funny now, especially since Anthony lost by only 18 votes,” Hearst told the Toronto Star in an email.
What I find rather interesting is that whoever the caller was, that person knew in advance that Hearst and her husband were not going to vote for the Conservatives because whoever placed their names on the robo-call list knew that information. Obviously, their names wouldn’t be on the robo-call list if the people compiling those list of names believed the Hearst and her husband were Conservatives. For example, if the people making the calls were Conservatives and they didn’t know who the recipients of the call were going to vote for, they would risk losing potential Conservative votes.
During the spring of 2011, a North Bay environmental activist received a phone call asking if she intended to vote for the Conservative Party. She said to the caller that she didn’t to vote for that Party. Later in about a week prior to the election, she received another phone call telling her that the place where she was to cast her vote was changed.
These two aforementioned cases alone convinces me that the robo-calls are being promoted by the Conservatives to the recipients they believe are not Conservatives. This raises an interesting question. How would they know who is a Conservative and who is not?
Canada already has a problem with voter commitment, fuelled by an overriding belief among many Canadians that their votes don’t really count, that all politicians are the same and that all politicians play dirty. They see broken promises, juvenile name-calling in the House of Commons and hyper partisanship trumping reasoned debate so they hit the remote button in their lives that will lead them to more interesting vistas.
Three things have to happen, and happen quickly, before all voting Canadians must gird themselves for an even more disengaged electorate and a voter turnout in 2015 that could convulse the nation.
Canadians who are qualified to vote are by law required to vote. Their votes do count. When the Conservatives were found to have violated Elections Canada spending rules in the so-called ‘in-and-out’ case, Canadians not only yawned, they couldn’t understand the accounting skullduggery. When the Conservatives were found in contempt of Parliament, their shills boldly stated that a breach of an arcane rule would make no difference to voters, and they were right. When politicians booted unfriendly people from their campaign rallies, and limited journalists to a pre-set number of questions and used supporters to boo the questions they didn’t like that was put to the candidates, the nation collectively shrugged its shoulders.
However if there was and still might be in the future a concerted effort to disenfranchise voters, this country can no longer shrug its shoulders and moan that they can’t do anything about it. If the voters are not incensed by this political chicanery, then they deserve what government they get.
The Conservatives claim they were only targeting their own voters with their Robo-calls and scripted calls. Give me a break. They point out that 127 polling locations were changed by Elections Canada in the days before the May 2nd vote. Dean Del Mastro, Stephen Harper’s parliamentary secretary said, “We have done absolutely nothing wrong.” That was a blanket denial if there ever was one that surely needs to be investigated. the next thing this man will try to convince us is that the world really is flat.
There are too many questions to be answered to limit this felonious conduct to only a riding in Guelph or a call centre in Thunder Bay or a Robo-call centre in Edmonton. To dismiss these allegations as “shenanigans,” as one Conservative did say in a conversation with The Globe and Mail, is to insult the Canadian voters. This kind of shameful political wrongdoings of vote interference has to end. In fact, it should never have even begun in the first place.
If Canadians don’t get angry and demand an independent probe and an end to the sleaze in politics, we’ll all be looking back at the 61.1 per cent voter turnout of 2011 as the golden age of Canadian voter interest because less people will be inclined to vote next time around.
The matter of this alleged voter suppression scandal appears as a dirty thread that has come to Elections Canada and the RCMP’s attention in investigating this matter is ultimately extremely important by taking a closer look at what appears to be a muddy rug of alleged Conservative wrongdoing that seems to have been woven by someone or some people representing their party.
If there is a maze of Conservative dirty tricks leading to the party’s winning election results, the best and perhaps only hope to navigate through it may rest with finding the person who is hiding behind the bogus identity of Pierre Poutine and/or more people like him or her.
The fact that this individual or individuals went to great lengths to covertly mislead voters into showing up at non-existent polling stations in the Ontario riding of Guelph is so far one of the few solid elements proving that voter suppression really exists.
The fact that he or she or they used the services of a company that handled some of the phone outreach activities of the Conservative party, is the main link between the fraudulent calls and Stephen Harper’s campaign. But without first-hand testimony, it will be virtually impossible to ascertain whether this link is circumstantial or part of a larger network set up to suppress opposition votes in the last election.
The fact that ridings the opposition narrowly lost to the Conservatives on May 2nd, 2011 are on the list is not necessarily proof that voter fraud was at play in the various ridings. It would appear ludicrous to believe that the Conservative Party would risk its reputation by indulging in this kind of skullduggery. However, although many people in Canada think of the Conservatives of being less than suitable, this doesn’t mean that the Conservatives orchestrated this kind of electoral conduct. But if it turns out that a company associated with the Conservatives was involved in the Robo-calls suppression phone calls, the Conservative party will be judged by the general public as being guilty by association with respect to the acts of subverting the democratic rights of the citizens to a fair and honest election.
But considering the current high volume of complaints, it is hard to understand that they would not have picked up on the covert activity especially if it originated from sources that were friendly to them.
What is of considerable concern to everyone is that over the previous weeks, the information that some call centre employees took shortcuts with the message that they were contracted to deliver by the Conservatives has also surfaced. Rather than introduce themselves as party callers, they sometimes misrepresented themselves as Elections Canada workers. That by itself is evidence of political wrongdoing.
Canadians may never know all that they should about what took place in the muddy trenches of the last federal campaign. But if they ever get the beginning of a definitive answer, it will come from Elections Canada or the RCMP or even the media, and certainly not from the warring parties in the Commons.
If the high route is too high to be climbed, maybe it is best to appeal to the more base partisan instincts at play. The old adage holds true and my message is directed to all political parties. “If you play in the mud, you and your political party will be seen by the voters as being dirty when you emerge from the mud.” It seems to me that half of our politicians wouldn’t get elected if they didn’t oppose political wrongdoing and the other half wouldn’t get elected if they hadn’t supported political wrongdoings.
The Conservatives appear to have gotten themselves back into the public eye again and in doing so; their alleged shenanigans have irritated the public eye. No amount of eyewash will put the public at ease until the authorities get to the bottom of this saga. When that happens, the public eye will be opened wide and see who tricked so many voters into ridings they couldn’t vote in.
Friday, 9 March, 2012
Wednesday, 7 March, 2012
Reasonable doubt was the judge’s only option
Mitchell Wilson was one of those unfortunate children who suffer from muscular dystrophy, a debilitating disease for which there is no known cure. It never fails however—there are children who are best defined as creeps who will bully such victims who are not really in a good position to defend themselves against the bullies.
Two such bullies jumped him as Mitchell was taking a walk before dinner one day in November 2010. He had passed a group of boys at the same time he had called his mother on the iPhone to ask what was for dinner. Shortly afterwards, he saw two of the nearby youths pull up their hoodies around their faces and approach him. The boys had obviously seen the iPhone in his hand so the two hoodlums followed him and then attacked him. He was body-slammed from behind, bloodied and ended up with two chipped teeth and a sore wrist. Then the hoodlums robbed him of his father’s iPhone. His stepmother happened to be driving by and chased after the taller of the two hoodlums who then threw the iPhone back at her.
Two days after Mitchell was jumped and robbed by the two youths, he passed a boy who was exiting the school office just as Mitchell and his stepmom were entering it. Mitchell pointed to the boy and told his mother that the boy he pointed at was one of the boys that had attacked him. He later told the principal and vice-principal and the police that the boy he pointed out was one of the boys who attacked and robbed him. He also picked out a photo of his attacker from a binder of class photos. Mitchell described the boys to the police. He said that they were both black and male. He said that one was big, around 16 years old, the other was small, maybe 13. He even described their clothes. Then after the chance occurrence of seeing the boy whom he believed had assaulted him exiting the school office, Mitchell was steadfast in his identification. He told the police that he was doubly sure that the boy he was referring to was definitely one of the boys who had attacked him.
The boy was arrested and charged with assault and robbery.
Unfortunately as we all know, sometimes many months pass before the trials begin and that is what happened in this case. The trial took place approximately 14 months after Mitchell was mugged.
However, Mitchell wasn’t there at the trial. He had committed suicide ten months after he was mugged by the two young hoodlums. After the attack, the Grade 5 student suffered anxiety attacks. He didn’t want to take his daily walks, and his health worsened. His father says friends of the accused youth followed Mitchell home, all the while taunting him.
On the morning Mitchell was to start Grade 6, and soon after he was subpoenaed to testify about the assault, Craig Wilson found his son in bed with a plastic bag tied around his head. The boy was dead.
When the case was heard before Justice Mary Devlin, she was faced with a problem. The now 13-year-old defendant denied that he was the one who attacked Mitchell. Unfortunately, Mitchell wasn’t in court to identify him and explain what had happened when he was attacked. However, four statements Mitchell made to the police were entered into the trial as evidence. However, that evidence was rightfully classed as hearsay evidence because it was given by witnesses who heard Mitchell describe his attacker. The trial judge said that the evidence wasn’t enough to overcome the reasonable doubt that she harbored in her mind about the identity of Mitchell’s attacker.
Now had Mitchell given a dying declaration, his declaration could be used as evidence of the dead boy but of course, there was no dying declaration. Strangely enough, had he written down what had happened in a note and identified the boy in his note and then committed suicide, his note could be construed as a dying declaration because the courts presume that no one would risk going to hell for lying just before they died.
The lawyer for the defendant however could legitimately argue that he would be denied the opportunity to cross examine Mitchell since he wasn’t in court and as such, it could result in his client not getting a fair trial.
The trial judge had no alternative but to dismiss the charge against the defendant on the basis of reasonable doubt. In other words, if she was not totally convinced that the defendant really was the boy who attacked Mitchell and therefore had doubts as to his guilt or innocence, and she did have some doubts and her doubts were reasonable and they were, then she had no other choice but to dismiss the charges against the 13-year-old defendant.
There is no doubt in my mind however that the defendant was the boy who attacked Mitchell but under the law, the judge was right to dismiss the charge against him.
The judge said in part in court, “I realize that the conclusion of this trial leaves many unanswered questions, which is unfortunately unavoidable.”
I will try to answer those questions as they pertain to reasonable doubt for my readers.
In R. v. Lifchus, a 1997 case heard in the Supreme Court of Canada, the court was dealing with an appeal in which the appellant (defendant) claimed that the trial judge should have fully explained to the jury what is entailed in the phrase ‘reasonable doubt’.
The Supreme Court’s definition of reasonable doubt was as follows:
“This expression, which is composed of words commonly used in everyday speech, has a specific meaning in the legal context. The trial judge must explain to the jury that the standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt is inextricably intertwined with the presumption of innocence, the basic premise which is fundamental to all criminal trials, and that the burden of proof rests on the prosecution throughout the trial and never shifts to the accused. The jury should be instructed that a reasonable doubt is not an imaginary or frivolous doubt, nor is it based upon sympathy or prejudice. A reasonable doubt is a doubt based on reason and common sense which must logically be derived from the evidence or absence of evidence. While more is required than proof that the accused is probably guilty, a reasonable doubt does not involve proof to an absolute certainty. Such a standard of proof is impossibly high. Certain references to the required standard of proof should be avoided. A reasonable doubt should not be described as an ordinary expression which has no special meaning in the criminal law context, and jurors should not be invited to apply to the determination of guilt in a criminal trial the same standard of proof that they would apply to the decisions they are required to make in their everyday lives, or even to the most important of these decisions. Nor is it helpful to describe proof beyond a reasonable doubt simply as proof to a “moral certainty”. As well, the word “doubt” should not be qualified other than by way of the adjective “reasonable”.
That kind of interpretation would also apply to a judge who is conducting a trial without a jury.
As to Judge Devlin’s review of the evidence presented to her court, it left her with a doubt as to whether the Crown has proved the essential element involving identification and if that doubt was a reasonable one, then the defendant had to be acquitted of the charge.
I don’t think she had any doubts as to the honestly of Mitchell when he told the police that he was sure that the defendant was the one who attacked him. The judge’s doubt would be more related to whether or not Mitchell made a mistake involving the identity of the attacker when he pointed out the defendant as the boy who attacked him.
Many persons have been wrongfully imprisoned because of mistaken identification and this is constantly on the minds of judges when the issue of identity is raised in their courts. I have said it in an earlier article in my blog that it is better to release ten criminals who have committed the crimes than imprison an innocent man who didn’t commit a crime. Judge Devlin would have had that saying in her mind also. She like the rest of us are well familiar with some cases in which innocent persons spent years in prison, some even on death row and were later found to be innocent because they were erroneously identified as the criminals who committed the crimes.
Even if in her mind, the judge was convinced that the defendant before her was probably guilty as charged, probably guilty is not a reasonable assumption in a court of law. Probably means that there is still some doubt and having some doubt is what makes the doubt reasonable as it relates to guilt or innocence.
I am indeed sad for the parents of Mitchell as was the trial judge but our sympathies cannot be an element in a judge’s determination of whether or not a defendant is guilty. The judge didn’t have the luxury of including her feelings into her determination as she could only deal with the facts as they were presented to her. With Mitchell being deceased, the facts were not fully brought to her attention and for this reason; she had no other choice but to dismiss the charge.
Two such bullies jumped him as Mitchell was taking a walk before dinner one day in November 2010. He had passed a group of boys at the same time he had called his mother on the iPhone to ask what was for dinner. Shortly afterwards, he saw two of the nearby youths pull up their hoodies around their faces and approach him. The boys had obviously seen the iPhone in his hand so the two hoodlums followed him and then attacked him. He was body-slammed from behind, bloodied and ended up with two chipped teeth and a sore wrist. Then the hoodlums robbed him of his father’s iPhone. His stepmother happened to be driving by and chased after the taller of the two hoodlums who then threw the iPhone back at her.
Two days after Mitchell was jumped and robbed by the two youths, he passed a boy who was exiting the school office just as Mitchell and his stepmom were entering it. Mitchell pointed to the boy and told his mother that the boy he pointed at was one of the boys that had attacked him. He later told the principal and vice-principal and the police that the boy he pointed out was one of the boys who attacked and robbed him. He also picked out a photo of his attacker from a binder of class photos. Mitchell described the boys to the police. He said that they were both black and male. He said that one was big, around 16 years old, the other was small, maybe 13. He even described their clothes. Then after the chance occurrence of seeing the boy whom he believed had assaulted him exiting the school office, Mitchell was steadfast in his identification. He told the police that he was doubly sure that the boy he was referring to was definitely one of the boys who had attacked him.
The boy was arrested and charged with assault and robbery.
Unfortunately as we all know, sometimes many months pass before the trials begin and that is what happened in this case. The trial took place approximately 14 months after Mitchell was mugged.
However, Mitchell wasn’t there at the trial. He had committed suicide ten months after he was mugged by the two young hoodlums. After the attack, the Grade 5 student suffered anxiety attacks. He didn’t want to take his daily walks, and his health worsened. His father says friends of the accused youth followed Mitchell home, all the while taunting him.
On the morning Mitchell was to start Grade 6, and soon after he was subpoenaed to testify about the assault, Craig Wilson found his son in bed with a plastic bag tied around his head. The boy was dead.
When the case was heard before Justice Mary Devlin, she was faced with a problem. The now 13-year-old defendant denied that he was the one who attacked Mitchell. Unfortunately, Mitchell wasn’t in court to identify him and explain what had happened when he was attacked. However, four statements Mitchell made to the police were entered into the trial as evidence. However, that evidence was rightfully classed as hearsay evidence because it was given by witnesses who heard Mitchell describe his attacker. The trial judge said that the evidence wasn’t enough to overcome the reasonable doubt that she harbored in her mind about the identity of Mitchell’s attacker.
Now had Mitchell given a dying declaration, his declaration could be used as evidence of the dead boy but of course, there was no dying declaration. Strangely enough, had he written down what had happened in a note and identified the boy in his note and then committed suicide, his note could be construed as a dying declaration because the courts presume that no one would risk going to hell for lying just before they died.
The lawyer for the defendant however could legitimately argue that he would be denied the opportunity to cross examine Mitchell since he wasn’t in court and as such, it could result in his client not getting a fair trial.
The trial judge had no alternative but to dismiss the charge against the defendant on the basis of reasonable doubt. In other words, if she was not totally convinced that the defendant really was the boy who attacked Mitchell and therefore had doubts as to his guilt or innocence, and she did have some doubts and her doubts were reasonable and they were, then she had no other choice but to dismiss the charges against the 13-year-old defendant.
There is no doubt in my mind however that the defendant was the boy who attacked Mitchell but under the law, the judge was right to dismiss the charge against him.
The judge said in part in court, “I realize that the conclusion of this trial leaves many unanswered questions, which is unfortunately unavoidable.”
I will try to answer those questions as they pertain to reasonable doubt for my readers.
In R. v. Lifchus, a 1997 case heard in the Supreme Court of Canada, the court was dealing with an appeal in which the appellant (defendant) claimed that the trial judge should have fully explained to the jury what is entailed in the phrase ‘reasonable doubt’.
The Supreme Court’s definition of reasonable doubt was as follows:
“This expression, which is composed of words commonly used in everyday speech, has a specific meaning in the legal context. The trial judge must explain to the jury that the standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt is inextricably intertwined with the presumption of innocence, the basic premise which is fundamental to all criminal trials, and that the burden of proof rests on the prosecution throughout the trial and never shifts to the accused. The jury should be instructed that a reasonable doubt is not an imaginary or frivolous doubt, nor is it based upon sympathy or prejudice. A reasonable doubt is a doubt based on reason and common sense which must logically be derived from the evidence or absence of evidence. While more is required than proof that the accused is probably guilty, a reasonable doubt does not involve proof to an absolute certainty. Such a standard of proof is impossibly high. Certain references to the required standard of proof should be avoided. A reasonable doubt should not be described as an ordinary expression which has no special meaning in the criminal law context, and jurors should not be invited to apply to the determination of guilt in a criminal trial the same standard of proof that they would apply to the decisions they are required to make in their everyday lives, or even to the most important of these decisions. Nor is it helpful to describe proof beyond a reasonable doubt simply as proof to a “moral certainty”. As well, the word “doubt” should not be qualified other than by way of the adjective “reasonable”.
That kind of interpretation would also apply to a judge who is conducting a trial without a jury.
As to Judge Devlin’s review of the evidence presented to her court, it left her with a doubt as to whether the Crown has proved the essential element involving identification and if that doubt was a reasonable one, then the defendant had to be acquitted of the charge.
I don’t think she had any doubts as to the honestly of Mitchell when he told the police that he was sure that the defendant was the one who attacked him. The judge’s doubt would be more related to whether or not Mitchell made a mistake involving the identity of the attacker when he pointed out the defendant as the boy who attacked him.
Many persons have been wrongfully imprisoned because of mistaken identification and this is constantly on the minds of judges when the issue of identity is raised in their courts. I have said it in an earlier article in my blog that it is better to release ten criminals who have committed the crimes than imprison an innocent man who didn’t commit a crime. Judge Devlin would have had that saying in her mind also. She like the rest of us are well familiar with some cases in which innocent persons spent years in prison, some even on death row and were later found to be innocent because they were erroneously identified as the criminals who committed the crimes.
Even if in her mind, the judge was convinced that the defendant before her was probably guilty as charged, probably guilty is not a reasonable assumption in a court of law. Probably means that there is still some doubt and having some doubt is what makes the doubt reasonable as it relates to guilt or innocence.
I am indeed sad for the parents of Mitchell as was the trial judge but our sympathies cannot be an element in a judge’s determination of whether or not a defendant is guilty. The judge didn’t have the luxury of including her feelings into her determination as she could only deal with the facts as they were presented to her. With Mitchell being deceased, the facts were not fully brought to her attention and for this reason; she had no other choice but to dismiss the charge.
Monday, 5 March, 2012
Abusing a student’s rights to express his views
Recently Paul Gomille, a 17-year-old student approached the principal of his Catholic school in Toronto with his proposal to speak about the girls in his school and he asked for permission to address them. His proposal was initially met favourably, especially since the school received much public attention earlier this year when administrators noted that many of the female student body were hiking their kilt skirts too high. Principal Donna Modeste, according to Paul, welcomed the positive nature of his message.
Principal Modeste however objected to a particular section of Paul’s letter, which she felt was too judgmental. For this reason, she decided that Paul she would not permit Paul to address the girls in the school via the public address system.
The speech he wanted to give was on the topic of a woman’s inner beauty that is because he clearly believes that many of his female peers do not treat each other, or themselves, with due respect, and he wishes that everyone would focus more on how wonderful they are on the inside and not how attractive they can make themselves on the outside. This is what he put in his written message.
“The people this message concerns are the young women of this school, and of the world. In particular, it concerns the silent ones, the intelligent ones, the ones that don’t talk about people behind their backs, the ones that guys don’t flock to in droves, the ones that don’t dress in revealing clothing, the ones who would love to be in love, and the ones that are continually disappointed in their appearance because the only thing they have to compare themselves to are the women that have been put on pedestals by our society. This message also concerns those of you who may consider yourselves the so called “opposite” to the demographic I just described. The ones who do dress in revealing clothing, and the ones who try to fit in with the crowd.
“You don’t need to dress or act a certain way to fit in, to feel attractive, or to BE attractive. You’re all far more attractive than you realize. All of you. But that’s not to say that you should all dress in revealing clothing. No, not at all. Sure, a girl who dresses that way might turn a few heads, and get some compliments. But real attractiveness doesn’t come from wearing the latest fashion and it doesn’t come from being scantily clad in public, or putting on make-up, or having a pretty face, or a nice body. No. Real attractiveness comes from having a certain dignity. It comes from having class. It comes from being true to yourself, being yourself, and being comfortable in your own skin. This message is for all young women within the sound of my voice and beyond. You’re all beautiful. You all have inner beauty AND outer beauty.”
