Did you realize that the Town of Renfrew was part of a conduit operation whereby cars stolen in Southern Ontario, primarily the Greater Toronto Area, are transported through the town en-route to Montreal before being shipped overseas?
Drivers of these stolen vehicles are paid to get them to Montreal. With the heat rising in terms of law enforcement along Highway 401, the back highways have become more attractive to these Pony Express types, and a lot of those secondary routes will take these drivers, and these vehicles, right along our very own Raglan Street and O’Brien Road, or Burnstown Road.
The thing is, we’re on to the dirty little bastards.
So, as part of this, did you realize that the town joined forces with the local detachment of the Ontario Provincial Police to get grant money from the province to purchase a number of cars specially intended to be part of an interdiction process?
Now, why would the town join hands with the OPP to buy a bunch, or a couple of cars?
It’s not really the cars so far as the town is concerned. Rather, it’s all the passive surveillance cameras that were also part of the buy. These are the cameras that would have been installed along Raglan Street, and perhaps elsewhere, that would read licence plates and generally be part of the BOLO (Be On The Lookout) process for identifying stolen cars, not to mention their potential in spotting bad guys on the run.
Obviously, the cameras would also play a pretty good role in monitoring Renfrew’s downtown, just in case The Graffiti Kid decides to strike again, or goes off his meds, or feels he/she needs to make another statement involving other people’s property. As well, any acts of local hooliganism by local or visiting hooligans could now be captured, hopefully leading to their own capture.
Better yet, the presence of these cameras should act as a deterrent for a lot of n’aer-do-wells intent on vandalizing anything along the main drag. It may have shades of Big Brother, but it’s our big brother, and he’s out to keep us safe from the deplorables among us.
To me, this is just nothing short of fabulous.
Unless the OPP are involved somehow, and they are, and so down the tubes we go with the cars and the cams.
We have the cars. And we have the cams. But in a bit of a twist, they’re stuck in storage.
And why are they stuck in storage? If you’re anticipating me pulling a perfectly legitimate answer out of my hat, I’m going to have to disappoint.
The OPP and the Town of Renfrew have a somewhat spotty track record when it comes to joint collaborations. A lot of that has to do with the temperamental nature of our provincial police force, including their leadership right here in Renfrew.
I got started covering local government news back when the OPP pulled the rug out from under another joint “effort,” the Renfrew Community Networking Centre, even though there were several months remaining on the term of their operating grant. The OPP recited changes in enabling legislation as their reason, yet those changes were never made by the province. And despite that, the OPP still stuck to the closure, because that was their plan all along, and the legislative changes were part of their political cover. That whole fiasco was more than likely an off-shoot of an internal political power struggle within the detachment that spilled somehow into the community, likely due to a sloppy, ham-handed approach from the main guy with the bright white shirt. The town, either complicit in the closing from the very beginning, or otherwise, appears to have gone right along with the entire charade.
So with that as a contextual background, I don’t find it difficult at all that these cars, and those cameras, are being held up by some sort of turf disagreement between the local gendarmerie and the local administration of the town, or some other entity.
On its face, when did catching bad guys transporting stolen cars become a thing not worth doing, especially when it’s not costing the municipal taxpayer anything? How many bad guys in pilfered vehicles have passed along our streets on their journey to Abu Dhabi, capital of the UAE, or United Arab Emirates? Do we just watch every Toyota Highlander passing by with suspicion?
There are no answers offered, so all that’s left is speculation.
Maybe vehicle insurance is a problem, as in who pays for the coverage? I don’t know how many cars are depreciating in storage at the moment, but as my mom once said to me, if you’re going to worry about insurance costs then you can’t afford the car. And maybe that would have been something that might have come to mind a little earlier in the process, like before the grant application. To me, if insurance is part of the hold-up, that would be an expense that would reasonably fall to the OPP, as I’m assuming they’d be the ones operating the vehicles in the first place. It’s not like the town needs chase cars to lasso bylaw offenders, although a designated Tim Hortons vehicle for a coffee run would be a fabulous perk for over-worked town staff.
Are there other reasons?
Would the town even have operational access to the cameras and the footage they provide? My God, if they need somebody to monitor those cameras, I could be up for that, although it might interfere with my drinking. But pounding back beers and watching surveillance footage would be close to my idea of a dream job. Combined with being the guy with the car making the Tim Hortons run, I could be all over this car and camera thing, except I suppose the drinking gets tossed out of the mix, especially with the OPP involved.
I know that the OPP, and the white shirts that pilot their ship, can be pretty obtuse to deal with, given they think they occupy the top slot in any food chain worth thinking about. Small municipalities are annoyances to them, although they do represent handy co-signers for grants that yield additional equipment, like cars and cameras, for a detachment. But after the money becomes available, and the cars and cameras are bought, I can envision them being difficult partners, especially if the collaborative party they joined forces with insists upon being viewed as an equal.
To them, unless your shirt takes the same batteries theirs do, you can be safely and routinely ignored.
It’s entirely possible, though, that I have this all wrong. That I’m way off base. That I’m not even close to the real reasons for those cars and cams to be shuttered out of sight. So, if that were to be the case, then why would it not be a possibility to educate me on what’s going on, or what’s not going on, behind the scenes?
Why the continuous secrecy, on this and other things, like that Community Network Centre thing they poked the air out of despite not having a legitimate reason that passes acceptable muster?
Secrets generally denote the fact that there’s something up that they don’t want us to know about, mostly because it’ll make somebody look or sound stupid, or even worse than that, incompetent and petty. There’s nothing about a shirt you need to plug in every night that prevents or saves a person from being susceptible to stupidity, incompetence or pettiness.
The timing of all of this coincides with changes to the Police Services Board, as it was changed from being a Renfrew-specific board to a collection of municipalities board. The cars and cameras were initiated and the grant applied for before this change. Now that the change has been made, the cars and cameras are in limbo. So what political chicanery is possibly at play here? Does Admaston-Bromley resent the fact that Renfrew was getting cameras? Does Horton have a problem owing to the fact that they don’t get a Tim Hortons vehicle of their own?
Is it a case where, if we all can’t have them, none of us can have them?
Has someone lost the key to the storage facility housing the cars?
Has inflation and rising gas prices rendered the Tim Hortons run financially improbable and problematic?
With all the changes everywhere, is it possible that the person in charge is now gone? Or forgot?
Did Arnprior OPP raise a stink because they’re on the stolen car route as well, and they didn’t get any cars of their own, so they kicked it upstairs to regional, who then kicked it to provincial, who then kicked it to the Solicitor-General, who then kicked it to the Premier, who then kicked his dog?
Did Pembroke OPP raise a fuss because they love dogs and don’t appreciate them being kicked?
Like really, is there no way this can be resolved before we all die or become Americans?
Until resolved, this issue remains one of many that lurks in those dark recesses of the ether where all things preferably not discussed are sent to live out their days before being forgotten.
And if, some twenty years from now, we see a bunch of 2024 Dodge Chargers in the drive-thru of local coffee shops, we can reasonably conclude that someone has finally found that bloody key to the mystery storage garage.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 