It’s all yours.

The number one story in Saskatchewan today. Open thread on the firing of Riders’ GM Roy Shivers.

With the season in full swing, it’s time for another Roughriders’ open thread. Have at ‘er.

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation is fed up with the blatant misinformation coming out of the Calvert government;

The reality is that, since Calvert took over, there have been more deficit budgets than surplus. The Provincial Auditor lays it out in his 2005 Volume 2 report. Calvert became Premier in February, 2001. His first full budget cycle (2001-02) saw a $483 million deficit. In 2003, he managed to increase the deficit to $654 million. In 2004, when oil prices saved the day, the deficit was reduced to $100 million. In 2005 there was surplus, and you can bet the auditor will show another surplus this year.
Bottom line: Calvert racked up massive deficits for three years before he turned a surplus. They tell the “13 consecutive balanced budgets” lie with a straight face because of the “fiscal stablization fund.” Funny thing about that fund — there is no fund. Unlike Alberta, there is no actual account with money in it that can be used for a rainy day. When the government “withdraws” money from the “fund” the government debt goes up by the exact same amount.

(Emphasis mine.)
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Two weeks ago, Armand and Rosanne Smith of Mildred brought in alleged murderer Curt Dagenais. Now, it’s Kipling’s Pat Beaujot with the “collar” – CTV;

Meanwhile, the farmer who helped police locate Miller and led police to Whitmore downplayed suggestions on Wednesday that he is a hero.
Kipling-area resident Pat Beaujot was returning home for lunch on Tuesday when he noticed tracks leading to an abandoned farmhouse about a mile from his house.
“So I drove up to the farm yard and the grass is about three feet tall in that farmyard — and I saw tracks in the grass. It was pretty obvious that somebody had driven in there recently,” he told CTV.
When he followed the tracks around the house, he discovered a bucket of chicken and bones in a garage — along with the van Whitmore was believed to be using — which aroused his suspicions.
“So I opened the door a little bit and I saw the van that had been described by the media, and I quickly jumped back in my truck and drove to my house about a mile away and phoned the police from there.”
The RCMP arrived in about “15 minutes,” after which they began about 10 hours of negotiations with Whitmore, leading to his surrender late Tuesday night.
“I think there were hundreds of people doing the same thing I was doing yesterday,” said Beaujot, “looking in abandoned farm yards and what not — and I think they were all heroes. I guess I just stumbled upon the right place, I guess, at the right time.”

All things considered, perhaps the secret to solving crime doesn’t lie in hiring and equipping more police officers. It seems that what we really need are just more Saskatchewan farmers.

Will begin momentarily on CKOM. You can listen online.
Background.

Breaking right now at CKOM where you can listen live. Apparently, the unconfrimed reports were trickling in for the last few hours from residents in the Kipling area. Zachary Miller is reported to be safe.
Suspect Peter Whitmore is believed to be hiding out at an abandoned farmyard and a police perimeter has been set up. The second boy, 14-year-old Jordan Bruyerehas not yet been released/recovered.
background
A news conference is scheduled for 3:30 pm local time.
UPDATE – 7:15pm local time The RCMP have Whitmore cornered in a building. Jordan Bruyerehas is still with him, and is reported to be fine. Negotiation teams are on the scene.
UPDATE – Wednesday am – Whitmore has surrendered. Jordan Bruyerehas is also safe.

Ouch;

“Quite simple, this coup today, or this announcement today, will put Halifax back on top – above Moncton – as the cultural and entertainment capital of the Maritime Provinces.”
Mayor Peter Kelly said while the concert is not a “life-altering event,” it will give Halifax a chance to strut with the biggest cities on the continent, Regina being the exception.

The funeral of RCMP Constable Marc Bourdages is being covered live this afternoon on CKOM radio from the RCMP chapel in Regina. I believe it begins around 1:30 local time. You can listen live at the link.
Please refrain from engaging in debate in the comments of this thread – reserved for thoughts and condolences only, please.
A trust fund has been established for the children of the slain officers.

As if it wasn’t bad enough that Roughrider’s defensive tackle Scott Schultz hammered Toronto quarterback Spergon Wynn hard enough to rip off his helmet and lay him out on the field for 20 minutes (before being taken by ambulance to hospital.)

Then they sent in 200 little girls to finish him off…



Email to John Gormley LIve;

Hey John, funny story about that halftime show. My nephew was sitting in the section with a lot of those little girls who did the cheerleading, and he overheard one of them telling her mother “Hey mom, we got to dance right next to a dead guy!”

More here plus video!

