How Could Any of This Go Wrong?

One's daily litany of outrageous decisions made by people who are not held to account:

Following negative media publicity and a blowback from some staff, students and their parents, the mentally-ill man who attacked soldiers at a Toronto military recruiting office won’t be bound for Mohawk College after all.

He’ll likely be heading somewhere else.

Found not criminally responsible (NCR) last year for the 2016 stabbing attack, Ayanle Hassan Ali, 31, sat quietly in a grey suit before the Ontario Review Board in the locked forensic unit at St. Joseph’s Healthcare where he’s lived since his arrest.

At his second annual review, everyone around the boardroom table agreed Ali, who suffers from schizophrenia, has made good progress but continues to pose a “significant threat.”

And then they went on to discuss all the added privileges they believe he should be eligible to earn over the upcoming year.

The hospital and his psychiatrist, Dr. Gary Chaimowitz, recommended the board clear him to have unaccompanied passes into southern Ontario and travel within a 50-kilometre radius of Hamilton for education or employment. They also agreed with a request by his lawyer Maureen Addie that he be eligible for 48-hour overnight passes to Toronto under the supervision of his father or sister.

None of these would be automatic, they hastened to add, but would be implemented slowly by the hospital as Ali improves. “We take risk to the community as our priority,” insisted Chaimowitz.

Yet he decried the community uproar about their plans to allow Ali to attend Mohawk College across the street from the hospital. The story – first revealed here last year – was back in the news this week after the Court of Appeal upheld the ORB’s controversial decision to allow him to enrol and eventually go on his own.

Those plans have now been scuttled, Chaimowitz told the board, because the “unflattering” media coverage led them to worry that Ali himself might be in danger from another student.

**

In order to enrol fugitive killer Zhebin Cong in English-language training programs to help his mental health treatment, his psychiatric team worked to get official identification documents for the Chinese national, National Post has learned.

It is not known whether new identity papers materialized or helped him leave Canada, but Cong, found not criminally responsible for a brutal 2014 murder on account of mental disorder, is now an international fugitive after fleeing a psychiatric facility in Toronto and boarding a plane out of Canada.

His flight should not have been a surprise.

Cong, 47, repeatedly declared a “concrete” plan to return to China if he had the chance, his psychiatric records say.

He was “very fixed” on returning to China and adamant about not continuing English classes because it will be useless to him when he gets back home.

I am not a psychologist, nor have I ever claimed to be, but I would suggest that medication might be more effective a treatment than ESL classes, paid for by the taxpayer, that do nothing to address his murderous impulses.

Then there is that pesky disclosure thing that the Mr. Cong's psychiatrists conveniently ignored.

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A Canadian researcher who was suddenly dismissed from a federal lab recently worked with a Chinese company that copied a breakthrough Ebola drug she helped discover.

But it was definitely not a case of economic espionage, says the leading biologist who spearheaded development of the medicine.

(Sidebar: oh, I'm sure.)

Gary Kobinger said both he and Xiangguo Qiu co-operated with MabWorks while they were at Winnipeg’s National Microbiology Laboratory (NML). The Beijing firm was up-front about what it had done – despite the drug being under patent – and probably saved lives by increasing production of the experimental product at its own cost, he said.

Kobinger urged the federal government to be more transparent about the reasons for Qiu’s removal from the Winnipeg lab, and squelch speculation that has focused largely on the researcher’s ties to her native China.

Hhmm ...

Why would a Chinese company working in North America want access to the Ebola virus and a drug to treat it?:

China continues to maintain some elements of an offensive biological weapons program that it is believed to have started in the 1950s. It possesses biotechnology infrastructure sufficiently advanced to allow it to develop and produce biological agents. Its munitions industry is sufficient to allow it to weaponize such agents, and it has a variety of means that could be used for delivery. 

China's offensive biological warfare capability is believed to be based on technology developed before its accession in 1984 to the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC). Since then, China has claimed that it has never researched, produced, or possessed any biological weapons and would never do so. Nevertheless, its declarations under the BWC guidelines for confidence-building purposes are believed to be inaccurate and incomplete.

Perhaps one will never know.