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Bureaucrat Steals Money. Well, More Than They Usually Do.

Note to self: If I ever embezzle $1.23 million from the government, don’t travel all over the world, drive high-profile luxury SUVs, and purchase three homes to tip off an investigation:

Preadorshani Biazar was a relatively low-earning provincial bureaucrat with an unemployed husband when she was arrested in 2007 — yet she was able to travel the world, own three Toronto-area homes and drive an expensive luxury SUV.

Yesterday, the woman’s secret source of wealth was unearthed in a Toronto courtroom, as Biazar pleaded guilty to stealing more than $1.23-million from mentally ill, homeless and even dead people whose interests she was supposed to be protecting.

Biazar, who was a caseworker for Ontario’s Office of the Public Guardian and Trustee until she was fired in August 2007, pleaded guilty yesterday to running an extensive fraud that bilked 52 clients of between $1,000 and $400,000 over a 12-year period.

I like that term: a “relatively” low-earning bureaucrat. According to Statistics Canada the median family income in Canada ranges from $63,715 to $75,997. Ms.Biazar “earned” between $50,000 to $70,000 per year over the 12-year period of her employment.

But wait, it gets more ridiculous. You know how you sometimes get approached by people on the streets who are suffering from mental illness? A philanthropist might take pity on such a person, offering them up some spare change. But not Ms.Biazar. No, a mentally ill homeless person was her ship coming in:

They include the tale of one homeless, mentally ill man who had lived on the streets for decades when Biazar took over his case in 2007. Because the man’s government benefits went untouched, he had accrued nearly $116,000 in an account.

Almost immediately, Biazar began scheming, documenting false cases of contact with the man. She forged a doctor’s letter declaring the man — whose affairs had been managed by the province since 1980 — suddenly capable of controlling his own finances. She then opened a bank account, secured a debit card and quickly began using it to pay for her own gas, groceries, clothing and restaurant dinners.

And it took 12 years to catch this woman. So do you know what this tells me? Do you?

That the people who have access to this kind of money, with the same kind of scruples as Ms.Biazar, but don’t get caught, are likely the ones who didn’t flash their money around like Jim Carrey on a “relatively” low-earning bureaucrats salary.

Naturally, only $100,000 of the stolen money has been recovered. After she was fired from her work, essentially what the layman might call the “tip off”, she liquidated her Toronto home, deposited $340,000 into her husbands bank account, and now that money has “disappeared”. Because the province has repaid all the stolen money to its defrauded clients, in the end analysis, as Crown prosecutor Robert Hubbard so aptly puts it:

“It’s really the government that is the ultimate victim of the fraud.”

Or to be more precise, that hapless and powerless taxpayer. You.

In Other News, The Sun Set In The West Again Today

You almost have to feel bad for these guys. It’s kind of like watching Ralph Nader try to run for President in the U.S., only with less hope of success:

The “Alberta Greens” Green Party of Alberta has been de-registered by Elections Alberta as a political entity in the Province of Alberta. De-registration of the party is an administrative opportunity to re-organize and rebuild the party into a viable political organization. The importance and mainstream acceptance of the Green Party’s values and principles are on the rise, and the Green Party’s many supporters can now look forward to a fresh start.

I rather like the Vancouver Canucks colours they’re sporting in their little logo, although the arrow is a little bit too New Jersey Devils for me. It’s also rather odd that the word Green is blue, but hey, I’m sure it was in their budget. As Jeremy Klaszus observes, their slogan “the future is now” now seems a mite ironic.

Of the 923,362 voters in Alberta’s last election, 42,290 votes were cast for the Greens, or 4.58% of the total.

Omar Khadr: Portrait Of A Victim

Janet Hamlin, Pool/Associated Press

Young Mr.Khadr must certainly have the best public relations people in the business, because if he were a brand I’m sure I would have no trouble recognizing it in the supermarket. It seems as though every day there’s something new to report on Omar Khadr, the Canadian apprentice of terrorism caught at 15 years-old training with the Taliban in Afghanistan. On this day, we learn about how Mr.Khadr’s rights were violated in Guantanamo Bay, and that CSIS ignored them by not taking into account his youth and interrogating him after sleep deprivation sessions. A report from the security intelligence review committee [SIRC], a non-affiliated government committee that monitors CSIS, found that the intelligence agency needs to “adapt” to the more recent phenomenon of youth radicalization:

However, the report did not find that CSIS was complicit in Khadr’s alleged torture at the hands of U.S. interrogators.

The committee recommended that CSIS take human-rights issues into consideration in future probes and also establish a policy framework to guide its dealings with young people.

“As part of this, the service should ensure that such interactions are guided by the same principles that are entrenched in Canadian and international law,” the SIRC report said.

It’s funny. I don’t recall the Omar Khadr case being front and centre in the news during the days when the Liberals were in power. Both Jean Chretien and Paul Martin had the same opportunity as the Conservative government to ask for Omar Khadr’s release, yet they did not. But ever since 2006 rolled around, it’s become one of the favourite topics for discussion among those who self-identify as Liberal voters, and flogged in the media for partisan political points.

Let’s ignore for a moment that even though the government could formally request the United States to release Mr.Khadr, that such an endeavour would be merely symbolic at best, as the Americans continue to build a trial against the accused. Let’s even ignore the fact that young Omar was captured by the Americans while fighting with a radical enemy of the western world, and one that is ideologically and militarily aligned with al-Qaeda. Since many people would simply say that Omar Khadr was just a “child soldier”, or some similar such nonsense about his juvenile age, he bears no responsibility for his actions, and thus arguing about it seems fruitless.

What I’d like people to do then, is imagine what Canada would want to do with an American version of Omar sitting in a Canadian jail cell. What would we, the citizens of Canada, demand from our government in the case of a young American captured fighting with the Taliban, and suspected of killing one of our own soldiers? Wouldn’t we want our government to exhaust all legal avenues to find a way to hold him accountable for his crimes? Wouldn’t we demand justice for a soldier who died in the line of duty, senselessly killed by a person who by all rights should have been an ally?

We seem to hold Omar Khadr’s “human rights” on a rather lofty height, despite all he’s done to disinherit others of their own “human rights” when he fought and trained under al-Qaeda and the Taliban. We seem to forget the soldier he is accused of murdering; in fact, one can’t even find the soldier’s name in most articles about Omar. It’s Sergeant First Class Christopher James Speer. What happened to his rights, or the rights of his survivors?

The fact is, the government is doing exactly what most Canadians think they should be doing.