TRAGEDY NOT TIME TO REWRITE LAWS

Perhaps the mayor of the Alberta community where four RCMP officers
and a mad gunman died Thursday put it best:

"We don't see this here. To have something of this magnitude happen
here, we're just shocked."

That is the case, not only in Albert Schalm's Mayerthorpe, but across
Canada.

So rare is such a slaughter of Canadian police officers, historians
are looking back to the 1885 North West Rebellion in Saskatchewan for
comparison.

And because these events are so rare, it is perhaps understandable
that some people reacted with inappropriate suggestions that Canada
should adjust public policy in a futile effort to make sure this could
never happen again.

RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli, for example, barely waited for
the bodies to be moved off the Alberta farm before expressing his hope
this incident will encourage Canadians to reconsider their views on
marijuana.

For a man who should know better than to politicize the blood of his
officers, this was not only a shortsighted but an utterly insensitive
reaction to the tragedy.

"Drugs are illegal and they're extremely dangerous and people have to
understand that," he said a few hours after news of the deaths broke.
"When you have people who are promoting the issue of safe drugs or
(that) there are harmless drugs, I think that is something that we
better understand is not the right way to go. We don't solve anything
in society by legalizing things or by pretending they're not harmful
to society."

Zaccardelli knew, or at least he should have known before spouting
off, that his officers were sent to the farm to investigate stolen
cars that were being chopped up for parts, as much as to look for the
possibility of a grow operation.

Reflecting on Zaccardelli's inappropriate use of the incident to score
political points, Alberta Solicitor-General Harvey Cenaiko -- a former
Calgary police officer -- suggested the incident points to "the
seriousness of the fact that organized crime, illegal cultivation of
marijuana . . . is all around us, including in a small town like
Mayerthorpe."

Yet, according to the people of Mayerthorpe, Jim Roszko, the
46-year-old man involved in the multiple slaying, didn't at all fit
the profile of organized crime. He was "a walking time bomb," they
told reporters. He was a man considered a paranoid loner, constantly
in trouble with the law, who loved guns, but hated the RCMP.

After a particularly violent incident in 1993, for which Roszko was
convicted of impersonating an officer, unlawful confinement and
possession of dangerous weapons, police tried to enforce an order
prohibiting him from possessing weapons.

Public Safety Minister Anne McLellan, who is an MP from Edmonton, also
jumped on the law-and-order bandwagon, suggesting the deaths indicate
it might be time to get much tougher with marijuana growers.

Is this to suggest there is less likelihood of violence in a country
like the United States when their heavily armed officers raid a grow
operation? Would not a more logical conclusion be that legalizing and
controlling the production, distribution and use of marijuana might
take most of these activities out of the hands of dangerous criminals
and make a raid on an illegal grow op as anachronistic as a raid on a
speakeasy?

In the meantime, there is no doubt that illegal marijuana grow
operations -- particularly those run by ruthless and organized
criminals -- present a clear and constant danger, not only to police
officers but to the general public. This has nothing to do with what
happened in Mayerthorpe, however, where RCMP knew to be wary in
approaching his property in the first place.

Canada has spent more than a billion dollars to register gopher guns
and deer rifles in the wake of another horrible Canadian tragedy at
L'Ecole Polytechnic in Montreal, when Marc Lepine -- an equally
dangerous, asocial man -- killed 14 innocent people.

Roszko's actions this week show the futility of that overreaction to a
hard case, and an overreaction based on this mad Albertan would be
just as futile.

Like the Polytechnic incident, Mayerthorpe was, thankfully, an
absolute aberration in Canada, and it does a disservice to the lives
lost to suggest an adjustment to public policy or more severe
penalties would have done anything to prevent a mad man from being
mad.

In spite of the constant Liberal attempt to make the Conservative
party, and its leader Stephen Harper look reactionary, it is from this
quarter we hear the voice of reason.

Harper has been a long-time opponent of liberalizing marijuana laws,
but rather than casting blame on the Liberals for being too lax, he
insisted Friday that the government "can't just run out on the basis
of a single tragedy and make up a bunch of laws."

Now is the time to honour those who died in the line of duty, reflect
on their lives and preserve the Canadian values for which they risked
all to protect.

"Democracy cannot be maintained without its foundation: free public
opinion and free discussion throughout the nation of all matters
affecting the state within the limits set by the criminal code and the
common law."

- -The Supreme Court of Canada, 1938