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Newsstand: November 16, 2015
This morning's news: a mosque set on fire in Peterborough, a lawyer's drug smuggling conviction is overturned, and fentanyl goes missing in Mississauga.
On Saturday evening, barely 24 hours after several attacks in Paris left hundreds dead or wounded, and with rumours circulating that the attacks had been committed by extremist Muslims (Daesh, otherwise known as ISIS, has claimed responsibility, but very little is known yet about the attackers or their motives), Peterborough’s only mosque was set on fire. Just an hour earlier, people had gathered inside celebrating a baby’s birth, but no one was harmed in the fire. Police are investigating the fire as it appears to have been set deliberately, and the National Council of Canadian Muslims is calling on the local force to investigate it as a hate crime.”We call on authorities to investigate this arson as a hate crime so a clear message is sent that these acts have no place in our communities,” said NCCM executive director Ihsaan Gardee. However, Gardee did not assume the fire was directly linked to anti-Islam sentiment in the wake of Friday’s attacks. “It’s hard to make that causal connection right now,” he told CTV News. “It’s something that we’re monitoring and we will let the investigators do their jobs.”
Deryk Gravesande, a Toronto lawyer convicted in 2014 of smuggling drugs to a client at the Toronto Don Jail, had that conviction overturned by the Ontario Court of Appeal. In its decision, the appeal court judge found that the original judge had held the defence’s evidence to a higher standard than the prosecution’s, and that Gravesande’s request to see government records should have been granted. Witnesses for the prosecution included prison guards who admitted they hadn’t followed protocol in searching either the inmate or the interview room.
One package of Teva-Fentanyl patches containing five 14-gram patches has gone missing from a long-term health facility in Mississauga, according to Peel police. Fentanyl is a synthetic opiate many times stronger than heroin or oxycontin, and as such poses a danger to anyone who takes it without knowing exactly what drug they’re taking. The amount an inexperienced user can ingest before overdosing is significantly lower than with other opiates. There has been a spate of overdoses and deaths in the Prairies and B.C. over the past few years, many of them heroin or oxycontin users who unknowingly take fentanyl instead.