Friday, February 3, 2017

Tenants may have sold drugs, so gov't seizes rental units from owner

John Robson: Ontario’s brutal assault on a good couple, which it never even bothered to accuse of a crime | National Post:

January 10, 2017 - "Canadians have rights, don’t they? We love our Charter and the robust, even convoluted, legal system that surrounds it. Yet increasingly we live in a fools’ paradise because one of the worst things that can happen to us is to be sucked into precisely the elaborate legal system we think protects us.

"This point was driven home for me, horribly, at a Canadian Constitution Foundation conference on Law and Freedom in Toronto last weekend. I was there to talk about the surprisingly encouraging 'Comeau' court ruling that we can buy beer and take it home even from (ugh) another province.... But this matter, or the apparently endless procedural wrangling in the CCF challenge to B.C.’s restrictive health-care law, is nothing to a tragic case described at the conference that, I confess, I was not aware of.

"It concerns the Reillys, a couple dedicated to helping the unfortunate who tailored two of their Orillia rental properties to low-income people with often chaotic lives. The Reillys were the sort of landlords who would personally drive carless tenants to the grocery store and to addiction counselling sessions.

"So in 2008 the police alleged drug-dealing at these two properties. Furthermore, they said some rent was paid from drug profits. And under Ontario’s soothingly named Civil Forfeiture Act, the “Director of Asset Management” seized the Reilly’s two properties as the 'proceeds' and possibly 'instruments' of crime.

"The Reillys were never charged with anything. It was never suggested that they were involved in drug trafficking. Moreover, despite deep sympathy for their tenants’ sometimes disorderly lives they had evicted more than 50 for dangerous behaviour and tried without success to have others evicted for drug use....

"No tenant was even arrested in connection with this seizure. The state never proved that the Reillys ignored any crime, let alone condoned or quietly profited from it. It just swooped because what Juggernaut wants, Juggernaut takes, casually crushing the Reillys in the process.

"They sold all their other properties to pay legal bills and mortgaged their home. Their marriage broke down. They are elderly and their lives are destroyed. And the case is far from over. Indeed the contested properties, badly dilapidated in the tender claws of the state, are being sold without any pettifogging determination whether the seizure was lawful."

Read more: http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/john-robson-ontarios-brutal-assault-on-a-good-couple-which-it-never-even-bothered-to-accuse-of-a-crime
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3 comments:

  1. One of these days, one of the life-destroyed victims of this sort of state bullying is going to assassinate one of the bureaucrats or politicians who authored their destruction. That won't be very good, but it shouldn't be unexpected. Or worse, maybe somebody will decide to take out the entire legislature that endorsed the whole "proof is so terribly inconvenient; let's just pass a law allowing us to make our accusations their own proof and steal whatever we want from whomever we feel like accusing of anything that strikes our fancy. That's the kind of society many people are apparently content to live in, so that's the kind of response we'd better prepare ourselves to see from its victims.

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  2. Any anybody who buys these properties should be regarded as accessories after the fact of the crime of their theft, if not outright receivers of stolen property. I hope their names and images will be displayed all over town - and these days, on the internet - and nobody will even sell them groceries. Which is, of course, what should happen to the bureaucrats and politicians who wrecked the Reillys' lives in the first place.

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  3. And speaking of that, I'll bet (and remember, no proof is necessary) some of those "drug profits" were used to buy groceries. And yet I haven't heard of any Ontario government slime bags seizing an Orillia Safeway (or is it Sobey's there?). Whoever buys those proceeds of government crime should be immediately investigated to determine which policemen/crown counsel/bureaucrats or MPPs they bribed to bring these properties to them at what I'm sure will be a far below market price.

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