Mr. Bateman, assuming your implicit argument that these children are in more toxic environment than they would be in under the care of the Ministry of Children and Families is correct, I find it extremely unlikely that there is not a single provision of our current child protection legislation under which a child can be remove from dangerous drug lab or grow-op environments is correct. In fact I find it hard to believe that those charged with protecting these young citizens cannot find numerous provisions to use to remove and place these children in other environments.

If police officers, social workers and our justice system require a clear signal that children in grow-ops or drug labs are in need of help – our society is in serious trouble. I would go so far as to say that anyone who needs a “province wide directive” in order to act on behalf of children in these circumstances is in the wrong job and should seek employment elsewhere.

Mr. Bateman’s original editorial The Post Friday March 21, 2008

My wife and I have two little girls under the age of five. They are bright and happy and we would stop at nothing to keep them safe. Every night, I tuck those two girls into their beds and I say a little prayer that God would keep them healthy.

Not every child in B.C. is so lucky .In hundreds of other homes across this province, children sleep in beds with hastily-wired electrical cables running past them. Toxic mould grows in the walls. Poisonous drug precursors litter the house .Dirty needles lay in the living room, and crystal meth residue is all over the kitchen.

This is a new social issue in B.C. and it should break the heart of anyone who cares about children. These are drug-endangered children and there are hundreds of them living on borrowed time.

As a Langley Township councillor, the issue of drug-endangered children first came onto my radar when I received a memo from our fire chief. Like Abbotsford and many other municipalities, Langley has put together a Public Safety Inspection Team, which inspects suspicious electricity users for safety violations. We do it because these homes are far more likely to burn than others, and we need to protect our neighbourhoods .In the memo, our fire chief reported that the team found evidence of children living in 36 of the 158 grow-ops they discovered.

As I tucked my two little girls into bed that night, I thought about those 36 grow-ops that children lived in. I thought of these kids, living in an environment with shoddy electrical work that could cause a fire at any time. I thought about the toxic mould growing inside the walls– often undetected behind the drywall. That’s why municipalities have strengthened their building bylaws to make sure that homes that had been used as grow-ops or meth labs are brought back up to a healthy standard. I thought about the dangers of living in a home that could be the target of an organized crime grow-rip.

I started reading, researching, and asking questions. I found the story of little Deon, Jackson and Megan White, three preschoolers killed in a meth lab explosion in California. I saw pictures of babies – the same age as my little Danica – with burns from meth precursors on their faces.

I saw pictures of meth ingredients contaminating the same kitchens that kids eat in. I read about power cables running under cradles to grow-ops. I read about needles and drugs being found next to sleeping infants. These children are being abused by the carelessness and high-risk lifestyles of their parents and guardians. They deserve better protection.
I’m not the only one who thinks that. Police officers I speak with feel the same way; so does the BC Association of Social Workers; and UCFV criminologist Darryl Plecas; and the Government of Alberta, which has a law protecting drug-endangered children. While the B.C. government has moved to protect children from their parents’ second-hand cigarette smoke in cars, it has ignored the hundreds of children living in grow-ops and meth labs.

In 2006, Alberta passed a Drug-Endangered Children Act, which sent a clear signal to police officers, social workers, and the justice system: children growing up in grow-ops or drug labs are being abused. Their parents are subject to prison terms and fines. The children are seized and put with other family members or in another safe environment.

In B.C., our social workers don’t even have a uniform provincial protocol on how to deal with children found in these homes. Each region makes its own policies, despite three years of lobbying by the BC Association of Social Workers for a province-wide directive. We need to do more for these drug-endangered children. The health studies are staggering.

“Children living in those labs might as well be taking the drug directly, ”says John Martyny, a medicine professor with the National Jewish Medicaland Research Centre in Denver. A U.S. Attorney’s Office study shows that as many as 80 per cent of children rescued from meth labs in the US test positive for toxic levels of the chemicals used in meth production. These chemicals can cause cancer, severe skin conditions, tremors, lead poisoning, kidney, lung and liver diseases and more.

On the grow-op side, the mould from the growing process can cause chronic respiratory problems, neurological damage, and cancer.

That doesn’t count the psychological harm from living in such an environment, or the elevated risk of fires and explosions. Every child deserves a safe and happy place to grow up. When will British Columbia step up to the plate for our hundreds of drug-endangered children.

What kind of bottom dwelling scum uses charities as a place to dump their unwanted crap and avoid paying dumping fees?

The cost of disposing of the junk these low lives dump has become a drain on the resources of the charities involved; sucking money out of charitable activities to provide free garbage disposals for this tight-fisted, self-centred bunch of vermin.

