Not-So-Secret Lies and Ugly Truths

This Time It's Personal

Did the Halifax municipal prosecutor lie in August when she declined a deal to let Brindi go to the US in return for me to withdraw my appeal?  

After a winter like no other - six to eight inches of solid ice for months and record snows that drove everyone a bit mad here - I ended up spending the summer recovering from surgery for ovarian cancer. It was a double-whammy procedure to remove a large malignant tumour on my ovary, as well as certain lady parts I wasn't too happy about losing. I held my breath until the biopsies came back, and by August the coast was clear and I was able to get around on my own. But I was still far too dazed and worn to tackle yet more court documents. I can't help feeling they're what made me sick in the first place, frankly.

Brindi in distress, ca. 30 minutes after seizure, Sept. 24, 2010.

(Imagine if your best friend was put on death row, and their life depended entirely on you, and your ability to fake a language known only to members of a private club. Your friend will die unless you find the right combination of signs and sounds to convince a judge to listen to you instead of the club member in the room - the prosecutor, a native speaker. Then imagine having to do this over and over, year after year, to keep your friend alive, as they grow sick and old. You know you will never speak the language yet you have no choice. You can never see your friend; and after a time, no one will tell you if they are even alive. That's more or less my life.)

I was at the point that I could not tolerate it anymore. So I asked a kind relative I haven’t seen in decades to call HRM solicitor Katherine Salsman on my behalf and ask once more if she would agree to mediation. When she said no, he went ahead and made an offer to adopt Brindi, suggesting that in return I might be persuaded to drop my appeal. 

She declined his offer as "too complicated" - and then said to my amazement that HRM had a family all picked out to adopt Brindi.

HRM Animal By-law A-700 shocker! New money-maker for Halifax preserves A-300's biggest flaws

[Update: Overnight, a Change.org petition appeared: Mayor Savage Fix the Animal Control By-law A-700. Please sign and share!]

Reading A-700 gives me the distinct impression that HRM Council feels I got off lightly. And yet even though HRM has struck out three times in its bid to kill her, Brindi is still locked up after seven years. There is nothing light about that.

Timing is everything... and everything about the timing of the release of the "new" By-Law A-700 for the Halifax Regional Municipality (I'll never comprehend how a municipality can be regional) is simply nuts. And that's just the beginning!

I have not blogged for months. There are a lot of important reasons; they all add up to what I call flatlining. But I can't talk about that now. I have to talk about this. I am trying very hard to meet a court deadline, resuming with reluctance this very difficult task, after trying very hard to find representation - coming close but no cigar. Having to turn away offers of work as this deadline approaches doesn't make it any easier. Neither does having my head explode more than once in the past four weeks by things that just never happen but somehow did to me. Things best left unsaid, for now.

Now I am just speechless - A-700???  I am trying to overcome all manner of obstacles - financial, physical, emotional, spiritual, you name it, to appeal charges under A-300 and the horrible sentence under the little-known "additional penalty" clause tucked into the voluminous HRM Charter, and suddenly this A-700 drops from the sky. It should be called "A-007 Skyfall"! The HRM "Regional" Council voted on it a month ago, and whisked it into effect so fast this weekend, I never even heard it was thinking of it. Even a friend who reads the paper every day missed it. Maybe they wanted to avoid the long years of Council debates before A-300 went into effect?

Still, I would have thought Council would want to make sure it heard from the public first, especially since it had to change A-300 right away when folks went ballistic over the cat licenses. Apparently everybody missed the fact that A-300 contained sections that violate Charter rights, one of which I had to go to court about when it seized Brindi so wrongly and, it turned out, unlawfully.

Council sort of lost the trust of a lot of people after that too. It sure lost mine. Words cannot express the magnitude of the consequences of the way Animal Services treated me and my dog since 2008 - no end of drastic financial and material loss it's caused me, with years of lost income, the extreme and sustained emotional distress of separation and worry about Brindi, not to mention the effects on my professional and personal reputation - with social shunning as well as outright attack from stalkers, cyberstalkers, and cyberbullying from total strangers.

However, reading A-700 gives me the distinct impression that HRM Council feels I got off lightly.