I see absolutely nothing he said in the text that was offensive. If fact, I think it was well written and that the message was an important one for girls to consider.
His principal requested changes be made with respect to part of his speech. Rather than comply, Paul chose instead of distribute his speech, in its original form, by handing out copies of the text in the school cafeteria on Valentine’s Day (2012)
Because he circulated this speech in the school cafeteria, Paul was suspended for two days. The reason for the suspension? It was his so-called opposition to authority. As far as the principal of his school was concerned, the boy’s actions constituted an act of rebellion against someone in authority in his school a school authority—to wit: his principal.
This principal of that school has through her actions convinced me that she doesn’t fully appreciate Canada’s Charter of Rights which guarantees everyone in Canada the right to free speech. She certainly can deny a student the privilege of addressing the students through the school’s public address system but I don’t see how she can deny any student the right to hand out to his fellow students his views on any subject he chooses providing the text isn’t offensive and it isn’t done while classes are in session.
As far as Paul was concerned, the people his message concerned were the young women of his school, and of the world. In particular, it concerned the silent girls, intelligent girls, the girls that don’t talk about other girls behind their backs, the girls that guys don’t flock to in droves, the girls that don’t dress in revealing clothing, the girls who would love to be in love, and the girls that are continually disappointed in their appearance because the only thing they have to compare themselves to are the women that have been put on pedestals by society. This message also concerns those girls who may consider themselves the so called opposite to the demographic he had described. His message was addressed to both the girls who do dress in revealing clothing and the girls who try to fit in with the crowd.
The principal certainly has the right to deny any student the right to make a public address during school hours. But does that same right extend to blocking a student from distributing a leaflet that he printed up himself, during his lunch hour? Does the school board intend to take the position that it has the absolute right over any form of written communication its students may wish to distribute during their own time and at their own expense, on school property? Would such extend to include Christmas cards or birthday invitations? Where would the rights of students with respect to the freedom of speech end in a school setting?
If so, that would be a bizarre, and a remarkably futile step to take. Perhaps the most surprising thing about this incident is that the offending material was distributed in hardcopy, rather than just placed on the Internet or sent to Twitter or Facebook which is obviously beyond the principal’s control. Reactions like the principal will only accelerate the move of intra-student communication into forums where the school has no jurisdiction.
Then there’s the issue of the content of the piece. I personally saw nothing in his proposed speech that would offend anyone. Paul has his opinions about girls but in his proposed speech, they aren’t insulting, racist, sexist, bigoted, homophobic or even indelicately expressed. No specific students are named nor are anyone harassed or bullied. Even in our Zero Tolerance era, what did Paul write that was intolerant by school standards? Indeed, his message could be placed directly into a ‘Go Girls! self-esteem’ brochure without seeming to be out of place.
The fact that it is judgmental doesn’t justify the principal rights to deny a student from saying what he wishes to say. He is entitled to his judgments, and to express them in an non-offensive manner which was his intent.
Principal Modeste should have given further thought with respect to her decision to object to Paul’s presentation on the grounds that Paul’s commentary reflects his own views about the girls in his school, given that the entire Catholic school system is a faith-based institution that more or less states that people who make the wrong value judgments face eternal damnation. The idea that a Catholic school in particular would object to a value judgment, and Paul’s specific judgment, is really bizarre especially when you consider that Paul was calling for the girls in his school to have more self-respect and to not act immodestly. From the Catholic perspective, his message was clearly on-point.
Then, finally, there is the fact that Paul did not necessarily defy the principal’s authority. He originally wanted to make a public address. When Principal Modeste raised concerns with some of the content, Paul pursued another option for distributing his message. Unless Principal Modeste had explicitly ordered him to share his opinions with no one in any format (which she didn’t and if she had, it itself would have been an indefensible position) no authority was defied, and it falls upon her to justify her objections to the distribution of the piece based on its content, not its manner of circulation because that is something this principal has no authority to do.
If students can’t present their views in a school cafeteria, then we as Canadians are at risk because later, our rights to free speech will be whittled away and Canada will end up as a nation similar to Thailand and Zimbabwe where telling jokes about the royal family of Thailand and the prime minister of Zimbabwe are punishable by imprisonment.
If students in a school have no right whatsoever to engage in expressive activity on school-owned property, little opportunity would exist to exercise their freedom of expression. While section 2(b) of the Charter does not provide a right of access to students to all school property, some property will be constitutionally open to them such as cafeterias and school yards.
A number of factors are helpful to determine whether the restrictions by the school authorities have been applied to school property which is a ‘public arena such as the school cafeteria or the school yard. These factors include: the traditional openness of such property for expressive activity; whether the students are ordinarily admitted to the school property as of right; the compatibility of the school property's purpose with such activity; the impact of the school property's availability on the achievement of s. 2(b)'s purposes; the school property's symbolic significance for the message being communicated; and the availability of other public arenas in the vicinity.
The ‘traditional’ component of the public arena analysis must appreciate the ‘type’ of place historically associated with public discussion, and should not be restricted to the actual places themselves. Cafeterias and school yards, which draw large numbers of students, are contemporary places in schools and should thus be accessible to those seeking to communicate with the students in them without official restrictions unless the messages given are offensive.
The principal of Paul’s school has failed to offer an intelligible standard which would enable Paul to submit his views and opinions about the girls in his school. Her decision to refuse Paul’s right to present his message to the girls in his school can be read as an attempt to eradicate all types of expression or, more narrowly, to exclude only certain types of expression, and thus creates confusion in the minds of her students.
Although some objectives would be reasonable in justifying restrictions on expression in a school with respect to the time, place, and manner, the restrictions were not reasonable in the context and circumstances of this particular case.
The test for whether section 2(b) applies to protect expression in a particular forum depends on the class into which the restriction at issue falls. Section 2(b) of the Charter would usually be infringed if the school’s purpose was to restrict the content of expression by limiting the forums in which it can be made. A content neutral restriction, however, may not infringe freedom of expression at all.
Section 2(b) of the Charter would apply if it were established that the expression (including its time, place and manner) promoted one of the purposes underlying the guarantee of free expression: the seeking and obtaining of truth; participation in social and political decision making; and the encouragement of diversity in forms of individual self fulfillment by cultivating a tolerant, welcoming environment for the conveyance and reception of ideas.
The content of Paul’s message to his fellow students was not so offensive to warrant overriding his Charter right, since there was nothing in the purpose of his message which was incompatible with the school’s goals. The actions of the school principal in preventing Paul from presenting his views to his fellow students constitutes a blanket exclusion of free speech in the school unrelated to concerns for its function and devoid of safeguards to protect against an over reaching application.
Mister Justice Lambert of the Supreme Court of Canada when deciding on a similar issue before the court with respect to the freedom of speech said in part;
“The concept of free and uninhibited speech permeates all truly democratic societies. Caustic and biting debate is, for example, often the hallmark of election campaigns, parliamentary debates and campaigns for the establishment of new public institutions or the reform of existing practices and institutions. The exchange of ideas on important issues is often framed in colourful and vitriolic language. So long as comments made on matters of public interest are neither obscene nor contrary to the laws of criminal libel, citizens of a democratic state should not have to worry unduly about the framing of their expression of ideas. The very lifeblood of democracy is the free exchange of ideas and opinions. If these exchanges are stifled, democratic government itself is threatened.” unquote
Freedom of expression was entrenched in our Constitution. so as to ensure that everyone can manifest their thoughts, opinions, beliefs, indeed all expressions of the heart and mind, however unpopular, distasteful or contrary to the mainstream. Such protection is, in the words of the Canadian Charter, ‘fundamental’ because in a free, pluralistic and democratic society, we prize a diversity of ideas and opinions for their inherent value both to the community and to the individual.
The principal of a school should not exclude student activity from the scope of guaranteed free expression on the basis of the content or meaning being conveyed. Indeed, if the activity conveys or attempts to convey a meaning, it has expressive content and prima facie falls within the scope of the guarantee to free speech.
If the school's purpose is to restrict the content of expression by singling out particular meanings that are not to be conveyed, it necessarily limits the guarantee of free expression. If the government's purpose is to restrict a form of expression in order to control access by others to the meaning being conveyed or to control the ability of the one conveying the meaning to do so, it also limits the guarantee.
A school policy against handing out copies of a speech by a pamphleteer is a restriction on a manner of expression and is tied to content even if that restriction purports to be interpreted as disobeying one’s principal. Such a school policy aims to control access to other students with respect to an opinion being conveyed by someone else as well as to control the ability of the pamphleteer to convey his or her opinion. To restrict this form of expression, such as what Paul’s principal did when Paul handed out copies of his message, is restricting the content of his opinion.
If a school has as its aim, to control attempts to convey an opinion either by directly restricting the content of an opinion or by restricting the manner in which it is to be conveyed, then the school’s purpose entrenches upon the guarantee that an author of an opinion and everyone else in Canada has—the right to free speech.
In my opinion, the school’s principal should be severely chastised by her school board and an apology to Paul Gomille should be given to him by the principal over the school’s public address system. Further, his suspension should be removed from his school record.
Principal Modeste however objected to a particular section of Paul’s letter, which she felt was too judgmental. For this reason, she decided that Paul she would not permit Paul to address the girls in the school via the public address system.
The speech he wanted to give was on the topic of a woman’s inner beauty that is because he clearly believes that many of his female peers do not treat each other, or themselves, with due respect, and he wishes that everyone would focus more on how wonderful they are on the inside and not how attractive they can make themselves on the outside. This is what he put in his written message.
“The people this message concerns are the young women of this school, and of the world. In particular, it concerns the silent ones, the intelligent ones, the ones that don’t talk about people behind their backs, the ones that guys don’t flock to in droves, the ones that don’t dress in revealing clothing, the ones who would love to be in love, and the ones that are continually disappointed in their appearance because the only thing they have to compare themselves to are the women that have been put on pedestals by our society. This message also concerns those of you who may consider yourselves the so called “opposite” to the demographic I just described. The ones who do dress in revealing clothing, and the ones who try to fit in with the crowd.
“You don’t need to dress or act a certain way to fit in, to feel attractive, or to BE attractive. You’re all far more attractive than you realize. All of you. But that’s not to say that you should all dress in revealing clothing. No, not at all. Sure, a girl who dresses that way might turn a few heads, and get some compliments. But real attractiveness doesn’t come from wearing the latest fashion and it doesn’t come from being scantily clad in public, or putting on make-up, or having a pretty face, or a nice body. No. Real attractiveness comes from having a certain dignity. It comes from having class. It comes from being true to yourself, being yourself, and being comfortable in your own skin. This message is for all young women within the sound of my voice and beyond. You’re all beautiful. You all have inner beauty AND outer beauty.”
I see absolutely nothing he said in the text that was offensive. If fact, I think it was well written and that the message was an important one for girls to consider.
His principal requested changes be made with respect to part of his speech. Rather than comply, Paul chose instead of distribute his speech, in its original form, by handing out copies of the text in the school cafeteria on Valentine’s Day (2012)
Because he circulated this speech in the school cafeteria, Paul was suspended for two days. The reason for the suspension? It was his so-called opposition to authority. As far as the principal of his school was concerned, the boy’s actions constituted an act of rebellion against someone in authority in his school a school authority—to wit: his principal.
This principal of that school has through her actions convinced me that she doesn’t fully appreciate Canada’s Charter of Rights which guarantees everyone in Canada the right to free speech. She certainly can deny a student the privilege of addressing the students through the school’s public address system but I don’t see how she can deny any student the right to hand out to his fellow students his views on any subject he chooses providing the text isn’t offensive and it isn’t done while classes are in session.
As far as Paul was concerned, the people his message concerned were the young women of his school, and of the world. In particular, it concerned the silent girls, intelligent girls, the girls that don’t talk about other girls behind their backs, the girls that guys don’t flock to in droves, the girls that don’t dress in revealing clothing, the girls who would love to be in love, and the girls that are continually disappointed in their appearance because the only thing they have to compare themselves to are the women that have been put on pedestals by society. This message also concerns those girls who may consider themselves the so called opposite to the demographic he had described. His message was addressed to both the girls who do dress in revealing clothing and the girls who try to fit in with the crowd.
The principal certainly has the right to deny any student the right to make a public address during school hours. But does that same right extend to blocking a student from distributing a leaflet that he printed up himself, during his lunch hour? Does the school board intend to take the position that it has the absolute right over any form of written communication its students may wish to distribute during their own time and at their own expense, on school property? Would such extend to include Christmas cards or birthday invitations? Where would the rights of students with respect to the freedom of speech end in a school setting?
If so, that would be a bizarre, and a remarkably futile step to take. Perhaps the most surprising thing about this incident is that the offending material was distributed in hardcopy, rather than just placed on the Internet or sent to Twitter or Facebook which is obviously beyond the principal’s control. Reactions like the principal will only accelerate the move of intra-student communication into forums where the school has no jurisdiction.
Then there’s the issue of the content of the piece. I personally saw nothing in his proposed speech that would offend anyone. Paul has his opinions about girls but in his proposed speech, they aren’t insulting, racist, sexist, bigoted, homophobic or even indelicately expressed. No specific students are named nor are anyone harassed or bullied. Even in our Zero Tolerance era, what did Paul write that was intolerant by school standards? Indeed, his message could be placed directly into a ‘Go Girls! self-esteem’ brochure without seeming to be out of place.
The fact that it is judgmental doesn’t justify the principal rights to deny a student from saying what he wishes to say. He is entitled to his judgments, and to express them in an non-offensive manner which was his intent.
Principal Modeste should have given further thought with respect to her decision to object to Paul’s presentation on the grounds that Paul’s commentary reflects his own views about the girls in his school, given that the entire Catholic school system is a faith-based institution that more or less states that people who make the wrong value judgments face eternal damnation. The idea that a Catholic school in particular would object to a value judgment, and Paul’s specific judgment, is really bizarre especially when you consider that Paul was calling for the girls in his school to have more self-respect and to not act immodestly. From the Catholic perspective, his message was clearly on-point.
Then, finally, there is the fact that Paul did not necessarily defy the principal’s authority. He originally wanted to make a public address. When Principal Modeste raised concerns with some of the content, Paul pursued another option for distributing his message. Unless Principal Modeste had explicitly ordered him to share his opinions with no one in any format (which she didn’t and if she had, it itself would have been an indefensible position) no authority was defied, and it falls upon her to justify her objections to the distribution of the piece based on its content, not its manner of circulation because that is something this principal has no authority to do.
If students can’t present their views in a school cafeteria, then we as Canadians are at risk because later, our rights to free speech will be whittled away and Canada will end up as a nation similar to Thailand and Zimbabwe where telling jokes about the royal family of Thailand and the prime minister of Zimbabwe are punishable by imprisonment.
If students in a school have no right whatsoever to engage in expressive activity on school-owned property, little opportunity would exist to exercise their freedom of expression. While section 2(b) of the Charter does not provide a right of access to students to all school property, some property will be constitutionally open to them such as cafeterias and school yards.
A number of factors are helpful to determine whether the restrictions by the school authorities have been applied to school property which is a ‘public arena such as the school cafeteria or the school yard. These factors include: the traditional openness of such property for expressive activity; whether the students are ordinarily admitted to the school property as of right; the compatibility of the school property's purpose with such activity; the impact of the school property's availability on the achievement of s. 2(b)'s purposes; the school property's symbolic significance for the message being communicated; and the availability of other public arenas in the vicinity.
The ‘traditional’ component of the public arena analysis must appreciate the ‘type’ of place historically associated with public discussion, and should not be restricted to the actual places themselves. Cafeterias and school yards, which draw large numbers of students, are contemporary places in schools and should thus be accessible to those seeking to communicate with the students in them without official restrictions unless the messages given are offensive.
The principal of Paul’s school has failed to offer an intelligible standard which would enable Paul to submit his views and opinions about the girls in his school. Her decision to refuse Paul’s right to present his message to the girls in his school can be read as an attempt to eradicate all types of expression or, more narrowly, to exclude only certain types of expression, and thus creates confusion in the minds of her students.
Although some objectives would be reasonable in justifying restrictions on expression in a school with respect to the time, place, and manner, the restrictions were not reasonable in the context and circumstances of this particular case.
The test for whether section 2(b) applies to protect expression in a particular forum depends on the class into which the restriction at issue falls. Section 2(b) of the Charter would usually be infringed if the school’s purpose was to restrict the content of expression by limiting the forums in which it can be made. A content neutral restriction, however, may not infringe freedom of expression at all.
Section 2(b) of the Charter would apply if it were established that the expression (including its time, place and manner) promoted one of the purposes underlying the guarantee of free expression: the seeking and obtaining of truth; participation in social and political decision making; and the encouragement of diversity in forms of individual self fulfillment by cultivating a tolerant, welcoming environment for the conveyance and reception of ideas.
The content of Paul’s message to his fellow students was not so offensive to warrant overriding his Charter right, since there was nothing in the purpose of his message which was incompatible with the school’s goals. The actions of the school principal in preventing Paul from presenting his views to his fellow students constitutes a blanket exclusion of free speech in the school unrelated to concerns for its function and devoid of safeguards to protect against an over reaching application.
Mister Justice Lambert of the Supreme Court of Canada when deciding on a similar issue before the court with respect to the freedom of speech said in part;
“The concept of free and uninhibited speech permeates all truly democratic societies. Caustic and biting debate is, for example, often the hallmark of election campaigns, parliamentary debates and campaigns for the establishment of new public institutions or the reform of existing practices and institutions. The exchange of ideas on important issues is often framed in colourful and vitriolic language. So long as comments made on matters of public interest are neither obscene nor contrary to the laws of criminal libel, citizens of a democratic state should not have to worry unduly about the framing of their expression of ideas. The very lifeblood of democracy is the free exchange of ideas and opinions. If these exchanges are stifled, democratic government itself is threatened.” unquote
Freedom of expression was entrenched in our Constitution. so as to ensure that everyone can manifest their thoughts, opinions, beliefs, indeed all expressions of the heart and mind, however unpopular, distasteful or contrary to the mainstream. Such protection is, in the words of the Canadian Charter, ‘fundamental’ because in a free, pluralistic and democratic society, we prize a diversity of ideas and opinions for their inherent value both to the community and to the individual.
The principal of a school should not exclude student activity from the scope of guaranteed free expression on the basis of the content or meaning being conveyed. Indeed, if the activity conveys or attempts to convey a meaning, it has expressive content and prima facie falls within the scope of the guarantee to free speech.
If the school's purpose is to restrict the content of expression by singling out particular meanings that are not to be conveyed, it necessarily limits the guarantee of free expression. If the government's purpose is to restrict a form of expression in order to control access by others to the meaning being conveyed or to control the ability of the one conveying the meaning to do so, it also limits the guarantee.
A school policy against handing out copies of a speech by a pamphleteer is a restriction on a manner of expression and is tied to content even if that restriction purports to be interpreted as disobeying one’s principal. Such a school policy aims to control access to other students with respect to an opinion being conveyed by someone else as well as to control the ability of the pamphleteer to convey his or her opinion. To restrict this form of expression, such as what Paul’s principal did when Paul handed out copies of his message, is restricting the content of his opinion.
If a school has as its aim, to control attempts to convey an opinion either by directly restricting the content of an opinion or by restricting the manner in which it is to be conveyed, then the school’s purpose entrenches upon the guarantee that an author of an opinion and everyone else in Canada has—the right to free speech.
In my opinion, the school’s principal should be severely chastised by her school board and an apology to Paul Gomille should be given to him by the principal over the school’s public address system. Further, his suspension should be removed from his school record.
Friday, 2 March, 2012
At what age should we stop driving our car?
Alan Burridge, age 75, of Woodstock Ontario said, “Driving gave me an incredible feeling of power.” You notice that he spoke in the past tense.
That feeling he had from driving race cars to the family sedan, was a natural part of Burridge’s life until last September 2011, when his licence was suspended by Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation.
Diagnosed in 2011 with early Alzheimer’s disease, Burridge was encouraged by his doctor to take a $550 on-road driving test from a private company (DriveABLE) to see how his mental decline was affecting his driving skills. Burridge failed the test, so he took it a second time, and again he failed.
The final word on his driver’s licence, the plastic licence that can be key to a person’s independence, arrived in a letter from the transportation ministry. The notice of suspension letter said in part;
“Although you may be disappointed, this decision has been reached to ensure both your own safety and that of other road users.”
Dementia affects the brain’s functioning, creating an inability to work out a complicated decision and, as it advances; a lack of awareness that a decision while driving even needs to be made. In a rapidly aging society, driving with dementia may very well become the new officially recognized form of impaired driving.
In the coming years, there will be a surge of senior drivers on Ontario’s roads suffering from dementia, the general term for those with cognitive impairments such as Alzheimer’s. The number of drivers with dementia in Ontario will more than double from about 45,000 today to nearly 100,000 in 2028, according to a Queen’s University study.
In the past 20 years, the number of drivers over 65 doubled in Ontario, from 600,000 to 1,200,000. At the same time, the Alzheimer Society of Canada reports that more than 500,000 Canadians are living with dementia, with one new case being reported every five minutes. Within a generation, that will increase every year by 250,000 new cases —with a new diagnosis every two minutes.
These are frightening statistics. This means that thousands of motorists in Ontario are suffering from some form of dementia. This increases the risk to the motoring public.
