by Michael Smyth

If you're a B.C. taxpayer, you have every right to be choked that Police Complaint Commissioner Don Morrison walked away with a $100,000 severance after resigning in disgrace.

But count yourself lucky: You could be Deborah Jardine, the mother of one of Vancouver's missing women. Jardine is furious that her tax dollars are going to a man who dismissed her complaint of police misconduct in her daughter's disappearance.

Angela Jardine, a mentally-disabled drug addict and prostitute, disappeared from the streets of the Downtown eastside on Nov.20, 1998. In 1999, Jardine filed a complaint with Morrison's office, alleging police were slow to issue a missing persons poster, failed to investigate kept witnesses such as Angela's welfare case worker and didn't even search the hotel room where she lived. The complaint was quickly dismissed and Angela's remains officially missing.

But now the list of murder charges against pig farmer Robert Pickton seems to lengthen by the day. The cries of police bungling in the cases are growing too, along with claims that police were tipped to Pickton's farm years ago.

It all leaves Deborah Jardine wondering what " justice " really means. Mr. Morrison is getting a nice severance package, but what about my daughter?" she asked yesterday. There was no adequate police investigation into her disappearance. They did nothing, absolutely nothing."

Jardine said she was shocked by the official indifference to her daughter's disappearance. She said she ended up doing her own investigation, including tracking down Angela's dental records and giving them to the cops. "That's a pretty sad situation-a mother doing her own police investigation, she said yesterday from her home in Sparwood, near the Alberta border.

Three years after Morrison dismissed her complaint, Jardine said she listened in horror to the stories coming out of his office recently. Testifying before a legislature committee, a parade of Morrison's senior staffers came forward with incredible allegations. Morrison was a bully, they said, who fraternized with cops, hired his buddies and swept allegations of serious police misconduct under the rug.

Now that Morrison is gone, the commission is looking into the dozens of complaints he dismissed. Jardine said she received a questionnaire from the commission recently, asking questions such as: Did anyone ever inform you of your rights? She said she plans to re-file her complaint. And, like many family members of Vancouver's missing women, she is demanding a public inquiry into police handling of serial disappearances.

The Liberal government may have washed its hands of its controversial police watchdog yesterday, but the storm over police conduct in B.C. is only beginning to gather.

Should anyone from the public have information regarding the homicide or disappearance of a Vancouver street trade worker, please phone Crime Stoppers at 604-662-TIPS (8477) or the Missing Woman Tip line at 1-877-687-3377.