So Mr.Coderre you were elected in 2013 as Mayor of Montreal right? Why then did you not look at the first dire situation of your dog bylaw. It was extremely apparent at that time only 14 per cent of Montreal's population had dogs registered.Why did you not immediately, change that situation by getting your animal control officers to enforce the bylaw better. Why did you not hire extra bylaw officers to get a hold of this dire situation?
When that boxer/lab that attacked and killed Christine Vadnais, you knew that the owner had a criminal record, plus that specific dog had bit 2 other people as well. Why was that owner not fined and why on the second dog bite did that dog not be quarantined and put down for aggressive behavior. This should have been on Montreal Animal Control's radar. Surely there should have been some intervention before this escalated into such a terrible tragedy.You failed the people of Montreal Mr. Coderre because nothing was done!
If you actually visited the joke of any resemblance of a fence, that was in place to secure such an aggressive, unsociable dog, again you would have had your bylaw officers do something about it.
Why Dennis Coderre, did you not thoroughly research other places in the world that had instituted BSL, when study after study, specifically proved it doesn't work!
Areas of the UK, Belgium, Netherlands, Italy,Germany and Spain have all come to the conclusion that they were wrong in BSL. It does not make communities safer because other dogs are still biting people there too.
So instead you followed a failed BSL system in Ontario. What a complete idiot you are to have done that. Do you not know that over a decade later Toronto's dog bites are actually higher than before BSL was in place.
In 2013, 1,400 registered Pitbull owners licensed their dogs there, and only about 300 are now registered in a city of millions of people. Moreover, in 2004, there were 576 dog bites reported, but in 2014 a whopping 767 bites. What does that tell you Mayor Coderre, when BSL was in place, maybe Pitbulls were not the ones originally to blame right? I repeat to you Dennis Coderre, BSL bans do not work and never will!
In point of truth, in the USA over 164 towns and cities have repealed breed based laws. Over 20 states have state-wide exemptions on these type of archaic laws now too.
So why Mayor Coderre did you not follow a successful model like Calgary, Alberta, Canada has in place. They instilled a responsible ownership bylaw because in 2014 they realized they had a real Pitbull problem. They figured out it was those problematic, uneducated owners that made an increase in dog bites, and if you focused your attention on them, then the problem simply decreased.
Why did you not consult our Mayor Nenshi on how he fixed that specific issue, instead of steamrolling your BSL immediately after the death of a woman not attacked by a Pitbull. In fact, no DNA was ever found to be in that hound of hell, that did the fatal damage.
The only conclusion I can come to is that thing called money! Your city stands to make hundreds of thousands of dollars by bleeding about $700.00 out of each family or person that owns a large breed dog, including the Pitbull. I mean they have to have the dog spayed or neutered, a special license, a "Silence of the Lambs" type muzzle that does not allow them to drink water, very easily. Another huge factor is putting up a fence that's over 7 feet tall. Not to mention the money a certain kill shelter, we will not mention any names, stands to make thousands of dollars on the deaths of unadoptable or surrendered Pitbulls. Also let's not forget, the ones that own the large breed dog, ie Pitbull have to also have a criminal background check done now too. If they do have a criminal record,no matter what it is, their large breed dog will have to be surrended to an animal shelter to be put down. Hmm, I recall Adolf Hitler did something about that in the genocide of thousands of Jews.
You, Mayor Coderre, are an absolute disgrace to your office, and have you no conscience, your responsibility is to the Montreal Citizens? What a joke, maybe a responsibility to your pocket book, your pension and oh yes, your grand stand of getting the title "World Mayor".Well, I give you this, you will go down as World Mayor allright, World Mayor of the death of innocent loving dogs, including my beloved breed a Pitbull. Think about that Dennis Coderre as you sleep on your silk pillows tonite?
Wow, to lighten up the mood, as I spit the venom from my mouth eluding from that idiot, I leave you with an excerpt from my third book, "Road History" from a happier time with our deceased Pitbull Sampson. Enjoy your week.