Robert Hopkins, who conducted the Queen’s study and is director of pychogeriatric (psychology of older people) research at Providence Care in Kingston, Ontario said in part;
“This is definitely a public-health issue, and the province has not done a lot (about it.) We’re living longer and the number of drivers with dementia is going to increase substantially. It’s going to be a problem.”
Ontario remains one of the safest places to drive, with the lowest road-mortality rate for people of all ages in North America, according to the Ministry of Transport’s latest statistics taken from 2008.
The ministry has a strong focus on drivers with dementia, says spokesperson Bob Nichols. “We continue to actively monitor, evaluate and support research in this very important area to help better determine the magnitude of the cognitively impaired driving problem.”
But the Toronto Star has found a disturbing lack of awareness of the hazards ahead among doctors, government policy-makers and older drivers themselves.
Critics say Ontario’s Ministry of Transport is failing to train family physicians to look for early signs of dementia that might affect driving.
It gave doctors the legal responsibility for reporting medically unsafe drivers, but has never cautioned or punished a physician for failing to report medically unsafe drivers. Nor, critics say, is the ministry focused enough on what researchers call the ‘holy grail’ —a scientific test to help doctors spot at-risk patients without unfairly targeting others.
Many seniors have busy, productive lives, but there is no escaping the reality that the risk of dementia increases with age. It has a direct impact on driving — making those complex decisions, for example, when turning left at a busy intersection with pedestrians crossing and cars racing or even simple decisions such as remaining in one’s lane without inadvertently crossing into part of another lane.
The danger coming up on our roads is a result of two inevitable trends: a massive population of aging baby boomers determined to stay behind the wheel and the creeping onslaught of mental impairment for many motorists as they get older.
“The vast majority of older drivers are safe,” says Dr. Shawn Marshall of the Ottawa Hospital Rehabilitation Centre, who is working on a major research project called Candrive to develop better testing for senior drivers. He warns against “crazy blanket comments that are ageist and unfair. He said, “You don’t want people to be unfairly targeted and you don’t want safe drivers to be taken off the road.”
Because the driving population over 65 has increased so dramatically, the casualty rate for that age group — the number of serious and fatal collisions per 10,000 licensed drivers — in fact decreased by 40 per cent in 2008 compared to the year 1990. But that’s the rate — not the body count.
The problem is that seniors are frailer, so when they get into accidents, the injury and death rate is high. Also, while young people tend to get into single-vehicle accidents — the drunk teenager who hits a tree — seniors tend to cause multiple-vehicle crashes.
“People aged 70 or older have a higher accident rate per kilometre driven than any other age group except young male drivers,” concludes a new study released in February 2012 by Statistics Canada, which added that “seniors are more likely than younger people to be killed when they are involved in a collision.” That is because their bodies are more fragile than those of younger drivers.
The study found that 28 per cent of people over 65 who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease or some other form of dementia had a driver’s licence, and three-quarters of them had driven in the previous month.
To make matters worse, drugs prescribed to many seniors can be an additional — and largely ignored —road hazard.
Dr. Mark Rapoport, a geriatric psychiatrist at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, led a study that found about 40,000 out of the roughly 210,000 people in Ontario identified as having dementia had active driving licences. Close to 9,000 of them were involved in crashes. I don’t know how many people died as a result of those crashes but one death is too many.
When his team dug deeper into those accidents, they found that drivers on psychotropic medications— antidepressants, antipsychotics or benzodiazepines to deal with anxiety, agitation or sleep problems —had a collision risk 54 per cent higher than when they were not.
This is a triple whammy. These motorists have dementia plus they have a behavioural disturbance and are taking some form of medicine which may interfere with their ability to drive safely. One out of three drivers with dementia in his survey who crashed were in fact taking psychotropic drugs.
The problem is that unlike suspected drunk drivers, for example, seniors involved in accidents are not routinely examined for cognitive impairment. Besides, there is no Breathalyzer-type test — no reliable, quick way to determine the cause of cognitive impairment that might impact driving. That makes it hard to pin down just how many fatal or serious accidents are caused by seniors with cognitive impairment.
That dilemma surfaced dramatically 12 years ago when 84-year-old Pilar Hicks killed Etobicoke’s Beth Kidnie, driving over the mother of three, who was out for an evening walk. Hicks dragged Kidnie under her car until she arrived home. The body became dislodged at the end of Hicks’s driveway, where it lay until discovered by a passerby. The inquest into the tragedy heard that Hicks may have been cognitively impaired at the time of the accident, but authorities couldn’t be sure. But there was no doubt Hicks had dementia by the time the inquest got underway two years later, and she was not required to testify on compassionate grounds.
The inquest had a sharp focus on drivers with dementia, including a recommendation that the transportation ministry find out just how many such drivers were on the roads. The ministry says it followed up on this recommendation by supporting and evaluating several studies, including the Candrive initiative.
Their research showed that close to 7,000 senior drivers were involved in fatal collisions or ones involving injuries in Ontario in 2008, the latest year for which statistics are available. Of those, only 166 were “coded” with a “medical or physical disability” according to the Ministry of Transport.
But the real number could be much higher, since it is the investigating police officers who do the coding at the scene of an accident — and diagnosing dementia is not that easy to determine unless the person making the determination is a psychologist or a psychiatrist.
I would be less than honest however if I didn’t mention that persons who suffer from mild dementia, may still be good drivers because of well-ingrained talents they have acquired after years of driving on the road.
Elderly drivers face many constraints that vehicle modifications can't address. In addition to dealing with issues such as fatigue, vision problems, maneuverability problems, hearing loss, medications, arthritis and other debilitating health problems, elderly drivers must also combat confusion, anxiety, frustration, memory loss, a reduced ability to multitask, diminished concentration and information overload, especially in high-traffic situations. Any one of these factors can significantly impact an individual's ability to make it from point A to point B safely. Combined, they can be deadly. Therefore, it's important to know when, and how, to transition from being a driver to being a passenger, at the same time maintaining one’s self-esteem, sense of independence and, most importantly, freedom.
We’ll never know with any certainty how many drivers over 80 should be getting their licence renewed — or removed. That’s because the official tests the Ontario Ministry of Transport uses to certify drivers over the age of 80 are seriously flawed and may fail to spot seniors with cognitive impairment and signs of dementia.
Ontario drivers over the age of 80 years of age must take a written test and get their eyes checked every two years to renew their licences. More than 121,000 seniors took the test in 2011. The vision test of course will catch failing eyesight, however the multiple-choice test used to test knowledge and basic memory—the all-important driving and brain skills that might deteriorate with age, will be missed. That is because the tests don’t determine a person’s psychomotor speed, information processing, or the ability to handle a crisis or solve other problems that motorists encounter on the road.
“I don’t think it is effective screening for identifying who might be at risk,” says Dr. Shawn Marshall at the Ottawa Hospital Rehabilitation Centre. “For sure we’re missing people,” continues Marshall, a leading expert on senior drivers who is working to develop more accurate and comprehensive tests using hundreds of volunteers who are seniors who are still driving. We’re looking at something that might happen, for who may be the most at risk.”
Inaccurate or incomplete testing for over-80 drivers is just one of many failures in the government’s efforts to identify and help the growing number seniors who may be dangerous to themselves and others on the road, the Toronto Star has found.
That conflicts with what Ministry of Transportation spokesperson Bob Nichols said recently when he said, “Ontario has the one of the most stringent medical reporting programs in Canada,”
While that may be true, the vast majority of the most at-risk drivers are not being spotted, doctors who fail to report face no punishment, and physicians are not being properly trained in the first place to diagnose the impairments that may inflict many of their senior driving patients.
The statistics are like flashing red lights: simply because of our aging population — and the growing prevalence of Alzheimer’s and other types of cognitive impairment. As I said earlier, it is estimated that the number of Ontario drivers with dementia could reach nearly 100,000 in 2028. The potential for fatal accidents by then will be enormous.
If the Ontario system is failing to spot the riskiest drivers by the time they reach 80, it’s having even more problems identifying potentially dangerous senior drivers where it would be most effective — while they are at their doctor’s office. That should be the front line in senior road safety since, more than any other driving age group—seniors tend to have regular visits with their physicians.
Physicians in Ontario are required under the province’s Highway Traffic Act to report any patient who is suffering from a condition that may make it dangerous for the person to operate a motor vehicle. Six other provinces in Canada have similar rules.
That mandatory reporting system in Ontario has been in place since as far back as 1968. And in recent years, there has been a steep rise in reports, from 30,000 in 2006 to 50,000 in 2010, according to figures supplied by the ministry.
But unfortunately, many doctors are not passing on information to the Ministry of Transportation the names of their patients who in their opinion should not be driving vehicles on the road. The reason for this failure is obvious. They know that they will lose their older patients after that. Many doctors are clearly uncomfortable with being put in the awkward position of what they may see as playing police instead of physician.
Physicians are advocates for their patients and they feel torn unless it’s really, really obvious that the patient will not be able to drive. It’s difficult for a doctor to talk about the risk some aged patients are on the road with their patients — and it’s not something their patients will easily discuss either. Further, it is really harder for a doctor to report a patient to the Ministry of Transportation as it can really mess up his or her relationship with the patient. However if they have any doubts about their patient’s ability to continue driving on the road, they should ask themselves the following rhetorical question: “Will I let this person drive somebody I love? If not, then I am going to do what I have to do.”
But even if more doctors wanted to report their patients, they are ill-equipped and poorly trained to do so. Most provinces have mandatory reporting but the tools to identify drivers at risk are not there. It has been on books for many years but without direction, it is not very helpful.”
Last year, the Ontario ministry said it held nine training sessions with doctors to educate them about their mandatory reporting requirements. In 2010, 13 training sessions were held.
In cooperation with Quebec’s College of Physicians, there have been more than 120 workshops for about 4,000 doctors to show them how to spot early signs of dementia.
Even with more training, however, doctors will still face another serious roadblock in trying to spot senior drivers at risk: there is still no reliable and simple test they can perform in their office to measure the levels of cognitive impairment in their patients that might affect their driving unless of course they are psychologists or psychiatrists.
The Ontario legislation does not specify a penalty for failure to report a medically unfit patient, but the general provisions in the Highway Traffic Act call for a fine of up to $500. But that matters little: the ministry told the Toronto Star that no doctors have ever been investigated, much less charged.
“The ministry does not police individual physicians,” says ministry spokesperson Bob Nichols. “The ministry usually becomes aware of scenarios where a doctor did not report when the matter is before the courts.” But by then it may be too late: a fatal or serious crash has already occurred.
“The problem with the evaluation of medical fitness to drive is that nobody in Canada is training physicians to do it,” says Dr. Jamie Dow, the medical adviser on road safety for Quebec’s Société de l’Assurance Automobile, the provincial motor vehicle department. “It’s just taken for granted that because you’re a physician you can judge driving fitness, which is not true,” he says. “Most physicians know absolutely nothing about the effects of a given medical condition on driving.”
Dr. Donald Redelmeier and a team of researchers at the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre set out to find just how big that problem was and they discovered that only 3 per cent of medically unfit drivers of all ages were even being reported to the Ministry of Transportation by their doctors.
They combed the historical hospital, police and medical records of 1,600 Toronto drivers involved in ‘life-threatening crashes’ who were admitted for treatment at Sunnybrook — the largest trauma centre in the country for the five years leading up to 2001. They found the overwhelming majority of those seriously injured drivers — mostly suffering from alcohol or drug dependence, but also from cardiac disease or dementia and other neurological disorders were never previously reported to the licensing authorities by their physicians.
According to the ministry, 15.5 per cent of the 2010 reports were for “cognitive/dementia” — almost double the rate from four years earlier. The ministry says close to 80 per cent of the senior drivers who were reported had their licences suspended. Those numbers include drivers over 80 with a possible physical or medical impairment such as failing eyesight or serious cardiac problems.
Still, Ontario’s yearly total of 50,000 drivers reported for some kind of medical impairment represents a tiny fraction of the people on the road — less than .005 per cent of all licensed drivers. That leads many to suspect Ontario’s mandatory reporting system is catching just the tip a much larger unreported iceberg.
Dr. Malcolm Man-Son-Hing, a geriatrician and scientist working with Dr. Marshall at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute on the five-year project, says they hope it will lead to the first science-based tool to diagnose drivers with dementia. Now at the halfway mark, Candrive is following nearly 1,000 drivers aged 70 and over, using a GPS system that monitors their driving.
“At this point, we are concerned about governments that are prematurely creating policy,” Man-Son-Hing says. “There are huge variations among doctors who report and do not report. It is completely unfair to the patients. We believe there should be a scientific basis for these decisions.”
Until the Candrive study is finished, says Michel Bédard of Lakehead University, a Canada research chair in aging and health, we should not rely on existing on-road tests or in-office tools for doctors.
But Allen Dobbs, who runs an Alberta-based company called DriveABLE (its office near London recommended Burridge lose his licence), says his firm already has solid scientific research and is licensing offices across North America.
DriveABLE administers two tests. The first is a computer touch-screen one involving driving-related questions. The second is the on-road test — the one Alan Burridge failed twice — which examines individuals’ reactions and decisions while they drive.
In Ontario, the ministry requires that companies such as DriveABLE send occupational therapists on the road test — widely considered to offer a better assessment of skills — when drivers are being evaluated.
Dobb’s wife, Bonnie, a professor in the department of family medicine and director of the Medically At-risk Driver Centre at the University of Alberta, developed a checklist for doctors to help them decide their patient’s driving future. Called SIMARD MD, the test is free to doctors on the university’s website.
Bédard has criticized the SIMARD test, saying it is not reliable and sends patients for tests who do not need to go. But Dobbs counters that the tool’s track record is excellent, especially when combined with a road test from her husband’s company.
In the meantime, physicians face stiff push-back from seniors when it comes to giving up that driver’s licence that may have become an essential part of their lives, one many assumed was permanent.
“It’s very rare I have patients who say, ‘Oh you’re right doctor, I don’t think I’d be safe to drive,’ said one doctor. That is because most of us have a very inflated opinion of our abilities.
We certainly cling to that license for as long as we can. Three-quarters of Canadians over 65 remain licensed drivers according, to the most recent Statistics Canada survey, and most continue well into their later years.
More than 200,000 drivers on the road across Canada today are over 85. In Ontario, close to two-thirds of men over 85 are still driving.
Even among the over-90 set, more than one in three Canadian men had driven a vehicle in the previous month.
Many of them might be quite capable drivers, since medical experts stress that health and mental differences vary more among seniors than other age groups.
But here is the dilemma: it is precisely senior drivers who might fail to realize how much of a danger they pose to themselves and others, because the very condition that could make them risky on the road — dementia that robs them of their ability to recognize their own disability.
“Along with cognitive impairment comes loss of insight,” says Stephanie Melvin, deputy superintendent at British Columbia’s Ministry of Transportation. “People aren’t noticing that they’re cutting corners, veering into other lanes, or going the wrong way down the street.”
Years ago, a man in his eighties struck my car while trying to pass me. He didn’t stop like he was supposed to. I decided not to catch up to him because he was speeding. Instead I contacted the police. He denied that he was even on the road we were on but the police saw paint from my car on his bumper. They gave him a choice. Be charged criminally with fail to remain or hand over his licence. He handed over his licence and was told that if he applies for a new one, he will be charged with fail to remain. He didn’t reapply for a new licence. He was obviously a dangerous man to have on the road.
For understandable reasons, people cherish their driver’s licences they may have had since they were teenagers. This is the first generation of seniors who have grown up behind the wheel, and many of them tend to see that licence as a right and not a privilege. It is actually a privilege and not a right.
As medical and safety experts point out, the difference between the alcohol-impaired driver and the medically impaired one is that the drunk driver may be sober the next time he is behind the wheel of his vehicle whereas the mentally disabled person will always be disabled whether or not he is behind the wheel.
There is an element of choice with drunk driving because we can choose to be sober when we get behind the wheel of our vehicle. However, all of us are going to get older and with age, comes the possibility of risk to ourselves, our families, friends and others on the road if we are behind the wheel. We are going to have to face up to the fact that we might not be able to drive safely if our aged brains and bodies are not up to it. Responsible motorists will recognize the risk and voluntarily turn in their driver’s licences. Irresponsible drivers will continue to drive and put us all at risk.
Bad driving imposes risks on other people—even a short journey can put a bad driver in close proximity with others. Turning in one’s own driver’s licence if the driver feels he or she is a risk to others on the road is a responsible balancing of one’s freedom to drive with the safety for others on the road. Fortunately, many conscientious senior drivers police themselves.
Eric Powis, 85, got into a minor accident a year ago while turning left and decided never to drive again. Diagnosed three years ago with early Alzheimer’s disease, the former cop, firefighter and military police officer with the British Army decided the risk of a serious crash was simply too great.
“It became obvious to me that since I had Alzheimer’s and wasn’t going to get better, the best thing I could do was give it up,” he says. “I didn’t want to injure anyone. So I just didn’t bother to renew my license.” That was the action of a very responsible citizen. But for every senior like Powis who recognizes it’s time to give up his licence, how many other potentially dangerous drivers out there are going undiagnosed or unreported by their family doctors and untested by the Ministry of Transportation?
If as a senior you wish to keep driving, here a few tips to keep you and others safe:
Get annual vision and hearing checks
Take senior driving courses and seminars (ex: AARP’s Driver Safety Program)
Visit an occupational therapist who may recommend helpful devices for your vehicle
Invest in a vehicle that best suits your needs
Have emergency supplies in the vehicle at all times
Map out your directions, avoid heavy traffic areas and driving in inclement weather
Use defensive driving techniques
Like all drivers, avoid distractions such as adjusting music players and using cell phones while you are driving
According to the National Safety Council, adult children would rather talk to parents about funeral plans than about taking away car keys. Although many seniors may willingly phase out night driving when they find it impossible to see where they're going, many do not recognize when it's time to give up driving for good. Children and caretakers can help aging parents make the transition as smooth as possible by keeping these important points in mind:
Use compassion. Remember that seniors often associate driving with independence and freedom. Understanding their resistance to relinquishing control over driving can make the transition easier.
Transition gradually. Seniors are more accepting of change that happens slowly. Try making yourself available once a week to drive an aging parent to the doctor, on errands or to recreational activities. It also helps to coordinate other transportation options such as carpooling, community transportation and even alternate methods of obtaining goods and services such as home delivery and internet shopping.
Make financial sense. Owning and operating a vehicle can be expensive, especially for those on a fixed income. Car payments, repair costs, fuel, insurance and registration fees all add up. Giving up the car can make seniors feel more financially secure as much needed income will no longer need to be diverted to auto expenses.
Talk about safety. Some seniors don't realize that they have become unsafe drivers. Riding along with an elderly parent to assess driving skills can become a catalyst for a conversation on driving safety.
Enlist expert help. Many motor vehicle bureaus have elderly assessment services and senior driving courses that can help you and your aging parent understand and cope with changes in driving abilities. Even a parent who passes the standard vision exam during license renewal can be assessed for driving ability if the bureau worker suspects there might be issues that could prevent the individual from meeting minimum driving safety requirements. The individual's doctor can also issue a prescription barring the senior from driving if physical and mental issues could cloud judgment and ability.
Take the keys. If all else fails, it might become necessary to confiscate the keys to a parent's vehicle. This option is imperative if a senior doesn't remember that he or she is not supposed to drive. In such a case, removing the vehicle altogether or disabling it might become the best move.
It works for teenagers when they start their driving careers: a series of graduated steps and restrictions to ease them on to the road safely. Why not use the reverse for seniors — some kind of de-graduated licensing as they approach their final years behind the wheel?
Ontario is one of the few places in Canada and the United States that does not have conditional or restricted licensing for drivers who are medically at risk. But Ministry of Transport spokesperson Bob Nichols told the Toronto Star the province “has not ruled out a conditional licensing regime and we continue to monitor methods used by other North American jurisdictions.” Saskatchewan has one of the most successful and flexible programs designed to keep its roads safe, and its seniors happy.
“We try to balance the privilege to drive with the greater public safety,” says Sandy Crighton, the manager of driver programs for Saskatchewan Government Insurance, the province’s licensing authority. “Losing your license is devastating. We like to give our drivers every opportunity.”
When a driver is reported with a medical condition that might affect driving — by a doctor, a police officer, a family member or the driver himself — a government nurse reviews the file. If the problem is deemed severe enough, the licence could be suspended.
But in most cases the driver undergoes further medical evaluation and a road test. Then, depending how he or she performs, a wide-ranging series of conditions can be imposed to adapt their driving skills to their driving needs.
“We determine where they want to drive,” explains Crighton. “If they live in small town Saskatchewan, they may just want to drive around there and to the farm. A city person might want to drive to the mall and to the doctor’s office.”
Saskatchewan officials then might conduct an even more specialized road test along the specific routes chosen by the senior, and their licence might limit them to that zone. Other restrictions could include driving in daylight hours only and always with another person in the vehicle. The same should apply to drivers in Ontario but the authorities in Ontario seem less convinced.
I am getting fairly close to being eighty. I had a minor accident about thirty years ago when I changed lanes without first looking to see that I could do it safely. But young drivers make that kind of mistake also.
I drive practically every day, sometimes at night and other times on highways both during days and at night. So far, (knock on wood) I am a careful driver. But if I suspect that I am being a risk to others and to my family and also to myself, I will turn in my driver’s licence. However, when I turn eighty and have to take the tests every two years and pass them, I will continue to drive my car.
That feeling he had from driving race cars to the family sedan, was a natural part of Burridge’s life until last September 2011, when his licence was suspended by Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation.
Diagnosed in 2011 with early Alzheimer’s disease, Burridge was encouraged by his doctor to take a $550 on-road driving test from a private company (DriveABLE) to see how his mental decline was affecting his driving skills. Burridge failed the test, so he took it a second time, and again he failed.