This is compounded when someone who cannot afford the loss buys something that doesn’t function. The swine that dumped it might just as well rob them at gun point.

Get some character, some morals, you despicable trash!

I would like to respond to Donald J. St. Pierre factually deficient diatribe (Post Feb. 29) against reason, science and evolution.

Anyone who has conducted biology experiments with fruit flies has seen evolution in motion. However, it is not necessary to turn to the laboratory to see evolution occurring when Abbotsford sits surrounded by the ongoing many experiments and experimental results in evolution that is agriculture.

Evolution does not require a new species as an outcome as can be seen in the definition of evolution at www.dictionary.com: “Biology: change in the gene pool of a population from generation to generation by such processes as mutation, natural selection, and genetic drift”. Evolution is change in the gene pool.

Milk production, beef cattle, crops all have been and continue to be genetically changed by the efforts of mankind. In fact one of the major driving forces of evolution today is the actions of mankind either deliberately or as a side effect of those actions.

Given the babbled mumbo jumbo that Mr. St Pierre ties to pass off as a scientific argument, it is not surprising he has such a poor grasp of what the theory, science and underlying principles of evolution are and/or about.

Yes mass is a manifestation of energy but its conversion to energy is governed by Einstein’s famous E=mc2 not the Laws of Thermodynamics.

Thermodynamics is the study of the inter-relation between heat, work and internal energy of a system. In simplest terms, the Laws of Thermodynamics dictate the specifics for the movement of heat and work. The Laws of Thermodynamics are actually specific manifestations of the law of conservation of mass-energy as it relates to thermodynamic processes.

The Laws of Thermodynamics are not the set of Laws that govern the Universe. They are a subset of a subset of the Laws of Physics (motion, gravity, relativity, conservation of mass-energy etc) and until such time as a grand unifying theory for the Laws of Physics emerges and survives testing, there is not a “Law” that can be said to govern the Universe.

As to Mr. St. Pierre’s claims of what evolution contradicts.

I will concede that if you use the narrow meaning of the term Biogenesis that is the basis of Creation biology, then within that limited definition, evolution clashes with biogenesis. However if one does not misuse the term biogenisis by limiting it in this manner, there is no law of biogenesis saying that very primitive life cannot form from increasingly complex molecules.

A cursory study of the Laws of Thermodynamics reveals that the Fourth Law is about biological systems and encompasses evolution.

As to Laws of cause and effect or probability, I cannot comment further until Mr. St. Pierre provides examples of what he means as it appears to this observer that not only do these laws not contradict evolution, these laws suggest and support evolution.

While I would commend Mr. St. Pierre for his statement about debate without the rantings of emotional philosophical bias, I am left wondering when he plans to begin or join such a debate?

“Grant’s Law” is inconvenient but what else would government do if it was not filling our lives with inconvenience? Surely one would not expect them to address such issues as poverty, affordable housing, homelessness, addiction or mental illness? No, that would require thought, hard work and leadership. It is so much easier to pander to the public with “Grant’s Law”, than to tackle pressing social issues.

The Liberal government pays lip service to capitalism and letting the markets decide – until it is politically convenient for legislation or to avoid enforcing the laws protecting workers. All the government had to do was use the existing labour standards to prevent employers from deducting the cost of stolen gas from employees or from firing them because they were intelligent enough to do the smart thing – nothing.

But enforcing labour standards in this instance would have set a precedent and the government could have found itself under pressure to enforce all the labour standards, areas such as farm workers. Or even worse, find their selves under pressure to deal with issues such as keeping employees as “part time” to avoid the rights and benefits that accrue to full time employees.

My sympathies may go out to Grant’s parents, but this law still exasperates me. Not because I resent being treated like a criminal and inconvenienced every time I purchase gasoline, but because at its core it is a law legislating about human stupidity.

With apologies to Mr. De Patie, rushing out to confront a criminal armed with a high powered weapon weighing hundreds of kilograms is not an intelligent action. And a car, despite the way the laws deal with drivers who kill people (drunk or sober drivers), is a lethal weapon. A criminal or an idiot armed with a car is as deadly lethal as if armed with an AK-47 and confronting them, whether armed with a car or AK-47, is less than intelligent behaviour that is likely to prove fatal.

What this law is about, besides inconveniencing and treating as criminals the pubic, is preventing people from behaving stupidly.

If government is going down that path, it better get right on legislation governing the use of ladders; since in North America nearly a person a day dies and there are 100,000 injures from falling from ladders. Legislation is obviously needed, even though research shows that 100% of ladder accidents might be eliminated with proper attention to the application of equipment.

If we are going to legislate about human stupidity where do we stop? After all, as Albert Einstein noted “Only two things are infinite, the Universe and Human Stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”