On that following weekend before my next big long hauling adventure, with the new company, I made a call to a local vet in Lacombe and set up an appointment for Sampson. If we were going to be traveling with him, Carol told me, we needed to get all his shots up to date. We accomplished that, plus Sampson now had his very own passport made there, with a photo of him on it, along with all his vital statistics. So now the three of us were ready to go trucking on some new adventures.
As it turned out, our load wasn’t going to be ready until later that Monday afternoon, so we headed up early to put our stuff in the new truck. Actually, I had my satellite radio to install with the antenna and whatnot, plus we had our microwave oven, TV, DVD, and cooler with us as well. Apparently, it was going to be a larger double-bunk Volvo that was coming from Toronto, but when we got to their yard, it was nowhere to be found. My new boss Abe, had given me some bullshit story that the truck wasn’t there because it was held up in Toronto for some reason; that should have been our first clue to bail out!
Next, I met the yard person Leroy, who went around looking for the keys to a temporary unit for us. Now before I met this guy, Abe had told me he was in his trailer in the yard, so I went to go look for him. Well, I knocked on the door of this beat up old “Winnebago” Motor Home parked in the back of the yard, sandwiched between two broken down 53-foot trailers. When this older fellow, invited me in, to meet him, well there parked in the front of the cab, was half of a diesel engine, strewn all over in dirty, greasy truck parts! I think most of you reading this probably would have turned tail and got out of there as fast as possible and looking back on it now, I probably should have, but I didn’t.
If truth be told I really didn’t have any other job, I could fall back on and besides, this was all for Sampson. Now if that wasn’t bad enough, despite the atrocious housekeeping, this fat, greasy looking guy , gets up from some nasty torn mattress in his underwear! Needless to say, they weren’t clean or even in one piece either. Well, this guy apologizes to me for the way he looks, as he tells me it's his only day off, nor was he aware I was going to be here today, to pick up a load. So he tells me his name is Leroy, and reluctantly, I shake his dirty greasy stained right hand. He starts to boast to me that nothing leaves “his” yard unless he says so. First, he says that we need to find me a truck to use for this load going to Missouri, so out the trailerI go, following this “God of the Right Speed Yard!”
Well, he finally locates this old relic of a blue Kenworth tractor parked at an area of the yard that you can only guess why it was sitting there in the first place. It was a 2005 model, and talk about a small sleeper berth, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Seriously I think it was called a super-sized single, which is just a more fancy term for a 7-foot long bed that only fits in college campus dorm rooms and of course tractors used in shitty trucking companies such as this one. Luckily it did have a top bunk, so we used the top portion of the bed to put all our boxes that contained our clothes, office supplies, food, weather related items, and whatnot that were essential when we went trucking.
Next thing Leroy does is he has me pop the hood, because he needs to show me something very important.
“This old girl has a problem starting sometimes” he adds.
“Oh okay “I reply back to him, thinking that maybe this wasn’t such a hot shit idea to begin with.
“If she won’t turn over in the mornings, take a quarter with a flat head screwdriver and just insert it here “he shows me.
Whatever the hell, he was explaining to me appeared to be a faulty solenoid that was connected to the starter system that was acting up and needed to be replaced. However, because I was about to embark on this load, they did not have the time to get this truck repaired, nor did they have any other available truck for me to use. Maybe that should have been another warning sign that I should just walk away from this company, but stupidly, I did not. In fact, I think if you had to decipher Leroy’s message it would be something like this.
“We really don’t give a shit about what you’re driving, take the fricken truck with the meat load, get it to Missouri, so we can make enough money to fix the damn thing when you get back!”
“We need you to do this so we can get some other East Indian Schmuck to drive this, that way when you get the white truck coming back from Toronto you’ll be a happy camper!”
“That about sums it up, right?”