The final word on his driver’s licence, the plastic licence that can be key to a person’s independence, arrived in a letter from the transportation ministry. The notice of suspension letter said in part;
“Although you may be disappointed, this decision has been reached to ensure both your own safety and that of other road users.”
Dementia affects the brain’s functioning, creating an inability to work out a complicated decision and, as it advances; a lack of awareness that a decision while driving even needs to be made. In a rapidly aging society, driving with dementia may very well become the new officially recognized form of impaired driving.
In the coming years, there will be a surge of senior drivers on Ontario’s roads suffering from dementia, the general term for those with cognitive impairments such as Alzheimer’s. The number of drivers with dementia in Ontario will more than double from about 45,000 today to nearly 100,000 in 2028, according to a Queen’s University study.
In the past 20 years, the number of drivers over 65 doubled in Ontario, from 600,000 to 1,200,000. At the same time, the Alzheimer Society of Canada reports that more than 500,000 Canadians are living with dementia, with one new case being reported every five minutes. Within a generation, that will increase every year by 250,000 new cases —with a new diagnosis every two minutes.
These are frightening statistics. This means that thousands of motorists in Ontario are suffering from some form of dementia. This increases the risk to the motoring public.
Robert Hopkins, who conducted the Queen’s study and is director of pychogeriatric (psychology of older people) research at Providence Care in Kingston, Ontario said in part;
“This is definitely a public-health issue, and the province has not done a lot (about it.) We’re living longer and the number of drivers with dementia is going to increase substantially. It’s going to be a problem.”
Ontario remains one of the safest places to drive, with the lowest road-mortality rate for people of all ages in North America, according to the Ministry of Transport’s latest statistics taken from 2008.
The ministry has a strong focus on drivers with dementia, says spokesperson Bob Nichols. “We continue to actively monitor, evaluate and support research in this very important area to help better determine the magnitude of the cognitively impaired driving problem.”
But the Toronto Star has found a disturbing lack of awareness of the hazards ahead among doctors, government policy-makers and older drivers themselves.
Critics say Ontario’s Ministry of Transport is failing to train family physicians to look for early signs of dementia that might affect driving.
It gave doctors the legal responsibility for reporting medically unsafe drivers, but has never cautioned or punished a physician for failing to report medically unsafe drivers. Nor, critics say, is the ministry focused enough on what researchers call the ‘holy grail’ —a scientific test to help doctors spot at-risk patients without unfairly targeting others.
Many seniors have busy, productive lives, but there is no escaping the reality that the risk of dementia increases with age. It has a direct impact on driving — making those complex decisions, for example, when turning left at a busy intersection with pedestrians crossing and cars racing or even simple decisions such as remaining in one’s lane without inadvertently crossing into part of another lane.
The danger coming up on our roads is a result of two inevitable trends: a massive population of aging baby boomers determined to stay behind the wheel and the creeping onslaught of mental impairment for many motorists as they get older.
“The vast majority of older drivers are safe,” says Dr. Shawn Marshall of the Ottawa Hospital Rehabilitation Centre, who is working on a major research project called Candrive to develop better testing for senior drivers. He warns against “crazy blanket comments that are ageist and unfair. He said, “You don’t want people to be unfairly targeted and you don’t want safe drivers to be taken off the road.”
Because the driving population over 65 has increased so dramatically, the casualty rate for that age group — the number of serious and fatal collisions per 10,000 licensed drivers — in fact decreased by 40 per cent in 2008 compared to the year 1990. But that’s the rate — not the body count.
The problem is that seniors are frailer, so when they get into accidents, the injury and death rate is high. Also, while young people tend to get into single-vehicle accidents — the drunk teenager who hits a tree — seniors tend to cause multiple-vehicle crashes.
“People aged 70 or older have a higher accident rate per kilometre driven than any other age group except young male drivers,” concludes a new study released in February 2012 by Statistics Canada, which added that “seniors are more likely than younger people to be killed when they are involved in a collision.” That is because their bodies are more fragile than those of younger drivers.
The study found that 28 per cent of people over 65 who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease or some other form of dementia had a driver’s licence, and three-quarters of them had driven in the previous month.
To make matters worse, drugs prescribed to many seniors can be an additional — and largely ignored —road hazard.
Dr. Mark Rapoport, a geriatric psychiatrist at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, led a study that found about 40,000 out of the roughly 210,000 people in Ontario identified as having dementia had active driving licences. Close to 9,000 of them were involved in crashes. I don’t know how many people died as a result of those crashes but one death is too many.
When his team dug deeper into those accidents, they found that drivers on psychotropic medications— antidepressants, antipsychotics or benzodiazepines to deal with anxiety, agitation or sleep problems —had a collision risk 54 per cent higher than when they were not.
This is a triple whammy. These motorists have dementia plus they have a behavioural disturbance and are taking some form of medicine which may interfere with their ability to drive safely. One out of three drivers with dementia in his survey who crashed were in fact taking psychotropic drugs.
The problem is that unlike suspected drunk drivers, for example, seniors involved in accidents are not routinely examined for cognitive impairment. Besides, there is no Breathalyzer-type test — no reliable, quick way to determine the cause of cognitive impairment that might impact driving. That makes it hard to pin down just how many fatal or serious accidents are caused by seniors with cognitive impairment.
That dilemma surfaced dramatically 12 years ago when 84-year-old Pilar Hicks killed Etobicoke’s Beth Kidnie, driving over the mother of three, who was out for an evening walk. Hicks dragged Kidnie under her car until she arrived home. The body became dislodged at the end of Hicks’s driveway, where it lay until discovered by a passerby. The inquest into the tragedy heard that Hicks may have been cognitively impaired at the time of the accident, but authorities couldn’t be sure. But there was no doubt Hicks had dementia by the time the inquest got underway two years later, and she was not required to testify on compassionate grounds.
The inquest had a sharp focus on drivers with dementia, including a recommendation that the transportation ministry find out just how many such drivers were on the roads. The ministry says it followed up on this recommendation by supporting and evaluating several studies, including the Candrive initiative.
Their research showed that close to 7,000 senior drivers were involved in fatal collisions or ones involving injuries in Ontario in 2008, the latest year for which statistics are available. Of those, only 166 were “coded” with a “medical or physical disability” according to the Ministry of Transport.
But the real number could be much higher, since it is the investigating police officers who do the coding at the scene of an accident — and diagnosing dementia is not that easy to determine unless the person making the determination is a psychologist or a psychiatrist.
I would be less than honest however if I didn’t mention that persons who suffer from mild dementia, may still be good drivers because of well-ingrained talents they have acquired after years of driving on the road.
Elderly drivers face many constraints that vehicle modifications can't address. In addition to dealing with issues such as fatigue, vision problems, maneuverability problems, hearing loss, medications, arthritis and other debilitating health problems, elderly drivers must also combat confusion, anxiety, frustration, memory loss, a reduced ability to multitask, diminished concentration and information overload, especially in high-traffic situations. Any one of these factors can significantly impact an individual's ability to make it from point A to point B safely. Combined, they can be deadly. Therefore, it's important to know when, and how, to transition from being a driver to being a passenger, at the same time maintaining one’s self-esteem, sense of independence and, most importantly, freedom.
We’ll never know with any certainty how many drivers over 80 should be getting their licence renewed — or removed. That’s because the official tests the Ontario Ministry of Transport uses to certify drivers over the age of 80 are seriously flawed and may fail to spot seniors with cognitive impairment and signs of dementia.
Ontario drivers over the age of 80 years of age must take a written test and get their eyes checked every two years to renew their licences. More than 121,000 seniors took the test in 2011. The vision test of course will catch failing eyesight, however the multiple-choice test used to test knowledge and basic memory—the all-important driving and brain skills that might deteriorate with age, will be missed. That is because the tests don’t determine a person’s psychomotor speed, information processing, or the ability to handle a crisis or solve other problems that motorists encounter on the road.
“I don’t think it is effective screening for identifying who might be at risk,” says Dr. Shawn Marshall at the Ottawa Hospital Rehabilitation Centre. “For sure we’re missing people,” continues Marshall, a leading expert on senior drivers who is working to develop more accurate and comprehensive tests using hundreds of volunteers who are seniors who are still driving. We’re looking at something that might happen, for who may be the most at risk.”
Inaccurate or incomplete testing for over-80 drivers is just one of many failures in the government’s efforts to identify and help the growing number seniors who may be dangerous to themselves and others on the road, the Toronto Star has found.
That conflicts with what Ministry of Transportation spokesperson Bob Nichols said recently when he said, “Ontario has the one of the most stringent medical reporting programs in Canada,”
While that may be true, the vast majority of the most at-risk drivers are not being spotted, doctors who fail to report face no punishment, and physicians are not being properly trained in the first place to diagnose the impairments that may inflict many of their senior driving patients.
The statistics are like flashing red lights: simply because of our aging population — and the growing prevalence of Alzheimer’s and other types of cognitive impairment. As I said earlier, it is estimated that the number of Ontario drivers with dementia could reach nearly 100,000 in 2028. The potential for fatal accidents by then will be enormous.
If the Ontario system is failing to spot the riskiest drivers by the time they reach 80, it’s having even more problems identifying potentially dangerous senior drivers where it would be most effective — while they are at their doctor’s office. That should be the front line in senior road safety since, more than any other driving age group—seniors tend to have regular visits with their physicians.
Physicians in Ontario are required under the province’s Highway Traffic Act to report any patient who is suffering from a condition that may make it dangerous for the person to operate a motor vehicle. Six other provinces in Canada have similar rules.
That mandatory reporting system in Ontario has been in place since as far back as 1968. And in recent years, there has been a steep rise in reports, from 30,000 in 2006 to 50,000 in 2010, according to figures supplied by the ministry.
But unfortunately, many doctors are not passing on information to the Ministry of Transportation the names of their patients who in their opinion should not be driving vehicles on the road. The reason for this failure is obvious. They know that they will lose their older patients after that. Many doctors are clearly uncomfortable with being put in the awkward position of what they may see as playing police instead of physician.
Physicians are advocates for their patients and they feel torn unless it’s really, really obvious that the patient will not be able to drive. It’s difficult for a doctor to talk about the risk some aged patients are on the road with their patients — and it’s not something their patients will easily discuss either. Further, it is really harder for a doctor to report a patient to the Ministry of Transportation as it can really mess up his or her relationship with the patient. However if they have any doubts about their patient’s ability to continue driving on the road, they should ask themselves the following rhetorical question: “Will I let this person drive somebody I love? If not, then I am going to do what I have to do.”
But even if more doctors wanted to report their patients, they are ill-equipped and poorly trained to do so. Most provinces have mandatory reporting but the tools to identify drivers at risk are not there. It has been on books for many years but without direction, it is not very helpful.”
Last year, the Ontario ministry said it held nine training sessions with doctors to educate them about their mandatory reporting requirements. In 2010, 13 training sessions were held.
In cooperation with Quebec’s College of Physicians, there have been more than 120 workshops for about 4,000 doctors to show them how to spot early signs of dementia.
Even with more training, however, doctors will still face another serious roadblock in trying to spot senior drivers at risk: there is still no reliable and simple test they can perform in their office to measure the levels of cognitive impairment in their patients that might affect their driving unless of course they are psychologists or psychiatrists.
The Ontario legislation does not specify a penalty for failure to report a medically unfit patient, but the general provisions in the Highway Traffic Act call for a fine of up to $500. But that matters little: the ministry told the Toronto Star that no doctors have ever been investigated, much less charged.
“The ministry does not police individual physicians,” says ministry spokesperson Bob Nichols. “The ministry usually becomes aware of scenarios where a doctor did not report when the matter is before the courts.” But by then it may be too late: a fatal or serious crash has already occurred.
“The problem with the evaluation of medical fitness to drive is that nobody in Canada is training physicians to do it,” says Dr. Jamie Dow, the medical adviser on road safety for Quebec’s Société de l’Assurance Automobile, the provincial motor vehicle department. “It’s just taken for granted that because you’re a physician you can judge driving fitness, which is not true,” he says. “Most physicians know absolutely nothing about the effects of a given medical condition on driving.”
Dr. Donald Redelmeier and a team of researchers at the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre set out to find just how big that problem was and they discovered that only 3 per cent of medically unfit drivers of all ages were even being reported to the Ministry of Transportation by their doctors.
They combed the historical hospital, police and medical records of 1,600 Toronto drivers involved in ‘life-threatening crashes’ who were admitted for treatment at Sunnybrook — the largest trauma centre in the country for the five years leading up to 2001. They found the overwhelming majority of those seriously injured drivers — mostly suffering from alcohol or drug dependence, but also from cardiac disease or dementia and other neurological disorders were never previously reported to the licensing authorities by their physicians.
According to the ministry, 15.5 per cent of the 2010 reports were for “cognitive/dementia” — almost double the rate from four years earlier. The ministry says close to 80 per cent of the senior drivers who were reported had their licences suspended. Those numbers include drivers over 80 with a possible physical or medical impairment such as failing eyesight or serious cardiac problems.
Still, Ontario’s yearly total of 50,000 drivers reported for some kind of medical impairment represents a tiny fraction of the people on the road — less than .005 per cent of all licensed drivers. That leads many to suspect Ontario’s mandatory reporting system is catching just the tip a much larger unreported iceberg.
Dr. Malcolm Man-Son-Hing, a geriatrician and scientist working with Dr. Marshall at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute on the five-year project, says they hope it will lead to the first science-based tool to diagnose drivers with dementia. Now at the halfway mark, Candrive is following nearly 1,000 drivers aged 70 and over, using a GPS system that monitors their driving.
“At this point, we are concerned about governments that are prematurely creating policy,” Man-Son-Hing says. “There are huge variations among doctors who report and do not report. It is completely unfair to the patients. We believe there should be a scientific basis for these decisions.”
Until the Candrive study is finished, says Michel Bédard of Lakehead University, a Canada research chair in aging and health, we should not rely on existing on-road tests or in-office tools for doctors.
But Allen Dobbs, who runs an Alberta-based company called DriveABLE (its office near London recommended Burridge lose his licence), says his firm already has solid scientific research and is licensing offices across North America.
DriveABLE administers two tests. The first is a computer touch-screen one involving driving-related questions. The second is the on-road test — the one Alan Burridge failed twice — which examines individuals’ reactions and decisions while they drive.
In Ontario, the ministry requires that companies such as DriveABLE send occupational therapists on the road test — widely considered to offer a better assessment of skills — when drivers are being evaluated.
Dobb’s wife, Bonnie, a professor in the department of family medicine and director of the Medically At-risk Driver Centre at the University of Alberta, developed a checklist for doctors to help them decide their patient’s driving future. Called SIMARD MD, the test is free to doctors on the university’s website.
Bédard has criticized the SIMARD test, saying it is not reliable and sends patients for tests who do not need to go. But Dobbs counters that the tool’s track record is excellent, especially when combined with a road test from her husband’s company.
In the meantime, physicians face stiff push-back from seniors when it comes to giving up that driver’s licence that may have become an essential part of their lives, one many assumed was permanent.
“It’s very rare I have patients who say, ‘Oh you’re right doctor, I don’t think I’d be safe to drive,’ said one doctor. That is because most of us have a very inflated opinion of our abilities.
We certainly cling to that license for as long as we can. Three-quarters of Canadians over 65 remain licensed drivers according, to the most recent Statistics Canada survey, and most continue well into their later years.
More than 200,000 drivers on the road across Canada today are over 85. In Ontario, close to two-thirds of men over 85 are still driving.
Even among the over-90 set, more than one in three Canadian men had driven a vehicle in the previous month.
Many of them might be quite capable drivers, since medical experts stress that health and mental differences vary more among seniors than other age groups.
But here is the dilemma: it is precisely senior drivers who might fail to realize how much of a danger they pose to themselves and others, because the very condition that could make them risky on the road — dementia that robs them of their ability to recognize their own disability.
“Along with cognitive impairment comes loss of insight,” says Stephanie Melvin, deputy superintendent at British Columbia’s Ministry of Transportation. “People aren’t noticing that they’re cutting corners, veering into other lanes, or going the wrong way down the street.”
Years ago, a man in his eighties struck my car while trying to pass me. He didn’t stop like he was supposed to. I decided not to catch up to him because he was speeding. Instead I contacted the police. He denied that he was even on the road we were on but the police saw paint from my car on his bumper. They gave him a choice. Be charged criminally with fail to remain or hand over his licence. He handed over his licence and was told that if he applies for a new one, he will be charged with fail to remain. He didn’t reapply for a new licence. He was obviously a dangerous man to have on the road.
For understandable reasons, people cherish their driver’s licences they may have had since they were teenagers. This is the first generation of seniors who have grown up behind the wheel, and many of them tend to see that licence as a right and not a privilege. It is actually a privilege and not a right.
As medical and safety experts point out, the difference between the alcohol-impaired driver and the medically impaired one is that the drunk driver may be sober the next time he is behind the wheel of his vehicle whereas the mentally disabled person will always be disabled whether or not he is behind the wheel.
There is an element of choice with drunk driving because we can choose to be sober when we get behind the wheel of our vehicle. However, all of us are going to get older and with age, comes the possibility of risk to ourselves, our families, friends and others on the road if we are behind the wheel. We are going to have to face up to the fact that we might not be able to drive safely if our aged brains and bodies are not up to it. Responsible motorists will recognize the risk and voluntarily turn in their driver’s licences. Irresponsible drivers will continue to drive and put us all at risk.
Bad driving imposes risks on other people—even a short journey can put a bad driver in close proximity with others. Turning in one’s own driver’s licence if the driver feels he or she is a risk to others on the road is a responsible balancing of one’s freedom to drive with the safety for others on the road. Fortunately, many conscientious senior drivers police themselves.
Eric Powis, 85, got into a minor accident a year ago while turning left and decided never to drive again. Diagnosed three years ago with early Alzheimer’s disease, the former cop, firefighter and military police officer with the British Army decided the risk of a serious crash was simply too great.
“It became obvious to me that since I had Alzheimer’s and wasn’t going to get better, the best thing I could do was give it up,” he says. “I didn’t want to injure anyone. So I just didn’t bother to renew my license.” That was the action of a very responsible citizen. But for every senior like Powis who recognizes it’s time to give up his licence, how many other potentially dangerous drivers out there are going undiagnosed or unreported by their family doctors and untested by the Ministry of Transportation?
If as a senior you wish to keep driving, here a few tips to keep you and others safe:
Get annual vision and hearing checks
Take senior driving courses and seminars (ex: AARP’s Driver Safety Program)
Visit an occupational therapist who may recommend helpful devices for your vehicle
Invest in a vehicle that best suits your needs
Have emergency supplies in the vehicle at all times
Map out your directions, avoid heavy traffic areas and driving in inclement weather
Use defensive driving techniques
Like all drivers, avoid distractions such as adjusting music players and using cell phones while you are driving
According to the National Safety Council, adult children would rather talk to parents about funeral plans than about taking away car keys. Although many seniors may willingly phase out night driving when they find it impossible to see where they're going, many do not recognize when it's time to give up driving for good. Children and caretakers can help aging parents make the transition as smooth as possible by keeping these important points in mind:
Use compassion. Remember that seniors often associate driving with independence and freedom. Understanding their resistance to relinquishing control over driving can make the transition easier.
Transition gradually. Seniors are more accepting of change that happens slowly. Try making yourself available once a week to drive an aging parent to the doctor, on errands or to recreational activities. It also helps to coordinate other transportation options such as carpooling, community transportation and even alternate methods of obtaining goods and services such as home delivery and internet shopping.
Make financial sense. Owning and operating a vehicle can be expensive, especially for those on a fixed income. Car payments, repair costs, fuel, insurance and registration fees all add up. Giving up the car can make seniors feel more financially secure as much needed income will no longer need to be diverted to auto expenses.
Talk about safety. Some seniors don't realize that they have become unsafe drivers. Riding along with an elderly parent to assess driving skills can become a catalyst for a conversation on driving safety.
Enlist expert help. Many motor vehicle bureaus have elderly assessment services and senior driving courses that can help you and your aging parent understand and cope with changes in driving abilities. Even a parent who passes the standard vision exam during license renewal can be assessed for driving ability if the bureau worker suspects there might be issues that could prevent the individual from meeting minimum driving safety requirements. The individual's doctor can also issue a prescription barring the senior from driving if physical and mental issues could cloud judgment and ability.
Take the keys. If all else fails, it might become necessary to confiscate the keys to a parent's vehicle. This option is imperative if a senior doesn't remember that he or she is not supposed to drive. In such a case, removing the vehicle altogether or disabling it might become the best move.
It works for teenagers when they start their driving careers: a series of graduated steps and restrictions to ease them on to the road safely. Why not use the reverse for seniors — some kind of de-graduated licensing as they approach their final years behind the wheel?
Ontario is one of the few places in Canada and the United States that does not have conditional or restricted licensing for drivers who are medically at risk. But Ministry of Transport spokesperson Bob Nichols told the Toronto Star the province “has not ruled out a conditional licensing regime and we continue to monitor methods used by other North American jurisdictions.” Saskatchewan has one of the most successful and flexible programs designed to keep its roads safe, and its seniors happy.
“We try to balance the privilege to drive with the greater public safety,” says Sandy Crighton, the manager of driver programs for Saskatchewan Government Insurance, the province’s licensing authority. “Losing your license is devastating. We like to give our drivers every opportunity.”
When a driver is reported with a medical condition that might affect driving — by a doctor, a police officer, a family member or the driver himself — a government nurse reviews the file. If the problem is deemed severe enough, the licence could be suspended.
