A man who had the bad judgment to grow marijuana on his own property,lost that property to a voracious crown with an appetite for easy money.Since the passing of the assets forfeiture act,the government had,before this atrocity,seized 4 million dollars in 2 years.If this man had rented a property,he would be sitting in jail for 6 months and be released to freedom.Because he,with no previous criminal history,chose his own shed,he is now homeless and the government of B.C. is $600,000 dollars richer.This is part of the newly declared war on grow ops that the government is using to seize property with very little recourse to the true owner. When they passed this onerous bill,they wrote it so it's the problem of the property owner to prove he bought said property legally and that he had no knowledge of criminal activity at the residence.This even leaves landlords open to having their property seized if the tenant happens to grow pot on the property.(or commit any other criminal act)Why this hasn't been challenged in court is beyond me as it is so obviously a double sentence for someone with the bad luck to own property.They don't even have to be committing criminal acts on the property.If the crown alleges you make your money from the proceeds of crime,it's your burden to prove otherwise or lose everything.It's already happened.To a Chinese immigrant of course.The lawyers and bankers that do the real crime are never even investigated.In a even more onerous story,the Tory government of Stephen Harper is sending mail outs attacking addicts and claiming that an addict should never be allowed to live in any area frequented by children.This is a first step towards an attempt at making addiction itself a crime.This kind of draconian thinking has been absent for almost 40 years now,Leave it to the born again,dogma driven,moral police that populate the conservative ranks to allow something like this.Always open in their contempt for any one that uses any drug,these political thugs use the bible to form their drug policy and openly deny the science that shows their methods have been tried before and failed miserably.To do the same thing over and over expecting to somehow get a different result is the very definition of insanity.Polls taken by the local papers(all Asper owned)show that people support the property seizures by a 60% margine.This only proves that the only people that read these rags belong to the lunatic fringe that jumps on every get tough bandwagon that passes by.They support para military police raids,Tasers,increased sentences for everything and a hatred for anyone that dares to think differently from themselves.In a word,intolerant.
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