Things got progressively worse when this truck wouldn’t start so good ole Leroy had to go grab the yard truck to give a boost. Previous to what I had just witnessed, a normal person probably would have changed his mind. Keep in mind we are talking about a really different trucking company here, and I kept reminding myself, that I was doing this for Sam! Nonetheless, I can remember that Carol said that we had to film our first trip in this truck with the “Jazz Camcorder” as this was going to be a memorable one, we would never forget. You know what; she couldn’t have been more accurate to what was going to transpire with just one trip. Now to my surprise we managed to cross the Coutts/Sweetgrass Mt border all right, and meat inspection seemed to be a breeze.
Sampson’s first trip into the USA was pretty much easy with the one border inspector even giving him a “Milk Bone” dog biscuit treat at the guard shack. That good boy was now sitting on the bed of the sleeper while Carol and I were in the front of the cab doing our thing. Carol pulled out the Camcorder and started filming our little adventure. So she starts filming the front of where I am driving, the usual introductions of where we are, and where we are going and whatnot.
“We are actually waiting to get a truck” she speaks into the tiny camcorder microphone.
“This one sucks! Look at the size of this sleeper? I mean really” as she now aims the camcorder at the back of the sleeper with Sam just sitting there looking into the camcorder.
“She’s pretty tiny, and she’s quite the pig!”
“And how many miles does it say Bri?”Carol now questions me.
“Let’s see” I pause.
“Just over a million miles!” is my reply to Carol’s question now.
Carol then lets everyone now in camcorder-land that she has had only about three and one-half hours of sleep but that she’s got her big cup of coffee to help her cope for the day.
“It would be nice to get a truck” she reiterates.
“This is not a truck, it is a lumber wagon” she adds.
So that brief explanation, pretty much sums it up, how this trip is going to go, but it was more horrible that both of us could ever have imagined. I managed to make it all the way to Hardin, Montana, and fuel up there as well. Next thing I did was to park for the night at a really small “Flying J” truck stop.
Carol went over to the local McDonald’s there to get us some food, as we couldn’t possibly cook in this truck as there were no electrical outlets in it. Meanwhile, I went to take Sampson out for his nightly business, as he was enjoying sniffing all the unusual smells in the area. After we ate our Big Macs and all, we both tried to get some sleep on a stupid undersized single bed for two. Needless to say, it was not an easy task, so Carol pretty much sat up most of the night, sitting in the passenger seat. She knew it was vital for me to get my sleep to drive safely in the morning, so she had placed Sampson down at the foot of the bed as well. That’s my Carol, always thinking of the other person; even it meant further depriving her of sleep.
In the morning around 7am, I knew we needed to get an early start on the day, but that never materialized either. When I went to start that pig, the damn thing wouldn’t turn over as previously mentioned by Leroy, so I followed his procedure he had taught me. Needless to say, that didn’t work, so now I had to make a call to “Right Speed” dispatch and see what they could do about getting somebody out here to fix this situation. Now even more bad luck was to follow when I couldn’t even get hold of their dispatch as they shut the phone off till nine-am, according to a prerecorded voicemail message. This time, I quickly got an epiphany of the true fact I had made a huge mistake working for this company.
Finally at nine-am that morning, I got a hold of dispatch, but after another hour of a complete runaround, I got in touch with the Operations Manager, Abe that could make such a vital decision. That decision being, whether he could authorize a mechanic to drive out from Billings Montana to fix the dam thing! This guy even had the audacity that he wanted me to pay for this, as he couldn’t get it authorized by the “President of Right Speed Trucking.” He said that he would pay me time while waiting for the guy to get here, and maybe some hourly wage he would discuss with me when I got back. I relayed Carol this information and she told me to tell him a flat out No! He needed to get somebody from his end to arrange to fix this. Well, he said, to call him back in an hour and that he would try to get hold of a mechanic to come out from Billings to help me out.
“This is quickly becoming an adventure in futility!”, I thought to myself. The blame should be put on the owner and not the dog. It comes down to breed practices and proper education.
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