Vancouver Stanley Cup riot just won’t end
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VANCOUVER• One of the world’ s most livable, least affordable, most beautiful and despair- ridden cities — the paradoxical Vancouver — observed an anniversary the other day.
As noted in local media, sombrely and with no affection, exactly five years had passed since the city’s NHL team, the Canucks, lost a seventh and deciding game to the dreaded Boston Bruins in the 2011 Stanley Cup finals.
Five years it’s been since thousands of drunken louts flew into a rage and proceeded to tear up Vancouver’s downtown core, vandalizing and looting shops, setting fires to cars and trucks, beating up peaceful citizens, threatening police.
Those five hours of mayhem were a stain on this city. They left an indelible mark. Even to life-long residents, Vancouver’s poor, drug- infested Downtown Eastside seems anarchic and strangely out of place in a city of tremendous wealth, but it had nothing on riot night.
According to an official count, 26 arsons were committed during the June 15, 2011 riot. Some 112 businesses were damaged, 122 vehicles were damaged or destroyed, 52 assaults on civilians and police were reported, and more than 250 medical emergencies were recorded, post-hockey game.
It was an embarrassing, depressing and costly night of insanity. The “total estimated monetary loss resulting from the riot” was approximately $ 3.8 million, according to a report released earlier this year by B.C.’s Ministry of Justice and Attorney General.
The figure doesn’t include the expense of prosecuting the riotous creeps; that tally had reached $ 4,976,765 by January this year.
Good value for 912 charges l aid by the province against 300 suspects, resulting in 284 guilty pleas, six criminal trials and some jail time, mostly for taking part in a riot, and break and enter? Perhaps.
Were the prosecutions handled expeditiously? It seems not.
The wounds still smart, and here’s some salt: Mary and Joe Taxpayer haven’t even seen the final riot bill yet, because there are more residual costs for dealing with Stanley Cup miscreants. And they continue to mount.
On Friday, for example, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Elliott Myers finally rendered his decision in a civil claim brought by the provincially-owned Insurance Corporation of British Columbia ( ICBC), which insures automobiles licensed in B.C.
ICBC sued 82 individuals, claiming they were responsible for riot- related damages to vehicles it insured.
Almost 40 of the defendants settled with ICBC, while default judgments were made against 35 others. The remaining 10 defendants — every one of whom had already been convicted criminally and sentenced for their riot night misdeeds — elected to fight the civil lawsuit and went to trial.
Now, the riot has been written about, discussed, analyzed, parsed to death over the past five years, but Justice Myers’ judgment is still worth a read, and not just for its conclusions, including the rather startling remark that the last of the insurance case defendants had received enough punishment for whatever happened on that in famous night.
Justice Myers describes their lunacy in some detail. As defendant Sean Yates would eventually tell police, he “just went crazy” during the riot, and, according to Friday’s judgment, “started throwing and breaking things.”
Yates spat on an officer, and “challenged the constable to come get him while brandishing a metal pipe,” according to Justice Myers.
But contrary to claims made by ICBC, Yates did not directly participate in the destruction of any vehicles. Justice Myers found him not liable.
Fellow rioter and defendant Andrew Comber, on the other hand, was found by Justice Myers to have been actively involved in the destruction of a GMC pickup truck.
After joining a mob that was rocking the vehicle, Comber took a bear skin he’d been carrying, and threw it on the truck.
Someone else set t he truck on fire. Another person tried to retrieve Comber’ s bear skin from the flames; that person’s clothes caught fire. Comber managed to put out the flames on that person, and then tossed his bear skin back onto the burning truck. He backed away and bowed towards the truck; this, he would later tell police, was his way of “invoking the spirit of the bear … releasing the spirit of the bear, my lifelong companion for 25 years.”
Justice Myers found Comber jointly liable for the truck’s destruction, and ordered him to help pay for ICBC’s loss.
Eight other defendants were also found liable for damages. But in each case, the judge declined to award ICBC additional, punitive damages.
The defendants “have all been the subject of adverse publicity in the press and social media,” Justice Myers wrote in his decision. “There comes a point where ‘enough is enough’.”
Maybe they got off easy. Who knows? Paying homage to “the spirit bear” five years ago might have worked.
The rest of us — taxpayers forced to cover court costs — continue to pay in hard cash.
MORE RESIDUAL COSTS FOR DEALING WITH (MISCREANTS).