The funeral of RCMP Constable Robin Cameron is being covered live this afternoon on CKOM radio from the Beardy’s Okemasis First Nation. (About two hours of programming is scheduled.) You can listen live at the link.
Please refrain from engaging in debate in the comments of this thread – reserved for thoughts and condolences only, please.
A trust fund has been established for the children of the slain officers.

The questions surrounding how Curtis Dagenais came to surrender have been answered. He was discovered in a hayfield by Armand Smith, who farms north of Mildred. He and his wife Rosanne talked with the suspect for several hours, and convinced a very dispirited Dagenais to turn himself in. They accompanied him to the Spiritwood RCMP detachment.
A trust fund has been established for the children of the slain officers. The details are here.

The Edmonton Sun has received a 5 page, handwritten letter that appears to be from Curtis Dagenais, Postmarked last Friday from Shell Lake, SK.,t he contents include the kind of details that indicate it’s unlikely to be a hoax;

The letter writer recalls the dispute, saying he wanted to remove some “so-called family of mine” from his home.
The writer said he and his mother Elsie own the property, “not my sister (Grace) who I wanted removed … because she has told me things to mislead me, to give herself more time to screw me over as to division of family property due to the divorce of (my parents.)”
The writer complains Mounties wouldn’t help him remove his sister from the home, not because “it was family,” as Mounties allegedly told him, but because of a pending civil lawsuit of his against Mounties over alleged “obstruction of justice and tampering with evidence.”
A Mountie spokesman yesterday couldn’t confirm the suit.
Cameron and Bourdages arrived at the house, while the letter writer waited outside in his truck.
“Cameron said I was under arrest for assault and assault with a weapon, I couldn’t believe it. I had a screaming match with my sister, but never touched her.
“When I (earlier) backed away (out of the yard) with my pickup, I didn’t realize my steering was turned the wrong way and crowded Grace a bit. But Elsie and Grace can wrap any RCMP around their finger.”
The writer said he was so startled at being under arrest he fled because he felt that was “within my rights.”

Shell Lake is 30 miles from the crime scene, which indicates that Dagenais either remained in the area after eluding police, or had someone drop the letter at the post office box there on his behalf.
In a related development, the Globe & Mail is reporting that an hour passed before an ambulance was called.

Garry St. Onge, who runs Spiritwood’s ambulance service, said paramedics received the call at 10:24 that night to respond to two officers down near Mildred.
“It shouldn’t have taken any longer than seven minutes [to get there],” he said.
Paramedics were told to head to the village of Mildred, just 12 kilometres to the east, where they met with RCMP officers who escorted them another 15 kilometres to the scene of the shooting, which is a rural area surrounded by swamps, grain fields and forests.
The officers were then transported to Spiritwood, where their condition was stabilized, before being driven by ambulance to hospital in Saskatoon, Mr. St. Onge said.
He said the incident has been particularly hard on his staff, who work shoulder-to-shoulder with the RCMP in the community and knew the officers involved.
“First there was Mayerthorpe, now this,” he added. “Every community has someone on the edge, someone who is a bit strange.”
Sergeant Brian Jones, who is dealing with all media inquiries, did not return repeated phone calls yesterday. He has previously said that the RCMP won’t release details about what happened on July 7 until after the officers’ regimental funerals.

UPDATE The husband of Curtis Dagenais’ sister confirmed this morning that details appear in the letter that only someone at the scene could have knowledge of.
He also related information that the three officers had stopped Dagenais in his truck to speak with him, the two female constables at the driver’s side, and Marc Bourdages at the passenger’s side. They had parked their cruisers at the front and back of his truck, but did not corral it sufficiently to prevent escape. He was able to back up/go forward until free and at that point, the chase ensued.
A news conference is to be held momentarily. Listen live on John Gormley Live (where the above details were revealed)
UPDATE: As has been widely reported by now, Dagenais walked into the Spiritwood detachment of the RCMP this afternoon and surrendered peacefully.

For Riders’ fans. (Or un-fans).

Constables Marc Bourdages and Robin Cameron have succumbed to their injuries.
More at CTV.
You can listen to local coverage online at CKOM.com.