But in most cases the driver undergoes further medical evaluation and a road test. Then, depending how he or she performs, a wide-ranging series of conditions can be imposed to adapt their driving skills to their driving needs.
“We determine where they want to drive,” explains Crighton. “If they live in small town Saskatchewan, they may just want to drive around there and to the farm. A city person might want to drive to the mall and to the doctor’s office.”
Saskatchewan officials then might conduct an even more specialized road test along the specific routes chosen by the senior, and their licence might limit them to that zone. Other restrictions could include driving in daylight hours only and always with another person in the vehicle. The same should apply to drivers in Ontario but the authorities in Ontario seem less convinced.
I am getting fairly close to being eighty. I had a minor accident about thirty years ago when I changed lanes without first looking to see that I could do it safely. But young drivers make that kind of mistake also.
I drive practically every day, sometimes at night and other times on highways both during days and at night. So far, (knock on wood) I am a careful driver. But if I suspect that I am being a risk to others and to my family and also to myself, I will turn in my driver’s licence. However, when I turn eighty and have to take the tests every two years and pass them, I will continue to drive my car.
Wednesday, 29 February, 2012
When justice is blind, deaf and dumb
On February 22nd 2912, I read a very interesting article written by Lorne Gunter that was published in the National Post about the crime of protecting yourself from criminals. I rarely literally copy another writer’s work in my blog but when another writer has done such a good job in writing an article, I choose to put it in my blog so that others will appreciate what the author is trying to portray. Now here is his article.
Just when was Ian Thomson guilty of unsafe storage of a firearm? Mr. Thomson is the Port Colborne, Ont., man currently standing trial in a Welland, Ontario courtroom after he and his home were attacked by fire bombers in August 2010. (That's correct, in the topsy-turvy world of Canadian criminal justice, Mr. Thomson and his home were the ones attacked and yet he is the one on trial.)
Having dropped other more serious charges such as dangerous use of a firearm because they concluded there was no reasonable chance of winning a conviction, Crown prosecutors have nonetheless bullied ahead with unsafe storage charges against Mr. Thomson.
One can only speculate on the Crown's motives, but many prosecutors are so opposed to private citizens owning guns and, especially, using guns to defend themselves, their loved ones or property, that it is easy to believe prosecutors are running Mr. Thomson through the ringer in an attempt to discourage other homeowners from following his lead. They have conceded they cannot get a conviction against the retired crane operator and former firearms instructor for shooting at the three men who were trying to burn down his house with him in it, but perhaps they are hopeful their decision to drag Mr. Thomson through months of emotionally draining and expensive court proceedings will cause other homeowners to conclude armed self-defence isn't worth the hassle.
But back to my original question: Just when was Ian Thomson guilty of unsafe storage?
Was it when three masked thugs began lobbing Molotov cocktails at his secluded rural home, while also shouting death threats in a pre-dawn assault? That's when he ran to his locked gun safe, retrieved one of his legally registered pistols and loaded it with ammunition.
Or was he guilty of unsafe storage when one of the bombs set fire to his veranda and another broke through his kitchen window? That's when he went outside and fired three times - once at the feet and twice over the heads of his attackers - in a successful attempt to ward them off.
Or was he guilty of unsafe storage when he then ran back into his home, got a second locked-up gun, loaded it and left it on his bed? Not knowing whether his attackers would return, he wanted to be sure he was prepared, so he decided to fortify his bedroom as his last line of defence. Was that unsafe in (the) prosecutors' opinion?
Perhaps (the) prosecutors feel it was unsafe that Mr. Thomson; again, wary that his attackers might come back - tucked the first pistol in the waistband of his pajamas while he went outside and used a garden hose to the extinguish the fire on his porch and another that was burning his dogs' kennel. Perhaps they believe he should have returned his weapons to their safe before turning on the hose. Let the house burn rather than violate Canada's obsessive gun laws.
Prosecutors have concocted a theory that Mr. Thomson must have had his two pistols loaded and in his nightstand before the attack began because, to their minds, he never had enough time once the gasoline bombs began raining down to go to his safe, unlock it, remove his pistols, load and fire them.
Recall, though, Mr. Thomson is a former firearms trainer, experienced with the operation and handling of pistols. On Monday he and his lawyer used a video to demonstrate for the court that he was certainly capable of retrieving his guns from safe storage and loading them in the time available. (So much for the Crown's theory.)
But even if we accept that the Crown's version is not merely a desperate, hole-riddled stretch-of-the-imagination to justify its 17-month persecution of an innocent man, what would have been unsafe about keeping a gun in a bedside table in an area where police admit it can take 15 minutes or longer to respond to emergency calls?
The safe-storage provisions of the Criminal Code; passed at the same time the gun registry was made law, are so poorly drafted that they permit prosecutors to go after any gun owner who so much as takes his firearm out of its case to admire it. Few unsafe-storage charges stick; judges tend to throw them out. So they have largely become bludgeons prosecutors can use to intimidate lawful gun owners.
Just ask Ian Thomson.
My own opinion
As we all know, not all prosecutors have enough brains in their skulls to recognize that what they are doing is counter productive. Some of them act against the interests of society in the name of justice. In doing so, they drag that statue that represents justice through the mud the prosecutors have created until the statue of justice is no longer recognizable.
Let me ask you this rhetorical question. If you saw two gangsters trying to burn your house down and you had a firearm in your home which you could load and then go outside to confront the gangsters and make them stop what they are doing, would you go outside with a loaded firearm? Of course you would. But the police who charged Mr. Thompson and the prosecutor who is prosecuting him would insist that instead of confronting the fire bombers with a loaded gun, you should stay inside your burning house and phone the cops. What I find most offensive is that we as members of society are paying these dunces a salary.
We as human beings are born ignorant of the ways of the world. But as time moves on, our ignorance goes through a metamorphosis which results in us all becoming more or less intelligent and cognizant of the ways of the world. However, stupidity is something that many people acquire on their own initiative and like a bad cold—it just lingers in their heads.
I am going to refer you to a case that was heard before the Canadian Supreme Court in 2004.
An inmate (Kerr) in a Canadian prison had agreed to meet another inmate (Garon) for a meeting. Kerr was concern for his safety since Garon was the head of a gang in the prison. Garon had threatened Kerr with death in the past and it was for this reason that Kerr brought to the meeting a shiv (homemade knife) and an ice pick which he concealed in his clothing.
A physical altercation ensued, during which each stabbed the other multiple times and as a result, Garon died from his wounds. Kerr was charged on July 9, 2001 with the second degree murder of Garon, contrary to s. 235(1) of the Criminal Code, R.S.C. 1985, c. C-46, and with possession of a weapon for a purpose dangerous to the public peace, contrary to s. 88(1) of the Code.
At his trial, the judge accepted Kerr’s evidence to the effect that he was defending himself against what he perceived to be a lethal attack. The judge found that Kerr’s evidence was compelling and consistent with the physical evidence at the scene and the observations of other witnesses.
The judge acquitted Kerr on the charge of second degree murder on the basis that his actions constituted self-defence. The judge found that Kerr believed that his life was threatened, and that his belief was perfectly justified at the time. He also acquitted Kerr of the charge of being in possession of a weapon on the basis that he possessed his weapons for purposes of deterrence and defence.
The prosecutor appealed and the Court of Appeal set aside the acquittal and Kerr subsequently appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada.
The Supreme Court ruled that Kerr did not possess his weapons for a purpose dangerous to the public peace. It agreed with the trial judge’s finding that Kerr possessed his weapons on the day in question for the purpose of defending himself against an imminent attack by specific individuals. The court found that his purpose was not, in all the circumstances, dangerous to the public peace, since the attack was clearly unavoidable. Kerr was subject to credible threats of an imminent assault, in an environment from which there was simply no possibility to escape and in which, as found by the trial judge, it was futile to seek protection. It is also particularly relevant that the trial judge specifically found that Kerr’s actual use of the weapon constituted justifiable self-defence.
The court also said that an accused who otherwise satisfies the requirements of the offence should be excused from criminal liability where the possession of a weapon is necessary for defending himself. The usual limits on the common law defence of necessity apply. First, the defence of necessity is limited to situations of clear and imminent peril. Thus, necessity would not excuse the possession of a weapon simply because the accused lived in a high-crime neighbourhood or finds himself among a dangerous prison population. Second, the act must be unavoidable in that the circumstances afford the accused no reasonable opportunity for a legal way out, such as escaping or seeking police protection. Finally, the harm inflicted must be less than the harm sought to be avoided.
Since the man who was confronting the gangsters who were fire-bombing his home wasn’t shooting them and was only trying to scare them away from his home, the harm of scaring the gangsters was far less that him burning to death in his home or being attacked by the fire-bombers.
Quite frankly, I expect Ian Thompson to be acquitted just as Kerr was acquitted. Of course, it is also possible that his trial judge has mush for brains not unlike Kerr’s prosecutor.
Just when was Ian Thomson guilty of unsafe storage of a firearm? Mr. Thomson is the Port Colborne, Ont., man currently standing trial in a Welland, Ontario courtroom after he and his home were attacked by fire bombers in August 2010. (That's correct, in the topsy-turvy world of Canadian criminal justice, Mr. Thomson and his home were the ones attacked and yet he is the one on trial.)
Having dropped other more serious charges such as dangerous use of a firearm because they concluded there was no reasonable chance of winning a conviction, Crown prosecutors have nonetheless bullied ahead with unsafe storage charges against Mr. Thomson.
One can only speculate on the Crown's motives, but many prosecutors are so opposed to private citizens owning guns and, especially, using guns to defend themselves, their loved ones or property, that it is easy to believe prosecutors are running Mr. Thomson through the ringer in an attempt to discourage other homeowners from following his lead. They have conceded they cannot get a conviction against the retired crane operator and former firearms instructor for shooting at the three men who were trying to burn down his house with him in it, but perhaps they are hopeful their decision to drag Mr. Thomson through months of emotionally draining and expensive court proceedings will cause other homeowners to conclude armed self-defence isn't worth the hassle.
But back to my original question: Just when was Ian Thomson guilty of unsafe storage?
Was it when three masked thugs began lobbing Molotov cocktails at his secluded rural home, while also shouting death threats in a pre-dawn assault? That's when he ran to his locked gun safe, retrieved one of his legally registered pistols and loaded it with ammunition.
Or was he guilty of unsafe storage when one of the bombs set fire to his veranda and another broke through his kitchen window? That's when he went outside and fired three times - once at the feet and twice over the heads of his attackers - in a successful attempt to ward them off.
Or was he guilty of unsafe storage when he then ran back into his home, got a second locked-up gun, loaded it and left it on his bed? Not knowing whether his attackers would return, he wanted to be sure he was prepared, so he decided to fortify his bedroom as his last line of defence. Was that unsafe in (the) prosecutors' opinion?
Perhaps (the) prosecutors feel it was unsafe that Mr. Thomson; again, wary that his attackers might come back - tucked the first pistol in the waistband of his pajamas while he went outside and used a garden hose to the extinguish the fire on his porch and another that was burning his dogs' kennel. Perhaps they believe he should have returned his weapons to their safe before turning on the hose. Let the house burn rather than violate Canada's obsessive gun laws.
Prosecutors have concocted a theory that Mr. Thomson must have had his two pistols loaded and in his nightstand before the attack began because, to their minds, he never had enough time once the gasoline bombs began raining down to go to his safe, unlock it, remove his pistols, load and fire them.
Recall, though, Mr. Thomson is a former firearms trainer, experienced with the operation and handling of pistols. On Monday he and his lawyer used a video to demonstrate for the court that he was certainly capable of retrieving his guns from safe storage and loading them in the time available. (So much for the Crown's theory.)
But even if we accept that the Crown's version is not merely a desperate, hole-riddled stretch-of-the-imagination to justify its 17-month persecution of an innocent man, what would have been unsafe about keeping a gun in a bedside table in an area where police admit it can take 15 minutes or longer to respond to emergency calls?
The safe-storage provisions of the Criminal Code; passed at the same time the gun registry was made law, are so poorly drafted that they permit prosecutors to go after any gun owner who so much as takes his firearm out of its case to admire it. Few unsafe-storage charges stick; judges tend to throw them out. So they have largely become bludgeons prosecutors can use to intimidate lawful gun owners.
Just ask Ian Thomson.
My own opinion
As we all know, not all prosecutors have enough brains in their skulls to recognize that what they are doing is counter productive. Some of them act against the interests of society in the name of justice. In doing so, they drag that statue that represents justice through the mud the prosecutors have created until the statue of justice is no longer recognizable.
Let me ask you this rhetorical question. If you saw two gangsters trying to burn your house down and you had a firearm in your home which you could load and then go outside to confront the gangsters and make them stop what they are doing, would you go outside with a loaded firearm? Of course you would. But the police who charged Mr. Thompson and the prosecutor who is prosecuting him would insist that instead of confronting the fire bombers with a loaded gun, you should stay inside your burning house and phone the cops. What I find most offensive is that we as members of society are paying these dunces a salary.
We as human beings are born ignorant of the ways of the world. But as time moves on, our ignorance goes through a metamorphosis which results in us all becoming more or less intelligent and cognizant of the ways of the world. However, stupidity is something that many people acquire on their own initiative and like a bad cold—it just lingers in their heads.
I am going to refer you to a case that was heard before the Canadian Supreme Court in 2004.
An inmate (Kerr) in a Canadian prison had agreed to meet another inmate (Garon) for a meeting. Kerr was concern for his safety since Garon was the head of a gang in the prison. Garon had threatened Kerr with death in the past and it was for this reason that Kerr brought to the meeting a shiv (homemade knife) and an ice pick which he concealed in his clothing.
A physical altercation ensued, during which each stabbed the other multiple times and as a result, Garon died from his wounds. Kerr was charged on July 9, 2001 with the second degree murder of Garon, contrary to s. 235(1) of the Criminal Code, R.S.C. 1985, c. C-46, and with possession of a weapon for a purpose dangerous to the public peace, contrary to s. 88(1) of the Code.
At his trial, the judge accepted Kerr’s evidence to the effect that he was defending himself against what he perceived to be a lethal attack. The judge found that Kerr’s evidence was compelling and consistent with the physical evidence at the scene and the observations of other witnesses.
The judge acquitted Kerr on the charge of second degree murder on the basis that his actions constituted self-defence. The judge found that Kerr believed that his life was threatened, and that his belief was perfectly justified at the time. He also acquitted Kerr of the charge of being in possession of a weapon on the basis that he possessed his weapons for purposes of deterrence and defence.
The prosecutor appealed and the Court of Appeal set aside the acquittal and Kerr subsequently appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada.
The Supreme Court ruled that Kerr did not possess his weapons for a purpose dangerous to the public peace. It agreed with the trial judge’s finding that Kerr possessed his weapons on the day in question for the purpose of defending himself against an imminent attack by specific individuals. The court found that his purpose was not, in all the circumstances, dangerous to the public peace, since the attack was clearly unavoidable. Kerr was subject to credible threats of an imminent assault, in an environment from which there was simply no possibility to escape and in which, as found by the trial judge, it was futile to seek protection. It is also particularly relevant that the trial judge specifically found that Kerr’s actual use of the weapon constituted justifiable self-defence.
The court also said that an accused who otherwise satisfies the requirements of the offence should be excused from criminal liability where the possession of a weapon is necessary for defending himself. The usual limits on the common law defence of necessity apply. First, the defence of necessity is limited to situations of clear and imminent peril. Thus, necessity would not excuse the possession of a weapon simply because the accused lived in a high-crime neighbourhood or finds himself among a dangerous prison population. Second, the act must be unavoidable in that the circumstances afford the accused no reasonable opportunity for a legal way out, such as escaping or seeking police protection. Finally, the harm inflicted must be less than the harm sought to be avoided.
Since the man who was confronting the gangsters who were fire-bombing his home wasn’t shooting them and was only trying to scare them away from his home, the harm of scaring the gangsters was far less that him burning to death in his home or being attacked by the fire-bombers.
Quite frankly, I expect Ian Thompson to be acquitted just as Kerr was acquitted. Of course, it is also possible that his trial judge has mush for brains not unlike Kerr’s prosecutor.
Monday, 27 February, 2012
Overreaction is akin to stupidity
Being human, there are times when we overreact to something that confronts us. But some people react in such a manner that the use of the word ‘stupidity’ when describing their reaction is being kind. I am going to tell you a true story of an event that took place recently in which the police overreacted in such a manner, it makes us wonder if these cops are in the right profession.
The four-year-old daughter of Jesse Sansone was in a kindergarten class in a school in Kitchener, Ontario when she drew a picture of a man with a gun in his hand.
“Ohhh. What do we have here?” asked her teacher. The little girl said that the picture was of her dad getting bad guys and monsters.
The teacher then contacted the principal of the school who then called Family and Children's Services who then called the police. Meanwhile, the school called Jessie Sansone and asked him to come to the school, which he did. When he arrived at the principal’s office, his daughter was in the office and so were three police officers.
Now we all know that there are really bright police officers serving us in our police forces but there are also some really stupid police officers whom the word ‘dimwit’ is applicable and the use of it when describing some of them is not being unkind at all. Some dimwits from the police force in Kitchener were in the principal’s office
When Sansone arrived at the school to pick up his daughter, the Waterloo Police dimwits arrested him for possession of a firearm. But the ‘firearm’ turned out to be a plastic toy gun that shoots foam darts. Now what did these dimwits do when they learned that the ‘firearm’ was really simply a plastic toy? They did what you would expect dimwits to do. They arrested him and took him to the police station.
It was bad enough that they arrested the man for being in possession of a plastic toy that shoots foam darts but they went further in their ‘quest’ for the truth. They ordered him to take off all of his clothes so that they could strip search him for any other ‘weapons’ they might find on his person.
When ordering him to bend over so that they can look in the crevice of his butt, did they hope to find a gun protruding out of his ‘you know what’? Instead of giving him his clothes back, they gave him a blanket to cover himself with while they no doubt began an extensive search of his clothes for another gun, or perhaps for ammunition.
Think about it. If his daughter had drawn a picture of a bazooka, would they strip him and tell him to bend over so they can determine if he has a bazooka stuck inside his ‘you know what’? Suppose his four-hear-old daughter had drawn a picture of a tank or worse yet, a bomb? At what point would the stupidity of the dimwits end?
Meanwhile, the couple's four-year-old daughter was taken from them and handed to a social worker as Sansone's pregnant wife waited for over two hours, wondering where her children were. As it turns out, all of the couple's four children had been at Family and Children's Services, being interviewed by social workers.
"So, my wife was really panicking at that point," Sansone later said. "So her and the detective drove down to children's services. They questioned each of my children. At that interview, I wasn't there, my wife wasn't there, but my boys, all they know right now is: 'Daddy and guns, guns and Daddy' my kids knew all the police were at the school because of me. Now I have to explain to them how much of a mistake this is," he added.
All this occurred over a picture of a toy gun that shoots out foam darts drawn in crayon by a four-year-old girl.
"So many people dealt with this situation in the wrong way," Sansone said. That was a very good observation on Sansone’s part.
The school, the police and the Family and Children's Services defended their actions, saying that when a child draws a picture of a gun, they have a responsibility to act. I don’t take issue with that. However, they dealt with this problem the wrong way. What should they have done?
First of all, the school principal was right to call the police and the police were right to come to the school. But once Sansone arrived in the principal’s office, the police should have asked his daughter in her father’s presence to describe the gun in better detail than what she had drawn on a piece of paper.
The police could have asked, “Did you ever hear any loud noise when the gun is fired?” She would have told them that it shoots foam darts. That would have resolved the issue right then and there. But of course, the dimwits didn’t go that route. They still had visions of a real gun that shoots bullets in the hands of a really bad man, blah, blah, blah.
The family is trying to decide what to do next, and they are finding a new school for their children to attend because in this particular case, their action ended up slandering an innocent person and damaging an entire family.
Family and Children’s Service executive director Alison Scott correctly said, "From a public safety point of view, any child drawing a picture of guns and saying there are guns in a home would warrant some further conversation with the parents and child.”
I would be less than honest if I didn’t add that the police did apologize to Mr. Sansone when they discovered their mistake.
One should keep in mind that gun laws in Canada are much different than they are in the States, but this incident illustrates what happens when a country has stringent laws with respect to the possession of hand guns and the laws can be overly oppressive.
Just before two in the morning, on March 9th 2009, Leroy Smickle was alone in his cousin’s apartment when suddenly the police smashed open the apartment door with a small battering ram and caught Smickle red-handed with a loaded handgun in his hand while posing for the camera on his laptop so that he could put the picture of him holding the gun in Facebook.
Now let’s agree on one thing. That was a very stupid thing for him to do. Even if the police hadn’t come into the apartment at that moment, they sooner or later would have seen what was in the Facebook because they were already planning to arrest his cousin whom they suspected had illegal guns in his apartment.
Smickle spent five months in custody before he was released on bail. When the matter came up for trial in February 2012, the trial judge (Anne Molloy) was deeply concerned about the consequences this foolish man was going to face. In Canada, being in possession of an illegal handgun is automatically punishable for three years in prison as a minimum sentence.
The judge didn’t think that Smickle’s action warranted that kind of punishment but it appeared that she would have no other choice. But she did have a choice. She declared that the mandatory minimum sentence for possession of an illegal gun was contrary to the Canadian Charter of Rights because it constituted cruel and unusual punishment that was fundamentally unfair, outrageous, abhorrent and intolerant so she struck the law down. Now keep in mind, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the law is no longer valid. She was simply saying that it wasn’t valid in her court. Nevertheless, Smickle’s actions were deserving of punishment so she credited him with the time he served in jail and gave him a conditional sentence of house arrest for five months. He can still go to work, shop for groceries and go to church while serving the conditional sentence.
