Here’s how the scenario unfolds.  The police follow a suspect in an active investigation.  They observe him go into the woods.  Fifty minutes later, he emerges, and drives away.  The officers enter the woods and observe an area where the pine needles and soil appear disturbed.  The following day, a forensic team returns and unearths four wooden crates containing fourteen hundred rounds of ammunition and a garbage bag containing fourteen tins of black powder.

Tony Spears, writing in the Ottawa Sun goes on to say that Claude Haridge has been charged with careless storage of ammunition and breach of undertaking.  That’s where I get confused.  A guy buries over a thousand rounds of ammunition and a pile of black powder in the woods and that’s the best they can come up with?  Either he’s a total nut job, or he’s up to no good.

Meanwhile, his defense lawyer is arguing there shouldn’t be any charges at all.  Seriously?  We’re just supposed to look the other way?  I’m not sure where Mr. Brown got his law degree, but that school should probably start offering a course in common sense.  I expect you’d have a hard time finding a fifth grader who wouldn’t see a problem with someone hiding bullets and powder in the bush.

Oh yeah, one more detail.  That open investigation that had them watching him in the first place?  It involved the firebombing of a bank in the city.  Now you maybe start to see my problem with this.  The police have apparently not charged Mr. Haridge in connection to the bank bombing.  On the other hand, they had some reason for following him as part of their investigation.

So here we have a suspect in an urban bombing who admits to burying large quantities of ammunition and black powder in the bush.  He’s facing a mickey-mouse careless storage charge.  If Mr Haridge were of “non-caucasian” ethnicity, or a practicing Muslim, I bet the charge sheet would have looked a bit different. It probably would have included words like, “terrorism”, “terrorist”, and of course “Al Qaeda in Ottawa”.

The good news…. Apparently local law enforcement has concluded that people with names like “Haridge” aren”t likely to be terrorists.  Really, he probably had some perfectly valid reason for stashing ammo and powder like that.  Probably just a fun geo-caching game with his buddies from “Definitely Not Al Qaeda In Ottawa”.  What else could it possibly be?  After all, he doesn’t look like an “islamicist”.  They’re the ones Prime Minsiter Harper said are the big threat.

Feel safer now?

Cheers, Winston