CKNW Editorial
for September 26, 2000

This is a note to the attorney-general and to Ron Wood, the Mayor of West Vancouver. Mr Attorney, you’ve shown a genuine concern for the lack of respect for the justice system and law enforcement. I’m sure Your Worship is likewise concerned. Well, gentlemen, let me give you a very good example why I have grave concerns about law enforcement. Now admittedly traffic enforcement is at the low end of enforcement priorities but this is where the public sees it up close.

Let me set the scene. If one is going to Lions Bay, where I live, or points north like Squamish or Whistler one often takes Exit 2 off the Upper Levels. The exit speed is 60ks which is quite appropriate and it quickly goes down to 50 because there is a partially blind intersection. Again no one would argue. It stays 50 for about 300 meters because traffic off Exit 1 intersects and the #2 people must yield. Now here’s where the story starts. After the melding spot, and everyone is sorted out one goes for about 300 meters more when it becomes an 80 click zone. That 300 meters is no different than the 300 meters after the sign indicating 80 except, as I will show, it is a perfect speed trap.

Now if the motive of law enforcement is to ensure safe driving, where would you have your radar operating? At the exit where the speed limit drops? That would be fair. How about where the two lanes meet? Again that would make sense. But that’s not where the radar boys and girls ply their trade. They put their guns up just a few yards from where the speed goes to 80 and long after all the danger points have been passed. In other words, Mr Petter, Mr Wood, they lay a speed trap. There is no earthly reason why the point of resuming 80 cannot be after the merging and yielding point. Everyone who drives this knows that. In fact anyone with half a brain knows that the only reason the 80 sign is postponed for 2 or 300 meters is so that the police can nail people for speeding.

Now it’s the same coming the other way except having the speed limit at 50 clicks going up that hill is sheer nonsense and everyone knows it. Again, it’s a perfect spot to entrap motorists.

Mr Attorney, all this radar business, be it photo radar or radar guns, was sold to the public on the basis that it would prevent accidents and save lives. This was and remains gross misrepresentation. The speeds aren’t being checked where the problems are but where people are seduced into going the safe speed that in a few meters will be legal but is not quite yet only because it’s a good revenue producer. You expect motorists to respect the laws and obey them when you set deliberate traps for them. At the low end of law enforcement this may well be but it’s the point at which most citizens have a chance to assess the fairness of that law enforcement.

Yes, I probably will receive a ticket for being one of perhaps a dozen cars that were caught at 12:00 Noon yesterday by these cameras doing 60-65 clicks in what is kept a 50 zone to snare the unwary. So I’m prejudiced. But so are a lot of other motorists who drive carefully but get caught in a little trick you and your minions like to play on them in hundreds of spots like this around the province.

On another aspect of law enforcement, I see that Brian Burke, the Grim Weeper of the Vancouver Canucks, who has done so much to ensure that parents can’t afford to take their kids to a hockey game any more, thinks that assaults with a deadly weapon on ice ought to be handled by that bastion of justice, the organization that robbed their players of their pensions, the National Hockey League. Hockey is a rough, tough game – so are Rugby, Football, and Soccer. But hockey is the only sport that encourages violence beyond roughness. The Toronto Maple Leafs used to have a slogan in their dressing room – may still have for all I know – from Conn Smythe which read "If you can’t beat ‘em in the alley, you can’t beat ’em on the ice." This is what our kids are brought up to believe. Hockey encourages "enforcers" – relatively talentless individuals who collect penalties instead of goals and assists and are rewarded handsomely for it. When they overstep their bounds, why they could be suspended for as much as four games for maiming a star and keeping him out of the division race and the play-offs.

What Marty McSorley did was not rough hockey … not a body check, even one which was illegal and punishable by a penalty. It was aggravated assault – plain and simple. And it might easily have been manslaughter..

What you fear, Brian Baby, is that the law case will be a window through which the world can see the game of hockey as it really is. And well you should be afraid because we’ll soon learn what most of us have long suspected – hockey is not a game that can sustain itself by obeying its own written rules. It can only sustain itself, especially in American markets, if blood is spilled. And you could, in the twinkling of an eye, enforce the rules and put an end to it.

That’s the harsh truth and the day will come when even the thick as a plank owners and general managers who run the game – and Don Cherry - will be forced to recognize that. That day may be closer than you think.