CKOM radio is reporting that an update on the condition of the two officers is expected at this morning’s upcoming news conference at 10:30 AM local time. You can listen live here.
Speaking of CKOM, a few days ago a commentor criticized the accuracy of reporting from the Rawlco station. I didn’t reply then, but will here – on the whole, their local coverage seems good, and often, well ahead of the curve. But on international reporting, they seem to draw primarily from CNN, and as one can imagine, the quality of information can be dismal (this morning’s reporting on the escalations in Southern Lebanon a discouraging case in point).
On the other hand, some of the hosts and commentary people seem to have worked in recent months to expand their source material beyond CNN and CTV – it’s fairly obvious that the internet is playing a role in that, and the result is a slow, but general improvement on the quality of commentary they’ve been delivering. (David Kirton, in particular.)
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From the briefing:
Officers are still in intensive care, no change in their condition can be reported on. Families are not prepared to speak to media at this time.
Search of the area is largely finished.
Since Friday night, the 8 by 10 mile area has been searched extensively. Between 30 and 40 buildings (including shacks, graineries, hunting blinds, etc.) have been searched.
No sign of Curtis Dagenais has been found. There will be a representative updating media and area residents at a meeting at the Spiritwood Civic Centre at 1 pm.
Listening to the questions from media, it’s clear some are becoming frustrated at the near total lack of information coming out on the case. I can’t say I blame them. There seems to be a complete lockdown on just about all information, including the most basic of facts.

Latest:
Three motorists (including a reporter) saw a person fitting Curtis Dagenais’ description on Saturday, the day after the shootings, well south of the search zone. It wasn’t until photos were released some time later that they realized they may have seen someone who at least looked like the suspect “standing in the ditch” near Hwy 12. However, the search remains centered on the original area south of Spiritwood.
In other information released yesterday, his father, Arthur Dagenais, was arrested Saturday and obstruction of justice charges filed. He’s been remanded in custody.
The two wounded officers are still in intensive care in Royal University Hospital.
Some of the media discussion on radio has been a bit surreal – an interview on CKOM (with a Sask wildlife official ?) yesterday where they discussed matters such as how Dagenais might be able light a fire without being detected to keep warm at night, the “difficulty” in finding food, with discussions about how “easy” it is to catch a ground squirrel, but difficult to cook it or eat raw.
The Spiritwood area isn’t pure bush – it’s a combination of cropland, pasture and wooded areas. Now, I’m no survivalist, but I know a crop of field peas when I see one. And how to “stay warm” at night in July.
The one question asked by journalists I haven’t heard answered is how long the delay was between the shootings and the beginning of the manhunt proper. When asked, the RCMP spokesperson pleaded ignorance. I’m not sure I buy that. The suspect has decades of experience living in (and presumably, hunting in) the area. Had he more than a 2 or 3 hour head start before police could arrive in significant numbers, the assumption that he’d still be in the region after a day, much less four, seems a little shaky.
Providing he’s still alive.
There are lots of rural Saskatchewan readers here, so I’ll ask you – if you were dropped on your own farmland at the height of summer, in good health – how easily do you think you could find food and water, and how far do you think you could get in 12 hours?
Hell, when I was a kid, I knew 4 farmyards within easy walking distance that had vehicles sitting with keys in the ignition.
The Star Phoenix has more.

For three days, 20 residents Muscowpetung First Nation have been blockading a grid between Cupar and Edenwold, SK. Predictably;

RCMP are aware of the blockade, which is posing an inconvenience for area residents who use the road, and are monitoring the situation, said RCMP spokesperson Heather Russell.

Just as they did a few weeks ago, when a handful of Indian “protesters” decided to back up traffic on the Hwy 16 bridges at North Battleford. Another land claims dispute? Actually, no. Saskatchewan settled all the outstanding land claims several years ago.
For the past 6 years the band has been under “third party management”, an action generally taken when financial irregularities, non reporting, or incompetence occurs in First Nations governance. (About a dozen Saskatchewan First Nations are under third party management at the moment.) The protesters are demanding return of that financial control.
Leader Post;

INAC has given Muscowpetung all the tools it requires to develop systems so that in the long-term the band can manage its own financial affairs, said department spokesperson Trevor Sutter.
“Third-party management is the highest level of intervention. It is a point where the department has lost confidence in the First Nation to provide programs and services that the membership rightly deserves,” Sutter said, adding 12 Saskatchewan bands are operating under third-party management.
“When it comes to financial capacity and financial assistance we look to the First Nation to show a willingness to not only administer INAC funds, but to also administer non-INAC funds. In order to do this the band is required to provide a consolidated audit of its financial affairs.”
Muscowpetung, which received $2.5 million in federal funding for services and programs, has not provided INAC with a consolidated audit report for its 2004-05 fiscal year.
The band’s failure to provide a consolidated audit report demonstrates the band council’s unwillingness to co-operate with INAC in this process, Sutter said, adding the band is also required to develop a Financial Management Act and a human resource policy.

(Via John Gormley Live, where according to one caller from the band, many Muscowpetung residents didn’t even know the blockade was going to go up.)

Putting the town of Kipling on the map.