I remember when I was in my early twenties back in the mid 1950s, I took some of the members of my scout troop hunting in the forests of the mountains near Vancouver, B.C. and we carried our rifles unsheathed in a public bus. No one on the bus thought that odd because it was a common practice then.
A month after I purchased the handgun, I placed it in the drawer of my boss’ desk in the YMCA where I worked as the Assistant Boy’s Work Secretary. Two days later, some boys broke into his office one night in hopes of finding money some money and discovered the gun instead. Less than a week later, they were caught with the gun and the gun was returned to me with the hammer broken.
However, in 1962, I was charged with being in possession of an unregistered hand gun (38 calibre Smith & Wesson). It was in my apartment hanging on the wall. In those days, there were no laws then that stated that guns had to be securely locked up. Actually I registered the gun with the RCMP when I bought it in 1954 however; I didn’t know that I had to re-register it every time I moved to a different address. When the police realized that the firing pin was inoperable, they withdrew the charge but took my gun away to be destroyed.
It is imperative that gun owners securely lock up their guns and their ammunition. In Port Orchard in the State of Washington, a nine-year-old boy brought a loaded 45-calibre handgun to his school. He carried it in his backpack. Somehow, it went off when he slammed the backpack on his desk and a bullet struck an eight-year-old classmate. At the time of this writing, she is in critical condition with injuries to her abdomen and arm. The boy was charged with assault and unlawful possession of a firearm. He told the police that the gun belonged to his dad. Obviously, the gun was not locked up and instead it was easily obtainable by his son.
Many years ago, two boys and their parents lived next door to my aunt and uncle in Creston, B.C. One day, the boys were playing with their dad’s handgun and pointed it at a neighbour’s kid who was visiting the boys. They didn’t know that the gun was loaded. The trigger was pulled and the boy was accidentally shot dead. That gun was also not locked up.
I certainly don’t take issue with our gun laws in Canada. I am in favour of severe punishment for criminals who possess handguns. In February of this year, a man and woman (both being 22) were arrested after the police found an illegal loaded handgun and a bulletproof vest in their apartment. They will be facing a minimum of three-years in prison and rightly so. We don’t want gangsters and their molls being possession of handguns and bulletproof vests.
There is no doubt that if what had happened to the Sansone’s had happened in the U.S., the school and the authorities would be facing a massive lawsuit from angry parents. It is my opinion that the Sansones should sue the police in small claims court for the maximum of which that court upper limit is $25,000 because now the Sansones are left to pick up the pieces after the police have turned their lives upside down.
Mr. Sansone said, “The first thing my daughter said when I saw her was, ‘Daddy are you mad at me?’ That sums it up to me.” Of course he wasn’t mad at his little daughter. He is rightly mad however at the adults that mistreated him and his wife over a plastic gun that shoots out flam darts. As the title of this article says: “Overreaction is akin to stupidity.”
The four-year-old daughter of Jesse Sansone was in a kindergarten class in a school in Kitchener, Ontario when she drew a picture of a man with a gun in his hand.
“Ohhh. What do we have here?” asked her teacher. The little girl said that the picture was of her dad getting bad guys and monsters.
The teacher then contacted the principal of the school who then called Family and Children's Services who then called the police. Meanwhile, the school called Jessie Sansone and asked him to come to the school, which he did. When he arrived at the principal’s office, his daughter was in the office and so were three police officers.
Now we all know that there are really bright police officers serving us in our police forces but there are also some really stupid police officers whom the word ‘dimwit’ is applicable and the use of it when describing some of them is not being unkind at all. Some dimwits from the police force in Kitchener were in the principal’s office
When Sansone arrived at the school to pick up his daughter, the Waterloo Police dimwits arrested him for possession of a firearm. But the ‘firearm’ turned out to be a plastic toy gun that shoots foam darts. Now what did these dimwits do when they learned that the ‘firearm’ was really simply a plastic toy? They did what you would expect dimwits to do. They arrested him and took him to the police station.
It was bad enough that they arrested the man for being in possession of a plastic toy that shoots foam darts but they went further in their ‘quest’ for the truth. They ordered him to take off all of his clothes so that they could strip search him for any other ‘weapons’ they might find on his person.
When ordering him to bend over so that they can look in the crevice of his butt, did they hope to find a gun protruding out of his ‘you know what’? Instead of giving him his clothes back, they gave him a blanket to cover himself with while they no doubt began an extensive search of his clothes for another gun, or perhaps for ammunition.
Think about it. If his daughter had drawn a picture of a bazooka, would they strip him and tell him to bend over so they can determine if he has a bazooka stuck inside his ‘you know what’? Suppose his four-hear-old daughter had drawn a picture of a tank or worse yet, a bomb? At what point would the stupidity of the dimwits end?
Meanwhile, the couple's four-year-old daughter was taken from them and handed to a social worker as Sansone's pregnant wife waited for over two hours, wondering where her children were. As it turns out, all of the couple's four children had been at Family and Children's Services, being interviewed by social workers.
"So, my wife was really panicking at that point," Sansone later said. "So her and the detective drove down to children's services. They questioned each of my children. At that interview, I wasn't there, my wife wasn't there, but my boys, all they know right now is: 'Daddy and guns, guns and Daddy' my kids knew all the police were at the school because of me. Now I have to explain to them how much of a mistake this is," he added.
All this occurred over a picture of a toy gun that shoots out foam darts drawn in crayon by a four-year-old girl.
"So many people dealt with this situation in the wrong way," Sansone said. That was a very good observation on Sansone’s part.
The school, the police and the Family and Children's Services defended their actions, saying that when a child draws a picture of a gun, they have a responsibility to act. I don’t take issue with that. However, they dealt with this problem the wrong way. What should they have done?
First of all, the school principal was right to call the police and the police were right to come to the school. But once Sansone arrived in the principal’s office, the police should have asked his daughter in her father’s presence to describe the gun in better detail than what she had drawn on a piece of paper.
The police could have asked, “Did you ever hear any loud noise when the gun is fired?” She would have told them that it shoots foam darts. That would have resolved the issue right then and there. But of course, the dimwits didn’t go that route. They still had visions of a real gun that shoots bullets in the hands of a really bad man, blah, blah, blah.
The family is trying to decide what to do next, and they are finding a new school for their children to attend because in this particular case, their action ended up slandering an innocent person and damaging an entire family.
Family and Children’s Service executive director Alison Scott correctly said, "From a public safety point of view, any child drawing a picture of guns and saying there are guns in a home would warrant some further conversation with the parents and child.”
I would be less than honest if I didn’t add that the police did apologize to Mr. Sansone when they discovered their mistake.
One should keep in mind that gun laws in Canada are much different than they are in the States, but this incident illustrates what happens when a country has stringent laws with respect to the possession of hand guns and the laws can be overly oppressive.
Just before two in the morning, on March 9th 2009, Leroy Smickle was alone in his cousin’s apartment when suddenly the police smashed open the apartment door with a small battering ram and caught Smickle red-handed with a loaded handgun in his hand while posing for the camera on his laptop so that he could put the picture of him holding the gun in Facebook.
Now let’s agree on one thing. That was a very stupid thing for him to do. Even if the police hadn’t come into the apartment at that moment, they sooner or later would have seen what was in the Facebook because they were already planning to arrest his cousin whom they suspected had illegal guns in his apartment.
Smickle spent five months in custody before he was released on bail. When the matter came up for trial in February 2012, the trial judge (Anne Molloy) was deeply concerned about the consequences this foolish man was going to face. In Canada, being in possession of an illegal handgun is automatically punishable for three years in prison as a minimum sentence.
The judge didn’t think that Smickle’s action warranted that kind of punishment but it appeared that she would have no other choice. But she did have a choice. She declared that the mandatory minimum sentence for possession of an illegal gun was contrary to the Canadian Charter of Rights because it constituted cruel and unusual punishment that was fundamentally unfair, outrageous, abhorrent and intolerant so she struck the law down. Now keep in mind, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the law is no longer valid. She was simply saying that it wasn’t valid in her court. Nevertheless, Smickle’s actions were deserving of punishment so she credited him with the time he served in jail and gave him a conditional sentence of house arrest for five months. He can still go to work, shop for groceries and go to church while serving the conditional sentence.
I remember when I was in my early twenties back in the mid 1950s, I took some of the members of my scout troop hunting in the forests of the mountains near Vancouver, B.C. and we carried our rifles unsheathed in a public bus. No one on the bus thought that odd because it was a common practice then.
A month after I purchased the handgun, I placed it in the drawer of my boss’ desk in the YMCA where I worked as the Assistant Boy’s Work Secretary. Two days later, some boys broke into his office one night in hopes of finding money some money and discovered the gun instead. Less than a week later, they were caught with the gun and the gun was returned to me with the hammer broken.
However, in 1962, I was charged with being in possession of an unregistered hand gun (38 calibre Smith & Wesson). It was in my apartment hanging on the wall. In those days, there were no laws then that stated that guns had to be securely locked up. Actually I registered the gun with the RCMP when I bought it in 1954 however; I didn’t know that I had to re-register it every time I moved to a different address. When the police realized that the firing pin was inoperable, they withdrew the charge but took my gun away to be destroyed.
It is imperative that gun owners securely lock up their guns and their ammunition. In Port Orchard in the State of Washington, a nine-year-old boy brought a loaded 45-calibre handgun to his school. He carried it in his backpack. Somehow, it went off when he slammed the backpack on his desk and a bullet struck an eight-year-old classmate. At the time of this writing, she is in critical condition with injuries to her abdomen and arm. The boy was charged with assault and unlawful possession of a firearm. He told the police that the gun belonged to his dad. Obviously, the gun was not locked up and instead it was easily obtainable by his son.
Many years ago, two boys and their parents lived next door to my aunt and uncle in Creston, B.C. One day, the boys were playing with their dad’s handgun and pointed it at a neighbour’s kid who was visiting the boys. They didn’t know that the gun was loaded. The trigger was pulled and the boy was accidentally shot dead. That gun was also not locked up.
I certainly don’t take issue with our gun laws in Canada. I am in favour of severe punishment for criminals who possess handguns. In February of this year, a man and woman (both being 22) were arrested after the police found an illegal loaded handgun and a bulletproof vest in their apartment. They will be facing a minimum of three-years in prison and rightly so. We don’t want gangsters and their molls being possession of handguns and bulletproof vests.
There is no doubt that if what had happened to the Sansone’s had happened in the U.S., the school and the authorities would be facing a massive lawsuit from angry parents. It is my opinion that the Sansones should sue the police in small claims court for the maximum of which that court upper limit is $25,000 because now the Sansones are left to pick up the pieces after the police have turned their lives upside down.
Mr. Sansone said, “The first thing my daughter said when I saw her was, ‘Daddy are you mad at me?’ That sums it up to me.” Of course he wasn’t mad at his little daughter. He is rightly mad however at the adults that mistreated him and his wife over a plastic gun that shoots out flam darts. As the title of this article says: “Overreaction is akin to stupidity.”
Friday, 24 February, 2012
It was a really stupid Japanese nuclear blunder
The nuclear plants at Fukushima in Japan are ‘Boiling Water Reactors’ (BWR for short). A BWR produces electricity by boiling water, and spinning a turbine with that steam. The nuclear fuel heats water, the water boils and creates steam, the steam then drives turbines that create the electricity, and the steam is then cooled and condensed back to water, and the water returns to be heated by the nuclear fuel. The reactor operates at about 285 °C. This is generally the way it is done in all nuclear plants.
In the pressurized water reactor, the water which flows through the reactor core is isolated from the turbine. In the boiling water reactor the water which passes over the reactor core to act as moderator and coolant is also the steam source for the turbine.
The disadvantage of this kind of reactor is that any fuel leak might make the water radioactive and that radioactivity would reach the turbine and the rest of the loop the water passes through. However, if operated safely, it is a great way to generate electricity.
In the pressurized water reactor (PWR), the water which passes over the reactor core acts as moderator and coolant does not flow to the turbine, but is instead contained in a pressurized primary loop. The primary loop water produces steam in the secondary loop which drives the turbine. The obvious advantage to this is that a fuel leak in the core would not pass any radioactive contaminants to the turbine and condenser thereby making it to dangerous to be near it.
Another advantage is that the PWR can operate at higher pressure and temperature at about 160 atmospheres and about 315 C. This makes it more efficient than the BWR, but the reactor is more complicated and more costly to construct. Most of the U.S. reactors are pressurized water reactors.
For decades, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl have served as warning for the nightmare of nuclear power generation gone awry. In the wake of Japan's deadly earthquake and tsunami, the still-unfolding disaster of Fukushima Daiichi has come closer than any nuclear crisis in history to making it a fearsome trio.
It remains to be seen how much damage will be caused by the crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power complex, where four of the six reactors have seen a range of woes including three explosions in four days, damage to two containment vessels, possible overheating from spent fuel rods, and mounting peril for the last remaining 50 workers due to dangerous spikes in radiation emissions.
Yet it is already possible to outline key differences that set the current Fukushima situation apart from the 1979 Three Mile Island emergency near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and the disaster in Chernobyl, Ukraine, that unfolded seven years later.
Reactor Type
Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power complex, which began operating in the 1970s, is made up of six boiling-water reactors, or BWRs—a type of ‘Light Water Reactor.’ (Using ordinary water, it is distinguished from ‘heavy water reactors’ which use deuterium oxide, or D2O, instead of H2O.) Three Mile Island used another type of ‘Light Water Reactor’ known as a pressurized-water reactor, or PWR.
Both of these reactors use water for two purposes. The water acts as a coolant, carrying heat away from the nuclear fuel, and as a ‘moderator’ that slows down the release of neutrons during fission reactions.
In a PWR, the water is kept under pressure. This means the temperature can be higher than the boiling point of water without generating a significant amount steam. So the reactor core operates at a higher temperature in these systems, and heat can be transferred more efficiently. Boiling-water reactors operate at lower temperatures, and they tend to be simpler, with fewer parts.
Chernobyl's reactors were a type called RBMK (for the Russian, "reaktor bolshoy moshchnosty kanalny"), which also used water for the coolant. But unlike the ‘Light Water Reactors’, the RMBK used graphite as a moderator. According to the World Nuclear Association, an industry trade group based in London, no other power reactor in the world combines a graphite moderator and water coolant as Chernobyl did, although Russia does have several RBMK reactors in operation.
Most nuclear reactors in the United States today use either BWR or PWR technology, which it is said to be equally safe. Both types of reactors have a kind of self-regulation or ‘negative feedback’ loop: As the reactor gets hotter, the fission reaction slows down, decreasing power. The RMBK design, on the other hand, could go into positive feedback where higher temperature begets more power, which in turn increases the temperature, and so on.
Cause of the accident
At this point in the Fukushima disaster, the tsunami appears to be the immediate culprit, since the plants shut down as they were designed to do following the earthquake. When the tsunami hit an hour later, it damaged the site infrastructure. So while the earthquake had cut the reactors' external power supply, which is needed to keep coolant pumps doing their job, the tsunami killed the diesel backup generators needed to provide power for the cooling system. Batteries provided power for only up to eight hours. Mobile generators were brought in to take over. Still, it's too early to know for absolute sure what sequence of events led to what outcome.
My personal opinion is that the diesel backup should have not been at ground level. Because it was at ground level, the water from the tsunami covered the generator thereby rendering in inoperative. This resulted in no electricity being brought to operate the cooling system.
According to the 1979 Kemeny Commission report on Three Mile Island—the definitive document of that disaster—‘equipment failures’ initiated the event but ‘operator error’ was the fundamental cause of the accident. Emergency cooling systems were shut down, with dire consequences. Three Mile Island would have been a ‘relatively insignificant incident’ the commission found, if the plant operators (or those who supervised them) had kept the emergency cooling systems on through the early stages of the accident.
At the Chernobyl reactor in Ukraine, an ‘ill-conceived, badly executed safety test’ initiated the disaster. A sudden surge of power triggered a steam explosion that ruptured the reactor vessel, according to a report from the United Nations. This allowed further violent fuel-steam interactions that destroyed the reactor core and severely damaged the reactor building. As a direct result of that blunder, hundreds later died and an entire city was evacuated and now that city and its buildings are off limits to everyone who lived there.
Understanding the Problem
The level of access to information about what is going on inside a reactor has increased in the decades since Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
As Peter Bradford, who served on the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission at the time of Three Mile Island, said, “At Three Mile Island, much of what we thought we knew on the third day turned out to be incorrect.” The extent of fuel melting, and even the fact that a hydrogen explosion had occurred in the containment on the first day, he said, did not become clear for years. There was all kinds of information that we didn't know about.”
During the first few minutes of the accident at Three Mile Island, more than 100 alarms went off, and no system was in place to filter out the important signals from the insignificant ones, according to the 1979 Kemeny report. “Overall, little attention had been paid to the interaction between human beings and machines under the rapidly changing and confusing circumstances of an accident,” the commissioners wrote.
By contrast, the level of computerization and information transfer available today could give Japanese officials much more insight to what happened in the four troubled reactors at Fukushima—at least in theory. They've got so much more going on in terms of the earthquake and the tsunami that the nuclear reactors at the Three Mile Island didn't have.
Radiation Containment
Like the Three Mile Island plant, the Fukushima reactors have three barriers designed to prevent radiation leakage, including metal cladding surrounding the nuclear fuel, a reactor pressure vessel, and the primary containment vessel. Chernobyl lacked a containment vessel.
Once radiation is released into the environment, it can contaminate vast areas like they did when the Chernobyl reactor exploded. Contamination levels are not linear. The further away you are doesn’t necessarily mean that you will get lower doses. That is because other factors such as prevailing winds can influence what areas are affected. In the Chernobyl accident, some areas 100 miles away from the facility had radiation levels that were higher than areas just 10 or 20 miles away.
The Chernobyl pattern was quite erratic because radiation was released very, very high in the atmosphere because of the nature of the reactor and graphite fire. Weather changed over a prolonged emission period, as a graphite fire burned for 10 days. So radioactive gases and particles were picked up by wind and carried high in the atmosphere over long distances before raining down on communities far from the source.
Ultimately, the radiation released as a result of Three Mile Island was not high enough to present detectable health effects in the general population. That accident rated as a level 5 of 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale, and for this reason it was an accident with wider consequences rather than simply local consequences. At Chernobyl, the level 7 ‘major accident’ radiation exposure affected thousands of people.
Fukushima Daiichi has been elevated to level 4—"accident with local consequences. But it remains to be seen how much higher on the scale this incident will go. In Tokyo, 180 miles away from the plant, peak radiation levels were recorded at 23 times above normal at one point but they reportedly dropped to about 10 times above normal later in less than a day.
Exposure in Perspective
In the United States, the average radiation dose from natural background and man-made sources, such as medical procedures and consumer products, is 620 millirems (mrem) per year, according to the NRC.
One millisievert (mSv) is equal to 100 millirems. The Japanese Ministry of Health Labor and Welfare on Wednesday lifted the maximum allowable exposure for nuclear workers to 250 mSv, from 100 mSv, the Associated Press reported. According to the Nuclear Energy Institute, radioactivity at the plant hit a dose rate of 1,190 mrem per hour initially but dropped to 60 mrem per hour six hours later.
The Chernobyl accident caused acute radiation sickness in 134 of the 600 workers who were at the site on the morning of the initial explosion and received high doses of radiation—80,000 to 1.6 million mrem, according to the UN report and the U.S.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Of this group 28 people died within three months. Two others died due to injuries from the fire and radiation. And eventually as many as 4,000 people are expected to die as a result of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl plant, according to the World Health Organization.
From a public health perspective, Chernobyl's greatest impact was an epidemic of thyroid cancer (more than 6,000 cases so far) among children and adolescents exposed to radiation, often caused by them drinking contaminated cow's milk.
The global nuclear power industry today has come together to share information in an effort to help resolve the dangers at Fukushima. There is significantly more communication within the industry now than there was during the disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
Communication during a nuclear crisis, of course, must extend beyond industry, and in this area plant operator Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) is facing harsh criticism. The director general of the International Atomic Agency, Yukiya Amano, called for Japanese counterparts to facilitate stronger communication. According to the Kyodo News Agency, Prime Minister Naoto Kan admonished Tepco executives in a meeting after he learned about an explosion from TV news rather than receiving a call from Tepco. He reportedly demanded to know, "What the hell is going on?"
As the Three Mile Island emergency unfolded, officials attempted to reassure the public that the "danger was over," even as efforts to cool the reactor and stabilize the plant proved ineffective. And in Chernobyl, information hardly flowed at the speed of Twitter. In the view of the London-based World Nuclear Association, an industry group, Chernobyl "was a direct consequence of Cold War isolation and the resulting lack of any safety culture."
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wrote in a 1986 journal article on the accident that, "Chernobyl was a secret disaster at first." In fact, the earliest evidence for the international community that a major nuclear accident had occurred came from Sweden, where the discovery of radioactive particles on nuclear plant workers' clothing instigated a search for the source of radioactivity. The following day, the Soviet news agency confirmed the accident at Chernobyl plant but did not offer details, according to the EPA account. "The resulting information vacuum fueled rumors of all kinds, from fatality estimates to speculation about fires in adjoining reactors."
As the crisis in Japan intensified, officials came under fire for statements that in hindsight seem to underestimate the escalating threat. Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, criticized Japanese authorities for “working from a standard nuclear industry playbook whose byline seems to be, “What, me worry?”
