Letter Writer Gets Visit from RCMP
Surrey man, 73, gets police visit after writing Vanoc
By Jeff Lee, Vancouver Sun, April 23, 2009
METRO VANCOUVER -- When 73-year-old Peter Scott reads something he doesn’t like in a newspaper, he cuts the offending article out, stuffs it into an envelope, scribbles his opinions on the outside in black felt pen and mails it off to the object of his ire.
Recipients have been prime ministers and premiers (all of them, he says), MPs and MLAs and not a few mayors and councillors. His notes on the outside are a way of getting attention.
For the most part, he says, he’s simply ignored. Once in a while, someone will write back. But never in all of his many years of writing biting notes has he ever had the reaction he got this week from the police protecting the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Winter Olympics.
“I don’t threaten. I just say ‘What is this? Why are these incompetent people doing this? et cetera, et cetera,’” Scott explained. “Most of the time I’m ignored.”
On Wednesday, he wasn’t.Two police officers from the Vancouver 2010 Integrated Security Unit showed up at his Surrey home.
In their hands was a photocopy of the envelope he’d sent to Vanoc recently. Scott knew he’d sent it because his name and return address were on it, but doesn’t recall which clipping the envelope contained. He thinks it had something to do with Vanoc going after a restaurant for using the word “Olympic” and wanting it to take down its signs.
He admits he’s never been in favour of the Olympics and probably made that
clear in his writings.
“When I have policemen coming into my house because I wrote a letter, a
non-threatening letter, I am absolutely disgusted,” he said.
“They probably just wanted to check me out to see if I was, what, a threat
to society because I’m against the Olympics? I mean, holy cow, I am 73
years old.”
Scott said the officers, one of whom identified himself as a Vancouver police officer named Blondeau, badge number 2142, asked him if he’d written the notes on the envelope.
Of course he had, he said. That’s his name and return address on the envelope, isn’t it?
Const. Bert Paquet confirmed that members of the ISU’s threat assessment
division went to see Scott, including Det.-Const. Nathan Blondeau, a
Vancouver police officer seconded to the ISU’s Joint Intelligence Group.
“We can confirm that members of the Joint Intelligence Group did attend a
residence in Surrey to assess information that is being reviewed in
context to a potential threat to the Olympic Games,” Paquet said.
“We do this to either confirm or disregard an individual as a potential threat.”
He would not discuss the nature of the threat or how ISU got the letter but said “the assessment remains active and ongoing.”
Vanoc spokesman Chris Brumwell said at this point nobody in the organization recalls the letter, but the administration is looking into whether it has any records of it.
For his part, Scott is unimpressed.
“These are Gestapo tactics, and nobody, and I mean nobody, is going to stop me from speaking my mind.”
It’s likely that the Integrated Security Unit was rightly assessing whether Scott poses a threat to the Olympics, said Dave Harris, the director of international and terrorist intelligence programs for Insignis Strategic Research.
But Harris also thinks Vanoc and the ISU should be careful.
“Government or I dare say any other number of institutions would recognize they would be playing with fire if they were to loosely start attributing criminal and quasi-criminal motives and intentions to their correspondents,” he said.
“The instant questions that arise are around free expression. And then quite apart from the legal niceties, the issue of a journalist picking up on this and it blowing up in their face.”