7:13 p.m. - 2003-01-03
Anthrax
There was an anthrax scare yesterday at a post office in Edmonton, which is a city about 200 miles north of here. The letter in question was addressed to the Federal Gun Registry Offices. I've mentioned before that there is a small, but determined, group of people in Canada who object to being required to have certificates proving ownership and firearms competency training. No different than registering their vehicles. There was an organized protest yesterday and some of those people were arrested as a result for carrying weapons.
During the last election, a threatening letter from one of the opponents to this registry arrived at our office during the nomination process. Classic coward - no name, no address, cutouts of newspaper lettering, if I recall correctly. Fortunately, the staff member who opened it was one of my best people and she handled it with a great deal of tact and calm, even though it was obvious it really frightened her. I forwarded the material to Elections Canada's head office in Ottawa, along with a couple of other reports of illegal activities in other aspects of the event. Security was already an issue in our office and this made me even more concerned, but not even home grown terrorists have the right to shut down the democratic process. The only identifying marks on the letter came from the postage stamp. It had been mailed from a town about 100 miles south that has a number of people with ties to the militia wingnuts in Montana.
How do I know that? A few ways. First, at one of our annual Provincial Home and School conventions, one of the workshops one year was by an Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer who was tracking their movements, in addition to those of the white supremacists with links to the Idaho group. They've made inroads in the communities about 60 miles northwest of here. The reason he was at a parent conference was that he wanted to warn us about the recruitment practices being used. A favorite target was teens. There has also been a very public attempt by the Hell's Angels to settle here. There is an article called "Mad as Hell" in February's Chatelaine www.chatelaine.com,that should be posted online soon, about the current problems. Between those groups, I'm guessing that they are actively incubating other cells of terrorists with any number of pathological hatreds, but only one real agenda - drugs, arms, money, and power. Crosses all geo-political, ethnic, religious, and socio-economic boundaries.
I sometimes wonder what will happen if the US succeeds in drawing the rest of the Western world into the Middle Eastern war. Maybe, like in the Lord of the Rings, when the soldiers return home, they will find that the final stand off will be in their own hometowns. Steve Earl's "Copperhead Road" says it best.
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