Makhijani is calling for "a frank appraisal of what is known and not known and the potential range of damage and consequences. This would afford the public more confidence in the pronouncements. As it is, verbal reassurances about low radiation levels stand in stark contrast to repeated increases in the radius of evacuations.
As the Wall Street Journal reports, Japan's government had complained about the slow release of information from Tepco. Edwin Lyman, a physicist in the Union of Concerned Scientists Global Security Program and former president of the Nuclear Control Institute, commented in a call with reporters Tuesday that Tepco's briefings are becoming “less and less transparent.”
“There's clearly a kind of erratic quality to the information coming out by the Japanese,” Lyman, said. But this could be explained, he said, by the fact that they're still struggling to find out what's going on. “There's a staggering amount of confusion on the ground,” added Union of Concerned Scientists nuclear expert Ellen Vancko.
“Our concern is that industry in United States and elsewhere doesn't try to whitewash this,” said Lyman. Fukushima Daiichi, he said, is “one of most serious accidents that has occurred in history of nuclear power.”
The unfolding disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant follows decades of falsified safety reports, fatal accidents and underestimated earthquake risk in Japan’s atomic power industry.
The destruction caused by Japan’s which was a 9.0 earthquake and tsunami came less than four years after a 6.8 quake shut the world’s biggest atomic plant, also run by Tokyo Electric Power Co. In 2002 and 2007, revelations the utility had faked repair records forced the resignation of the company’s chairman and president, and a three-week shutdown of all 17 of its reactors.
With almost no oil or gas reserves of its own, nuclear power has been a national priority for Japan since the end of World War II, a conflict the country fought partly to secure oil supplies. Japan has 54 operating nuclear reactors which is more than any other country except the U.S. and France to power its industries, pitting economic demands against safety concerns in the world’s most earthquake-prone country.
Nuclear engineers and academics who have worked in Japan’s atomic power industry spoke in interviews of a history of accidents, faked reports and inaction by a succession of Liberal Democratic Party governments that ran Japan for nearly all of the postwar period.
Katsuhiko Ishibashi, a seismology professor at Kobe University, said that Japan’s history of nuclear accidents stems from an overconfidence in plant engineering. In 2006, he resigned from a government panel on reactor safety, saying the review process was rigged and ‘unscientific.’
Nuclear Earthquake
In an interview in 2007 after Tokyo Electric’s Kashiwazaki nuclear plant was struck by an earthquake, Ishibashi said that fundamental improvements were needed in engineering standards for atomic power stations, without which Japan could suffer a catastrophic disaster.
Despite what has been said above, Japan’s record isn’t the worst. The International Atomic Energy Agency rates nuclear accidents on a scale of zero to seven, with Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union having been rated seven, the most dangerous. Fukushima, where the steel vessels at the heart of the reactors have so far not ruptured, is currently a class five, the same category as the 1979 partial reactor meltdown at Three Mile Island in the U.S.
The key thing here is that Fukushima is not another Chernobyl. said Ken Brockman, a former director of nuclear installation safety at the IAEA in Vienna. “Containment engineering has been vindicated. What has not been vindicated is the site engineering that put us on a path to having such an accident.”
The 40-year-old Fukushima plant, built in the 1970s when Japan’s first wave of nuclear construction began, stood up to the country’s worst earthquake on record which occurred on March 11, 2011 only to have its power and back-up generators knocked out by the 7-meter tsunami that followed.
Lacking electricity to pump water needed to cool the atomic core, engineers vented radioactive steam into the atmosphere to release pressure, leading to a series of explosions that blew out concrete walls around the reactors.
Radiation readings spiked around Fukushima as the disaster widened, forcing the evacuation of 200,000 people and causing radiation levels to rise on the outskirts of Tokyo, 135 miles (210 kilometers) to the south, with a population of 30 million.
Basement Generator
Back-up diesel generators that might have averted the disaster were positioned in a basement, where they were overwhelmed by waves. That is the height of stupidity. This stupidity occurred in the country that invented the word ‘tsunami’. The Japanese nuclear scientists should have known better.
The cascade of events at Fukushima had been foretold in a report published in the U.S. two decades ago. The 1990 report by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, an independent agency responsible for safety at the country’s power plants, identified earthquake-induced diesel generator failure and power outage leading to failure of cooling systems as one of the most likely causes of nuclear accidents from an external event such as an earthquake or a tsunami.
While the report was cited in a 2004 statement by Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, it seems adequate measures to address the risk were not taken by Tokyo Electric.
Accident was foretold
It’s questionable whether Tokyo Electric really studied the risks. That they weren’t prepared for a once in a thousand year occurrence will not go over as an acceptable excuse for what had happened.
All six boiling water reactors at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant were designed by General Electric Co. (GE) and the company built the No. 1, 2 and 6 reactors, spokeswoman Emily Caruso said in an e-mail response to questions. The No. 1 reactor went into commercial operation in 1971.
Toshiba Corp. (6502) built 3 and 5. Hitachi Ltd. (6501), which folded its nuclear operations into a venture with GE known as Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy Ltd. in 2007, built No. 4.
All the reactors meet the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission requirements for safe operation during and after an earthquake for the areas where they are licensed and sited, GE said on its website.
Botched Container?
Mitsuhiko Tanaka, 67, working as an engineer at Babcock Hitachi K.K., helped design and supervise the manufacture of a $250 million steel pressure vessel for Tokyo Electric in 1975. Today, that vessel holds the fuel rods in the core of the No. 4 reactor at Fukushima’s Dai-Ichi plant, hit by explosion and fire after the tsunami.
Tanaka says the vessel was damaged in the production process. He says he knows because he orchestrated the cover-up. When he brought his accusations to the government more than a decade later, he was ignored.
The accident occurred when Tanaka and his team were strengthening the steel in the pressure vessel, heating it in a furnace to more than 600 degrees Celsius (1,112 degrees Fahrenheit), a temperature that melts metal. Braces that should have been inside the vessel during the blasting were either forgotten or fell over. After it cooled, Tanaka found that its walls had warped.
The law required the flawed vessel be scrapped, a loss that Tanaka said might have bankrupted the company. Rather than sacrifice years of work and risk the company’s survival, Tanaka used computer modeling to devise a way to reshape the vessel so that no one would know it had been damaged. He said that he did that with Hitachi’s blessings.
“I saved the company billions of yen,” Tanaka said in an interview March 12, the day after the earthquake. Tanaka says he got a 3 million yen bonus ($38,000) from Hitachi and a plaque acknowledging his “extraordinary” effort in 1974.
That changed with Chernobyl. Two years after the world’s worst nuclear accident, Tanaka went to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry to report the cover-up he’d engineered more than a decade earlier. Hitachi denied his accusation and the government refused to investigate.
Kenta Takahashi, an official at the NISA’s Power Generation Inspection Division, said he couldn’t confirm whether the agency’s predecessor, the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy, conducted an investigation into Tanaka’s claim.
In 1988, Hitachi met with Tanaka to discuss the work he had done to fix the dent in the vessel. They concluded that there was no safety problem.
In 1990, Tanaka wrote a book called Why Nuclear Power Is Dangerous that detailed his experiences.
Tokyo Electric in 2002 admitted it had falsified repair reports at nuclear plants for more than two decades. Chairman Hiroshi Araki and President Nobuyama Minami resigned to take responsibility for hundreds of occasions in which the company had submitted false data to the regulator.
Then in 2007, the utility said it hadn’t come entirely clean five years earlier. It had concealed at least six emergency stoppages at its Fukushima Dai-Ichi power station and a “critical” reaction at the plant’s No. 3 unit that lasted for seven hours.
Ignored Warnings
Tokyo Electric ignored warnings about the tsunami risks that caused the crisis at Fukushima, Tatsuya Ito, who represented Fukushima prefecture in the national parliament from 1991 to 2003, said in a March 16 telephone interview.
The Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant was only designed to withstand a 5.7-meter tsunami, not the 7-meter wall of water generated by last week’s earthquake or the 6.4-meter tsunami that struck neighboring Miyagi prefecture after the Valdiva earthquake in 1960.
The dangers posed by a tsunami the size of the one generated by the 9.5-magnitude Valdiva temblor off Chile are described in a 2002 report by the Japan Society of Civil Engineers in which it said in part;.
“Tokyo Electric brought this upon itself. This accident unfolded as expected.”
Coming Clean
Ito said he has met Tepco employees to discuss his concerns at least 20 times since 2003 and sent a formal letter to then- president Tsunehisa Katsumata in 2005. “We are prioritizing the safety of the plant and are not at a point where we can reflect upon and properly assess the root causes,” said Naoki Tsunoda, a Tokyo Electric spokesman in Tokyo. He said he couldn’t immediately confirm the exchanges made between Ito and the company.
Kansai Electric Power Co., the utility that provides Osaka with electricity, said it also faked nuclear safety records. Chubu Electric Power Co., Tohoku Electric Power Co. and Hokuriku Electric Power Co. (9505) said the same.
Only months after that second round of revelations, an earthquake struck a cluster of seven reactors run by Tokyo Electric on Japan’s north coast. The Kashiwazaki Kariwa nuclear plant, the world’s biggest, was hit by a 6.8 magnitude temblor that buckled walls and caused a fire at a transformer. About 1.5 liters (half gallon) of radioactive water sloshed out of a container and ran into the sea through drains because sealing plugs hadn’t been installed.
While there were no deaths from the accident and the IAEA said radiation released was within authorized limits for public health and environmental safety, the damage was nominal since three of the plant’s reactors are still offline.
After the quake, Trade Minister Akira Amari said regulators hadn’t properly reviewed Tokyo Electric’s geological survey when they approved the site in 1974.
The world’s biggest nuclear power plant had been built on an earthquake fault line that generated three times as much seismic acceleration, or 606 gals, as it was designed to withstand, the utility said. One gal, a measure of shock effect, represents acceleration of 1 centimeter (0.4 inch) per square second.
After Hokuriku Electric’s Shika nuclear power plant in Ishikawa prefecture was rocked by a 6.9 magnitude quake in March 2007, government scientists found it had been built near an earthquake fault that was more than twice as long as regulators deemed threatening.
While Japan had never suffered a failure comparable to Chernobyl, the Fukushima disaster caps a decade of fatal accidents.
Two workers at a fuel processing plant were killed by radiation exposure in 1999, when they used buckets, instead of the prescribed containers, to eye-ball a uranium mixture, triggering a chain-reaction that went unchecked for 20 hours.
Regulators failed to ensure that safety alarms were installed at the plant run by Sumitomo Metal Mining Co. because they believed there was “no possibility” of a major accident at the facility, according to an analysis by the NRC in the U.S. The report said there were ‘indications’ the company instructed workers to take shortcuts, without regulatory approval.
In 2004, an eruption of super-heated steam from a burst pipe at a reactor run by Kansai Electric killed five workers and scalded six others. A government investigation showed the burst pipe section had been omitted from safety checklists and had not been inspected for the 28 years the plant had been in operation.
Unlike France and the U.S., which have independent regulators, responsibility for keeping Japan’s reactors safe rests with the same body that oversees the effort to increase nuclear power generation: the Trade Ministry. Critics say that creates a conflict of interest that could hamper safety.
“What is necessary is a qualified, well-funded, independent regulator,” said Seth Grae, chief executive officer of Lightbridge Corp. (LTBR), a nuclear consultant in the U.S. “When you have an independent regulatory agency, you can have a utility that has scandals and lies, but the regulator will yank its licensing approvals.
Overall, the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant remains very serious, but there are signs of recovery in some functions, such as electrical power and instrumentation.
At a press conference held at 11:00 (Japan local time) on the 21st of April, 2011,the chief cabinet secretary, Mr. Edano, announced the establishment of a no entry zone around Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, as well as basic policies concerning temporary re-entry. As of midnight (Japan local time) on 22 April 2011, the area within 20 km of Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was announced as a no entry zone.
Chief cabinet secretary, Mr. Edano, also announced a re-designation of the evacuation zone around Fukushima Daini nuclear power plant. He announced that "the size of the evacuation zone around the station would be reduced from 10 km to 8 km," and that “the order to evacuate based on the incident at Fukushima Daini nuclear power station would be lifted from areas farther than 8 km around the station.”
The Japanese nuclear disaster and tsunami's effects on the environment and the Japanese people will not be known for at least 5 to 10 years. This is how long radiation can take to completely take hold in the body and do its damage.
This will likely also be the time frame in which it will take Japan to reconstruct its damaged cities. It's at that point that the world will be reminded of the infamous deadly tsunami that rocked Japan in 2011, because the poorest, most destitute people there will no longer be able to make a living as farmers. This is because the land will be poisoned. And, rich, affluent Westerners will not be able to indulge in Japanese cuisine as they once did.
Traces of radiation are contaminating vegetables and some water supplies, although in amounts the government says do not pose a risk to human health in the short term. Sale of raw milk, spinach and canola from prefectures over a swathe from the plant toward Tokyo have been banned. The government has just started to test fish and shellfish.
The troubles at Fukushima have in some ways overshadowed the natural catastrophe, threatening a wider disaster if the plant spews more concentrated forms of radiation than it has so far.
The accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has drawn comparisons to the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. According to some experts, while they are very different, the consequences could be as bad or worse if authorities in Japan fail to prevent a meltdown.
A meltdown is when the nuclear fuel which is basically uranium or plutonium in the reactor core heats up enough to melt. Radioactive materials emit heat along with nuclear radiation, and it is that heat that turns the water in the reactor to steam to power the turbines and make electricity. Reactors are cooled by pumping water through the core. If that system fails, then the core gets hotter until the nuclear fuel melts and runs the risk of breaching the containment vessel.
The short-term radioactive emissions are not as bad as Chernobyl was, but the Fukushima reactor might release more long-term radioactive material.
At Chernobyl, a failure in the cooling system, coupled with a mistake on the part of the operator, meant that the water in the reactor vessel boiled and blew the top of the reactor's containment vessel off. In addition, the Chernobyl design used graphite to moderate the reaction and control it. Graphite works well in this role, but it is almost exactly the same substance as charcoal briquettes. Heated enough, it will burn.
When the Chernobyl reactor vessel exploded it sent out hot chunks of graphite, now exposed to the air, making an already bad situation worse. At Chernobyl, much of the radiation release was due to the fire and the escape of a plume of radioactive gas and dust into the upper atmosphere, mostly caesium-137, iodine-131 and strontium-90, all of which have half-lives that are measured in days or years.
The Japanese reactors use a very different design. The control rods are made of metals that absorb neutrons and would not catch fire. In addition, there is a huge containment building that surrounds the reactor, in part to address just this kind of emergency.
But the Fukushima plant has a lot of spent nuclear fuel in a pool of water above the reactor. Keeping the spent fuel cooled in addition to the active reactor core complicates the situation. Not only could the reactor core melt down, but if the spent fuel loses its coolant (the water) it too could melt down and possibly damage the containment building.
That's why the plant could be longer-term problem, Chernobyl didn't keep the spent fuel in the plant itself. Also, the kinds of radioactive materials that could be released if the containment building fails are a bit different, as one of the reactors at the Fukushima plant uses what is known as mixed oxide (MOX) fuel, which is made up of oxides of plutonium and uranium. Plutonium is considered dangerous even in small amounts. Japan is a much smaller country than the Ukraine, and much more densely populated, so a release of any radionuclide's into the air is that much more dangerous to the Japanese people.
At the Fukushima reactor, the cooling system for three reactors failed because the tsunami, which was higher than any of the surrounding walls had been designed for, submerged the generators that ran the water pumps. At first the plant workers thought they might be able to get more water into the reactor vessel and cool it down, but even with the control rods inserted all the way (which occurred immediately once the earthquake struck) it wasn't enough. The water boiled away in one of the reactors and for this reason, it exposed the fuel rods to the air. The casing of the fuel rods is made of zirconium alloys. Exposed to air and steam at high temperatures causes a reaction and one of the gases it releases is hydrogen.
Plant operators tried to relieve the pressure in the reactor by venting some of the gas. But something went wrong, causing an explosion and another two days later. In a desperate move, the operators flooded the reactor with seawater and boron, an element that absorbs neutrons. Seawater is corrosive, and ruins the equipment in the plant. Unfortunately there was no other choice.
Further problems developed at one of the reactors at the Fukushima plant as efforts to keep the core covered with seawater failed for several hours. That left the upper parts of the fuel rods exposed, and the possibility that there was a partial meltdown. By early the third day, another explosion occurred at reactor number 2, raising the possibility that the containment building had been damaged.
Chernobyl was eventually encased in concrete. The Japanese authorities should do the same with their reactor if they are going to continue with their stupidity.
In the pressurized water reactor, the water which flows through the reactor core is isolated from the turbine. In the boiling water reactor the water which passes over the reactor core to act as moderator and coolant is also the steam source for the turbine.
The disadvantage of this kind of reactor is that any fuel leak might make the water radioactive and that radioactivity would reach the turbine and the rest of the loop the water passes through. However, if operated safely, it is a great way to generate electricity.
In the pressurized water reactor (PWR), the water which passes over the reactor core acts as moderator and coolant does not flow to the turbine, but is instead contained in a pressurized primary loop. The primary loop water produces steam in the secondary loop which drives the turbine. The obvious advantage to this is that a fuel leak in the core would not pass any radioactive contaminants to the turbine and condenser thereby making it to dangerous to be near it.
Another advantage is that the PWR can operate at higher pressure and temperature at about 160 atmospheres and about 315 C. This makes it more efficient than the BWR, but the reactor is more complicated and more costly to construct. Most of the U.S. reactors are pressurized water reactors.
For decades, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl have served as warning for the nightmare of nuclear power generation gone awry. In the wake of Japan's deadly earthquake and tsunami, the still-unfolding disaster of Fukushima Daiichi has come closer than any nuclear crisis in history to making it a fearsome trio.
It remains to be seen how much damage will be caused by the crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power complex, where four of the six reactors have seen a range of woes including three explosions in four days, damage to two containment vessels, possible overheating from spent fuel rods, and mounting peril for the last remaining 50 workers due to dangerous spikes in radiation emissions.
Yet it is already possible to outline key differences that set the current Fukushima situation apart from the 1979 Three Mile Island emergency near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and the disaster in Chernobyl, Ukraine, that unfolded seven years later.
Reactor Type
Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power complex, which began operating in the 1970s, is made up of six boiling-water reactors, or BWRs—a type of ‘Light Water Reactor.’ (Using ordinary water, it is distinguished from ‘heavy water reactors’ which use deuterium oxide, or D2O, instead of H2O.) Three Mile Island used another type of ‘Light Water Reactor’ known as a pressurized-water reactor, or PWR.
Both of these reactors use water for two purposes. The water acts as a coolant, carrying heat away from the nuclear fuel, and as a ‘moderator’ that slows down the release of neutrons during fission reactions.
In a PWR, the water is kept under pressure. This means the temperature can be higher than the boiling point of water without generating a significant amount steam. So the reactor core operates at a higher temperature in these systems, and heat can be transferred more efficiently. Boiling-water reactors operate at lower temperatures, and they tend to be simpler, with fewer parts.
Chernobyl's reactors were a type called RBMK (for the Russian, "reaktor bolshoy moshchnosty kanalny"), which also used water for the coolant. But unlike the ‘Light Water Reactors’, the RMBK used graphite as a moderator. According to the World Nuclear Association, an industry trade group based in London, no other power reactor in the world combines a graphite moderator and water coolant as Chernobyl did, although Russia does have several RBMK reactors in operation.
Most nuclear reactors in the United States today use either BWR or PWR technology, which it is said to be equally safe. Both types of reactors have a kind of self-regulation or ‘negative feedback’ loop: As the reactor gets hotter, the fission reaction slows down, decreasing power. The RMBK design, on the other hand, could go into positive feedback where higher temperature begets more power, which in turn increases the temperature, and so on.
Cause of the accident
At this point in the Fukushima disaster, the tsunami appears to be the immediate culprit, since the plants shut down as they were designed to do following the earthquake. When the tsunami hit an hour later, it damaged the site infrastructure. So while the earthquake had cut the reactors' external power supply, which is needed to keep coolant pumps doing their job, the tsunami killed the diesel backup generators needed to provide power for the cooling system. Batteries provided power for only up to eight hours. Mobile generators were brought in to take over. Still, it's too early to know for absolute sure what sequence of events led to what outcome.
My personal opinion is that the diesel backup should have not been at ground level. Because it was at ground level, the water from the tsunami covered the generator thereby rendering in inoperative. This resulted in no electricity being brought to operate the cooling system.
According to the 1979 Kemeny Commission report on Three Mile Island—the definitive document of that disaster—‘equipment failures’ initiated the event but ‘operator error’ was the fundamental cause of the accident. Emergency cooling systems were shut down, with dire consequences. Three Mile Island would have been a ‘relatively insignificant incident’ the commission found, if the plant operators (or those who supervised them) had kept the emergency cooling systems on through the early stages of the accident.
At the Chernobyl reactor in Ukraine, an ‘ill-conceived, badly executed safety test’ initiated the disaster. A sudden surge of power triggered a steam explosion that ruptured the reactor vessel, according to a report from the United Nations. This allowed further violent fuel-steam interactions that destroyed the reactor core and severely damaged the reactor building. As a direct result of that blunder, hundreds later died and an entire city was evacuated and now that city and its buildings are off limits to everyone who lived there.
Understanding the Problem
The level of access to information about what is going on inside a reactor has increased in the decades since Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
As Peter Bradford, who served on the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission at the time of Three Mile Island, said, “At Three Mile Island, much of what we thought we knew on the third day turned out to be incorrect.” The extent of fuel melting, and even the fact that a hydrogen explosion had occurred in the containment on the first day, he said, did not become clear for years. There was all kinds of information that we didn't know about.”
