On July 24 last year, Constable Daniel Montsion, one of the highest-paid police officers in Ontario, beat an unarmed Somalian man, Abdirahman Abdi,to death in front of horrified witnesses. He used specially reinforced gloves, the equivalent of brass knuckles, to accomplish his grisly task.
This past March 6, Montsion was charged with manslaughter, one of the rare occasions when the provincial Special Investigations Unit (SIU) finds a police officer at fault.
He has been on paid leave ever since. And now his taxpayer-subsidized vacation will continue for a further two years and two months.
To say that there is something badly amiss here would be to understate the obvious. What kind of court system delays justice to such an extent that the very concept seems meaningless? And what sort of legislation (the Ontario Police Act) allows a brutal killer to enjoy a tax-subsidized holiday for nearly three years?
If this isn’t a wake-up call about the state of “justice” in Canada—and the near-impunity of police officers into the bargain—I can’t imagine what would be. This is shameful, a travesty, an outrage, and it should give some of us pause when we point a little too self-righteously at the US. Our own backyard, it seems, needs its own tending. Hell, if this case is any indication, it needs to be dug up and re-seeded.