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Politically Incorrect

Holly Jones’ neighbourhood

by Arthur Weinreb

Holly Jones, on the off chance that someone doesn’t know, is the 10-year-old girl who went missing on the short walk home from a friend’s house on May 12. Early the next morning, parts of her dismembered body washed up on the shores of Lake Ontario.

Holly’s murder generated shock and anger in Toronto, and elsewhere, in a magnitude perhaps not seen since the Bernardo/Homolka murders a decade ago. A bright, energetic young girl, Holly seemed to have vanished into thin air while walking along the streets of her heavily populated residential neighbourhood. There was further outrage when, during the course of their investigation, authorities revealed that there were about 200 sexual predators living within a short distance of the home that Holly never reached on that fateful evening.

The indignation about the numerous pervs that were walking among them didn’t subside with the arrest of Michael Briere on a first-degree murder charge. Briere, who lived on the route that Holly took that night, was not one of the 200. Although it had been reported that Briere had an unusual interest in watching violence, he had no criminal record.

The fury in the west end of the city hit its zenith when Correctional Services Canada (CSC) decided to release Walter Jacobson into a halfway house located about a kilometer away from the home that Holly shared with her family. Jacobson has a criminal record for 60 sexual offences that went back about 40 years. CSC, through Assistant District Director Dave Pisapio, essentially said "tough" when there was an angry reaction, not only to Jacobson’s release, but to the location of his placement so soon after Holly’s death. Jacobson was later transferred back to a penitentiary, with Pisapio weakly apologizing for CSC’s insensitivity to what the community in that area was going through. We’ll probably never know the full extent of who pushed for the transfer--Correctional Services or Jacobson himself, who preferred being incarcerated to the publicity that he was receiving.

The release of dangerous offenders into the community is the responsibility of the federal government. Although not a politician, Pisapio exuded the smugness of the governing Liberals when he initially failed to show any sensitivity to the neighbourhood that had just experienced the horrific murder of a little girl. It’s no secret that the federal Liberals are soft on crime, placing the rehabilitation of offenders such as Jacobson over the safety of hard working people and their children who populate Holly’s neighbourhood. Attention seeking former Liberal MP, and Toronto mayoralty candidate John Nunziata, who denied exploiting Holly’s death for political purposes, led a protest of area residents demanding that Jacobson be moved. He vowed that if he becomes mayor, he’ll run all of the dangerous offenders out of Toronto, although where they’ll go and how he’ll do it remains a mystery. Nope--no political grandstanding here.

It is often said that people get the government that they deserve, so let’s see how the people in Holly Jones’ neighbourhood vote. Holly lived in the federal riding of Davenport, which is held by Liberal MP Charles Caccia. Caccia is one of those low keys MPs who has shown neither cabinet ambitions nor drawn attention to himself by outrageous conduct that many backbench Liberals are famous for. He is one of a breed of elected politicians who are virtually unknown outside of their own ridings, but who keep getting re-elected regardless of swings in the vote. Caccia has been a federal Member of Parliament since 1968; the year that Pierre Trudeau emerged with his policies of a tax on every driveway and a kiddy diddler on every street.

Although Charles Caccia is in no way responsible for what happened to Holly, who could have been anyone’s little girl anywhere in the city, a quick perusal of his website indicates that he has a great interest in the environment. He shows a lot of concern for the dangers that his constituents face from air pollution, bad water, pesticides, and global warming, but nary a word about the hazards posed by the dangerous offenders that his government lets loose on the street of his constituency.

Of those people in Holly’s neighbourhood who bothered to vote in the 2000 federal election (51.2% of eligible Davenport residents voted, well below the national average of 58%), 66.6% voted Liberal. That percentage was slightly higher than the 65.9% that voted for Caccia in the 1997 election.

The people in Holly Jones’ neighbourhood got the policies that they voted for. Why are they complaining now?