Growing up as a child, I remember my grandmother reading me Grimm's Fairy Tales from a big, leather-bound tome. Many of life's lessons were learned right there sitting on Nanny's knee.
One thing I learned was to never trust a senior citizen who lived in a gingerbread house, but a more practical lesson came from the tale of the Boy Who Cried Wolf.
As you can no doubt recall, that particular parable tells of a shepherd boy who, lonely at night while tending his sheep, got the local villagers all riled up by crying "Wolf" a few times, until he was finally gobbled up by a real wolf.
A while back, an Alberta town councillor named Dar Heatherington seems to have started this disturbing trend, when she claimed she had been abducted, drugged and sexually assaulted - when in fact, police investigators discovered she had actually skipped out to Las Vegas for a little fun.
A little more recently, the case of the 'Runaway Bride' caught the media's attention, as her similar claim of abduction turned out to be a case of pre-wedding jitters and incredibly bad judgment. And, last week a young Sikh boy in the lower mainland claimed a few racist white men had yanked his turban off his head, cut his hair (a sacred thing to Sikhs) and beat him up. After some brief investigations, this too proved false.
And last week, right here in Squamish (and presented on the front page of The Chief) local RCMP received a report that a man in a basement suite in Dentville had a firearm and was threatening people who were inside. Naturally, the RCMP mobilized into action, called in Emergency Response Teams (ERT), bomb teams, canine teams and sharpshooters. Two blocks in Dentville were blocked off and for five, tense hours no one really knew what was happening. More than one person who had been at that basement suite had reported that the man had a firearm, so no one can blame the RCMP for calling in the cavalry. We now find out that the guy apparently didn't even have a firearm, although he did allegedly utter threats. Again, we the citizens will be footing the bill for that little incident.
These latter-day wolf criers all need to be made to pay for their fibs, both socially and monetarily. Heatherington and the 'Runaway Bride' were charged with making false reports, but the young Sikh boy will only go through the restorative justice program.
Squamish RCMP should charge those who made up the Dentville firearm story. Someone other than the taxpayers has to foot the bill in these cases.
If not, maybe we can send the storytelling offenders off to spend some time with an elderly woman in a gingerbread house.