During the first few minutes of the accident at Three Mile Island, more than 100 alarms went off, and no system was in place to filter out the important signals from the insignificant ones, according to the 1979 Kemeny report. “Overall, little attention had been paid to the interaction between human beings and machines under the rapidly changing and confusing circumstances of an accident,” the commissioners wrote.
By contrast, the level of computerization and information transfer available today could give Japanese officials much more insight to what happened in the four troubled reactors at Fukushima—at least in theory. They've got so much more going on in terms of the earthquake and the tsunami that the nuclear reactors at the Three Mile Island didn't have.
Radiation Containment
Like the Three Mile Island plant, the Fukushima reactors have three barriers designed to prevent radiation leakage, including metal cladding surrounding the nuclear fuel, a reactor pressure vessel, and the primary containment vessel. Chernobyl lacked a containment vessel.
Once radiation is released into the environment, it can contaminate vast areas like they did when the Chernobyl reactor exploded. Contamination levels are not linear. The further away you are doesn’t necessarily mean that you will get lower doses. That is because other factors such as prevailing winds can influence what areas are affected. In the Chernobyl accident, some areas 100 miles away from the facility had radiation levels that were higher than areas just 10 or 20 miles away.
The Chernobyl pattern was quite erratic because radiation was released very, very high in the atmosphere because of the nature of the reactor and graphite fire. Weather changed over a prolonged emission period, as a graphite fire burned for 10 days. So radioactive gases and particles were picked up by wind and carried high in the atmosphere over long distances before raining down on communities far from the source.
Ultimately, the radiation released as a result of Three Mile Island was not high enough to present detectable health effects in the general population. That accident rated as a level 5 of 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale, and for this reason it was an accident with wider consequences rather than simply local consequences. At Chernobyl, the level 7 ‘major accident’ radiation exposure affected thousands of people.
Fukushima Daiichi has been elevated to level 4—"accident with local consequences. But it remains to be seen how much higher on the scale this incident will go. In Tokyo, 180 miles away from the plant, peak radiation levels were recorded at 23 times above normal at one point but they reportedly dropped to about 10 times above normal later in less than a day.
Exposure in Perspective
In the United States, the average radiation dose from natural background and man-made sources, such as medical procedures and consumer products, is 620 millirems (mrem) per year, according to the NRC.
One millisievert (mSv) is equal to 100 millirems. The Japanese Ministry of Health Labor and Welfare on Wednesday lifted the maximum allowable exposure for nuclear workers to 250 mSv, from 100 mSv, the Associated Press reported. According to the Nuclear Energy Institute, radioactivity at the plant hit a dose rate of 1,190 mrem per hour initially but dropped to 60 mrem per hour six hours later.
The Chernobyl accident caused acute radiation sickness in 134 of the 600 workers who were at the site on the morning of the initial explosion and received high doses of radiation—80,000 to 1.6 million mrem, according to the UN report and the U.S.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Of this group 28 people died within three months. Two others died due to injuries from the fire and radiation. And eventually as many as 4,000 people are expected to die as a result of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl plant, according to the World Health Organization.
From a public health perspective, Chernobyl's greatest impact was an epidemic of thyroid cancer (more than 6,000 cases so far) among children and adolescents exposed to radiation, often caused by them drinking contaminated cow's milk.
The global nuclear power industry today has come together to share information in an effort to help resolve the dangers at Fukushima. There is significantly more communication within the industry now than there was during the disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
Communication during a nuclear crisis, of course, must extend beyond industry, and in this area plant operator Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) is facing harsh criticism. The director general of the International Atomic Agency, Yukiya Amano, called for Japanese counterparts to facilitate stronger communication. According to the Kyodo News Agency, Prime Minister Naoto Kan admonished Tepco executives in a meeting after he learned about an explosion from TV news rather than receiving a call from Tepco. He reportedly demanded to know, "What the hell is going on?"
As the Three Mile Island emergency unfolded, officials attempted to reassure the public that the "danger was over," even as efforts to cool the reactor and stabilize the plant proved ineffective. And in Chernobyl, information hardly flowed at the speed of Twitter. In the view of the London-based World Nuclear Association, an industry group, Chernobyl "was a direct consequence of Cold War isolation and the resulting lack of any safety culture."
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wrote in a 1986 journal article on the accident that, "Chernobyl was a secret disaster at first." In fact, the earliest evidence for the international community that a major nuclear accident had occurred came from Sweden, where the discovery of radioactive particles on nuclear plant workers' clothing instigated a search for the source of radioactivity. The following day, the Soviet news agency confirmed the accident at Chernobyl plant but did not offer details, according to the EPA account. "The resulting information vacuum fueled rumors of all kinds, from fatality estimates to speculation about fires in adjoining reactors."
As the crisis in Japan intensified, officials came under fire for statements that in hindsight seem to underestimate the escalating threat. Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, criticized Japanese authorities for “working from a standard nuclear industry playbook whose byline seems to be, “What, me worry?”
Makhijani is calling for "a frank appraisal of what is known and not known and the potential range of damage and consequences. This would afford the public more confidence in the pronouncements. As it is, verbal reassurances about low radiation levels stand in stark contrast to repeated increases in the radius of evacuations.
As the Wall Street Journal reports, Japan's government had complained about the slow release of information from Tepco. Edwin Lyman, a physicist in the Union of Concerned Scientists Global Security Program and former president of the Nuclear Control Institute, commented in a call with reporters Tuesday that Tepco's briefings are becoming “less and less transparent.”
“There's clearly a kind of erratic quality to the information coming out by the Japanese,” Lyman, said. But this could be explained, he said, by the fact that they're still struggling to find out what's going on. “There's a staggering amount of confusion on the ground,” added Union of Concerned Scientists nuclear expert Ellen Vancko.
“Our concern is that industry in United States and elsewhere doesn't try to whitewash this,” said Lyman. Fukushima Daiichi, he said, is “one of most serious accidents that has occurred in history of nuclear power.”
The unfolding disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant follows decades of falsified safety reports, fatal accidents and underestimated earthquake risk in Japan’s atomic power industry.
The destruction caused by Japan’s which was a 9.0 earthquake and tsunami came less than four years after a 6.8 quake shut the world’s biggest atomic plant, also run by Tokyo Electric Power Co. In 2002 and 2007, revelations the utility had faked repair records forced the resignation of the company’s chairman and president, and a three-week shutdown of all 17 of its reactors.
With almost no oil or gas reserves of its own, nuclear power has been a national priority for Japan since the end of World War II, a conflict the country fought partly to secure oil supplies. Japan has 54 operating nuclear reactors which is more than any other country except the U.S. and France to power its industries, pitting economic demands against safety concerns in the world’s most earthquake-prone country.
Nuclear engineers and academics who have worked in Japan’s atomic power industry spoke in interviews of a history of accidents, faked reports and inaction by a succession of Liberal Democratic Party governments that ran Japan for nearly all of the postwar period.
Katsuhiko Ishibashi, a seismology professor at Kobe University, said that Japan’s history of nuclear accidents stems from an overconfidence in plant engineering. In 2006, he resigned from a government panel on reactor safety, saying the review process was rigged and ‘unscientific.’
Nuclear Earthquake
In an interview in 2007 after Tokyo Electric’s Kashiwazaki nuclear plant was struck by an earthquake, Ishibashi said that fundamental improvements were needed in engineering standards for atomic power stations, without which Japan could suffer a catastrophic disaster.
Despite what has been said above, Japan’s record isn’t the worst. The International Atomic Energy Agency rates nuclear accidents on a scale of zero to seven, with Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union having been rated seven, the most dangerous. Fukushima, where the steel vessels at the heart of the reactors have so far not ruptured, is currently a class five, the same category as the 1979 partial reactor meltdown at Three Mile Island in the U.S.
The key thing here is that Fukushima is not another Chernobyl. said Ken Brockman, a former director of nuclear installation safety at the IAEA in Vienna. “Containment engineering has been vindicated. What has not been vindicated is the site engineering that put us on a path to having such an accident.”
The 40-year-old Fukushima plant, built in the 1970s when Japan’s first wave of nuclear construction began, stood up to the country’s worst earthquake on record which occurred on March 11, 2011 only to have its power and back-up generators knocked out by the 7-meter tsunami that followed.
Lacking electricity to pump water needed to cool the atomic core, engineers vented radioactive steam into the atmosphere to release pressure, leading to a series of explosions that blew out concrete walls around the reactors.
Radiation readings spiked around Fukushima as the disaster widened, forcing the evacuation of 200,000 people and causing radiation levels to rise on the outskirts of Tokyo, 135 miles (210 kilometers) to the south, with a population of 30 million.
Basement Generator
Back-up diesel generators that might have averted the disaster were positioned in a basement, where they were overwhelmed by waves. That is the height of stupidity. This stupidity occurred in the country that invented the word ‘tsunami’. The Japanese nuclear scientists should have known better.
The cascade of events at Fukushima had been foretold in a report published in the U.S. two decades ago. The 1990 report by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, an independent agency responsible for safety at the country’s power plants, identified earthquake-induced diesel generator failure and power outage leading to failure of cooling systems as one of the most likely causes of nuclear accidents from an external event such as an earthquake or a tsunami.
While the report was cited in a 2004 statement by Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, it seems adequate measures to address the risk were not taken by Tokyo Electric.
Accident was foretold
It’s questionable whether Tokyo Electric really studied the risks. That they weren’t prepared for a once in a thousand year occurrence will not go over as an acceptable excuse for what had happened.
All six boiling water reactors at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant were designed by General Electric Co. (GE) and the company built the No. 1, 2 and 6 reactors, spokeswoman Emily Caruso said in an e-mail response to questions. The No. 1 reactor went into commercial operation in 1971.
Toshiba Corp. (6502) built 3 and 5. Hitachi Ltd. (6501), which folded its nuclear operations into a venture with GE known as Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy Ltd. in 2007, built No. 4.
All the reactors meet the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission requirements for safe operation during and after an earthquake for the areas where they are licensed and sited, GE said on its website.
Botched Container?
Mitsuhiko Tanaka, 67, working as an engineer at Babcock Hitachi K.K., helped design and supervise the manufacture of a $250 million steel pressure vessel for Tokyo Electric in 1975. Today, that vessel holds the fuel rods in the core of the No. 4 reactor at Fukushima’s Dai-Ichi plant, hit by explosion and fire after the tsunami.
Tanaka says the vessel was damaged in the production process. He says he knows because he orchestrated the cover-up. When he brought his accusations to the government more than a decade later, he was ignored.
The accident occurred when Tanaka and his team were strengthening the steel in the pressure vessel, heating it in a furnace to more than 600 degrees Celsius (1,112 degrees Fahrenheit), a temperature that melts metal. Braces that should have been inside the vessel during the blasting were either forgotten or fell over. After it cooled, Tanaka found that its walls had warped.
The law required the flawed vessel be scrapped, a loss that Tanaka said might have bankrupted the company. Rather than sacrifice years of work and risk the company’s survival, Tanaka used computer modeling to devise a way to reshape the vessel so that no one would know it had been damaged. He said that he did that with Hitachi’s blessings.
“I saved the company billions of yen,” Tanaka said in an interview March 12, the day after the earthquake. Tanaka says he got a 3 million yen bonus ($38,000) from Hitachi and a plaque acknowledging his “extraordinary” effort in 1974.
That changed with Chernobyl. Two years after the world’s worst nuclear accident, Tanaka went to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry to report the cover-up he’d engineered more than a decade earlier. Hitachi denied his accusation and the government refused to investigate.
Kenta Takahashi, an official at the NISA’s Power Generation Inspection Division, said he couldn’t confirm whether the agency’s predecessor, the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy, conducted an investigation into Tanaka’s claim.
In 1988, Hitachi met with Tanaka to discuss the work he had done to fix the dent in the vessel. They concluded that there was no safety problem.
In 1990, Tanaka wrote a book called Why Nuclear Power Is Dangerous that detailed his experiences.
Tokyo Electric in 2002 admitted it had falsified repair reports at nuclear plants for more than two decades. Chairman Hiroshi Araki and President Nobuyama Minami resigned to take responsibility for hundreds of occasions in which the company had submitted false data to the regulator.
Then in 2007, the utility said it hadn’t come entirely clean five years earlier. It had concealed at least six emergency stoppages at its Fukushima Dai-Ichi power station and a “critical” reaction at the plant’s No. 3 unit that lasted for seven hours.
Ignored Warnings
Tokyo Electric ignored warnings about the tsunami risks that caused the crisis at Fukushima, Tatsuya Ito, who represented Fukushima prefecture in the national parliament from 1991 to 2003, said in a March 16 telephone interview.
The Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant was only designed to withstand a 5.7-meter tsunami, not the 7-meter wall of water generated by last week’s earthquake or the 6.4-meter tsunami that struck neighboring Miyagi prefecture after the Valdiva earthquake in 1960.
The dangers posed by a tsunami the size of the one generated by the 9.5-magnitude Valdiva temblor off Chile are described in a 2002 report by the Japan Society of Civil Engineers in which it said in part;.
“Tokyo Electric brought this upon itself. This accident unfolded as expected.”
Coming Clean
Ito said he has met Tepco employees to discuss his concerns at least 20 times since 2003 and sent a formal letter to then- president Tsunehisa Katsumata in 2005. “We are prioritizing the safety of the plant and are not at a point where we can reflect upon and properly assess the root causes,” said Naoki Tsunoda, a Tokyo Electric spokesman in Tokyo. He said he couldn’t immediately confirm the exchanges made between Ito and the company.
Kansai Electric Power Co., the utility that provides Osaka with electricity, said it also faked nuclear safety records. Chubu Electric Power Co., Tohoku Electric Power Co. and Hokuriku Electric Power Co. (9505) said the same.
Only months after that second round of revelations, an earthquake struck a cluster of seven reactors run by Tokyo Electric on Japan’s north coast. The Kashiwazaki Kariwa nuclear plant, the world’s biggest, was hit by a 6.8 magnitude temblor that buckled walls and caused a fire at a transformer. About 1.5 liters (half gallon) of radioactive water sloshed out of a container and ran into the sea through drains because sealing plugs hadn’t been installed.
While there were no deaths from the accident and the IAEA said radiation released was within authorized limits for public health and environmental safety, the damage was nominal since three of the plant’s reactors are still offline.
After the quake, Trade Minister Akira Amari said regulators hadn’t properly reviewed Tokyo Electric’s geological survey when they approved the site in 1974.
The world’s biggest nuclear power plant had been built on an earthquake fault line that generated three times as much seismic acceleration, or 606 gals, as it was designed to withstand, the utility said. One gal, a measure of shock effect, represents acceleration of 1 centimeter (0.4 inch) per square second.
After Hokuriku Electric’s Shika nuclear power plant in Ishikawa prefecture was rocked by a 6.9 magnitude quake in March 2007, government scientists found it had been built near an earthquake fault that was more than twice as long as regulators deemed threatening.
While Japan had never suffered a failure comparable to Chernobyl, the Fukushima disaster caps a decade of fatal accidents.
Two workers at a fuel processing plant were killed by radiation exposure in 1999, when they used buckets, instead of the prescribed containers, to eye-ball a uranium mixture, triggering a chain-reaction that went unchecked for 20 hours.
Regulators failed to ensure that safety alarms were installed at the plant run by Sumitomo Metal Mining Co. because they believed there was “no possibility” of a major accident at the facility, according to an analysis by the NRC in the U.S. The report said there were ‘indications’ the company instructed workers to take shortcuts, without regulatory approval.
In 2004, an eruption of super-heated steam from a burst pipe at a reactor run by Kansai Electric killed five workers and scalded six others. A government investigation showed the burst pipe section had been omitted from safety checklists and had not been inspected for the 28 years the plant had been in operation.
Unlike France and the U.S., which have independent regulators, responsibility for keeping Japan’s reactors safe rests with the same body that oversees the effort to increase nuclear power generation: the Trade Ministry. Critics say that creates a conflict of interest that could hamper safety.
“What is necessary is a qualified, well-funded, independent regulator,” said Seth Grae, chief executive officer of Lightbridge Corp. (LTBR), a nuclear consultant in the U.S. “When you have an independent regulatory agency, you can have a utility that has scandals and lies, but the regulator will yank its licensing approvals.
Overall, the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant remains very serious, but there are signs of recovery in some functions, such as electrical power and instrumentation.
At a press conference held at 11:00 (Japan local time) on the 21st of April, 2011,the chief cabinet secretary, Mr. Edano, announced the establishment of a no entry zone around Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, as well as basic policies concerning temporary re-entry. As of midnight (Japan local time) on 22 April 2011, the area within 20 km of Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was announced as a no entry zone.
Chief cabinet secretary, Mr. Edano, also announced a re-designation of the evacuation zone around Fukushima Daini nuclear power plant. He announced that "the size of the evacuation zone around the station would be reduced from 10 km to 8 km," and that “the order to evacuate based on the incident at Fukushima Daini nuclear power station would be lifted from areas farther than 8 km around the station.”
The Japanese nuclear disaster and tsunami's effects on the environment and the Japanese people will not be known for at least 5 to 10 years. This is how long radiation can take to completely take hold in the body and do its damage.
This will likely also be the time frame in which it will take Japan to reconstruct its damaged cities. It's at that point that the world will be reminded of the infamous deadly tsunami that rocked Japan in 2011, because the poorest, most destitute people there will no longer be able to make a living as farmers. This is because the land will be poisoned. And, rich, affluent Westerners will not be able to indulge in Japanese cuisine as they once did.
Traces of radiation are contaminating vegetables and some water supplies, although in amounts the government says do not pose a risk to human health in the short term. Sale of raw milk, spinach and canola from prefectures over a swathe from the plant toward Tokyo have been banned. The government has just started to test fish and shellfish.
The troubles at Fukushima have in some ways overshadowed the natural catastrophe, threatening a wider disaster if the plant spews more concentrated forms of radiation than it has so far.
The accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has drawn comparisons to the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. According to some experts, while they are very different, the consequences could be as bad or worse if authorities in Japan fail to prevent a meltdown.
A meltdown is when the nuclear fuel which is basically uranium or plutonium in the reactor core heats up enough to melt. Radioactive materials emit heat along with nuclear radiation, and it is that heat that turns the water in the reactor to steam to power the turbines and make electricity. Reactors are cooled by pumping water through the core. If that system fails, then the core gets hotter until the nuclear fuel melts and runs the risk of breaching the containment vessel.
The short-term radioactive emissions are not as bad as Chernobyl was, but the Fukushima reactor might release more long-term radioactive material.
At Chernobyl, a failure in the cooling system, coupled with a mistake on the part of the operator, meant that the water in the reactor vessel boiled and blew the top of the reactor's containment vessel off. In addition, the Chernobyl design used graphite to moderate the reaction and control it. Graphite works well in this role, but it is almost exactly the same substance as charcoal briquettes. Heated enough, it will burn.
When the Chernobyl reactor vessel exploded it sent out hot chunks of graphite, now exposed to the air, making an already bad situation worse. At Chernobyl, much of the radiation release was due to the fire and the escape of a plume of radioactive gas and dust into the upper atmosphere, mostly caesium-137, iodine-131 and strontium-90, all of which have half-lives that are measured in days or years.
The Japanese reactors use a very different design. The control rods are made of metals that absorb neutrons and would not catch fire. In addition, there is a huge containment building that surrounds the reactor, in part to address just this kind of emergency.
But the Fukushima plant has a lot of spent nuclear fuel in a pool of water above the reactor. Keeping the spent fuel cooled in addition to the active reactor core complicates the situation. Not only could the reactor core melt down, but if the spent fuel loses its coolant (the water) it too could melt down and possibly damage the containment building.
That's why the plant could be longer-term problem, Chernobyl didn't keep the spent fuel in the plant itself. Also, the kinds of radioactive materials that could be released if the containment building fails are a bit different, as one of the reactors at the Fukushima plant uses what is known as mixed oxide (MOX) fuel, which is made up of oxides of plutonium and uranium. Plutonium is considered dangerous even in small amounts. Japan is a much smaller country than the Ukraine, and much more densely populated, so a release of any radionuclide's into the air is that much more dangerous to the Japanese people.
At the Fukushima reactor, the cooling system for three reactors failed because the tsunami, which was higher than any of the surrounding walls had been designed for, submerged the generators that ran the water pumps. At first the plant workers thought they might be able to get more water into the reactor vessel and cool it down, but even with the control rods inserted all the way (which occurred immediately once the earthquake struck) it wasn't enough. The water boiled away in one of the reactors and for this reason, it exposed the fuel rods to the air. The casing of the fuel rods is made of zirconium alloys. Exposed to air and steam at high temperatures causes a reaction and one of the gases it releases is hydrogen.
Plant operators tried to relieve the pressure in the reactor by venting some of the gas. But something went wrong, causing an explosion and another two days later. In a desperate move, the operators flooded the reactor with seawater and boron, an element that absorbs neutrons. Seawater is corrosive, and ruins the equipment in the plant. Unfortunately there was no other choice.
Further problems developed at one of the reactors at the Fukushima plant as efforts to keep the core covered with seawater failed for several hours. That left the upper parts of the fuel rods exposed, and the possibility that there was a partial meltdown. By early the third day, another explosion occurred at reactor number 2, raising the possibility that the containment building had been damaged.
Chernobyl was eventually encased in concrete. The Japanese authorities should do the same with their reactor if they are going to continue with their stupidity.
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