Tag: Law

High Proportion?

What does it say about a country when one of your top judges says this as was quoted by the BBC in relation to the longer pub hours coming to England soon:

Judge Charles Harris QC was particularly critical of the plans, saying a high proportion of British people become “pugnacious and bellicose” after drinking. He contrasted this to the continental drinking habits, where people “sit quietly chatting away at cafe tables”.

Nice to know that the guy in charge of sentencing British people thinks so highly of them.

Treason!

The good Flea makes an empassioned plea for the use of the charge of treason against those who would bomb we citizens in a twisted and pointless efforts to over-throw democracy. They do not know that the very rocks and trees of the Canadian Shield would vote somewhere between 12 and 18% for NPD every 3.5 to 4.5 years if we were all blown to bits taking mass trans of a morning.

But there is still reason to review our law and…did you know…there is still both high and also regular ethanol treason here in the law of the Great White North:

46. (1) Every one commits high treason who, in Canada,

(a) kills or attempts to kill Her Majesty, or does her any bodily harm tending to death or destruction, maims or wounds her, or imprisons or restrains her;
(b) levies war against Canada or does any act preparatory thereto; or
(c) assists an enemy at war with Canada, or any armed forces against whom Canadian Forces are engaged in hostilities, whether or not a state of war exists between Canada and the country whose forces they are.

(2) Every one commits treason who, in Canada,

(a) uses force or violence for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Canada or a province;
(b) without lawful authority, communicates or makes available to an agent of a state other than Canada, military or scientific information or any sketch, plan, model, article, note or document of a military or scientific character that he knows or ought to know may be used by that state for a purpose prejudicial to the safety or defence of Canada;
(c) conspires with any person to commit high treason or to do anything mentioned in paragraph (a);
(d) forms an intention to do anything that is high treason or that is mentioned in paragraph (a) and manifests that intention by an overt act; or
(e) conspires with any person to do anything mentioned in paragraph (b) or forms an intention to do anything mentioned in paragraph (b) and manifests that intention by an overt act.

(3) Notwithstanding subsection (1) or (2), a Canadian citizen or a person who owes allegiance to Her Majesty in right of Canada,

(a) commits high treason if, while in or out of Canada, he does anything mentioned in subsection (1); or
(b) commits treason if, while in or out of Canada, he does anything mentioned in subsection (2).

(4) Where it is treason to conspire with any person, the act of conspiring is an overt act of treason.

So even though we have newish post-9/11 trendy terrorism crimes set out in Part II.1 of the Act, there is some pretty beefy good old Victorian things to think about in the sweet section of the Criminal Code of Canada pasted above. Sadly, while we may bicker about “what is war,” high treason is perhaps beyond the scope of your average un-nationed freelance early 21st century jihadista – unless they go for the Queen – but it is nice to note, personally at least, that conspiring for the violent over-throw of Saskatchewan whether one is at home or away is treason nonetheless.

And it is a nice touch that the minimum sentence for high treason is life under 47(4).

Time To Cut Equalization?

Is it time to cut equalization and other aspects of the massive Federal funding to the anti-constitutionalist PEI government?

It may be the law, but same-sex couples can’t get married on P.E.I. None of the provincial bills that cover marriage have been changed, and P.E.I.’s attorney general, Mildred Dover, said it will take an undetermined amount of time for the Island to follow Canadian law.

This was hardly unexpected in light of the general Charter fighting track record of the current suits…but isn’t it time to penalize those who would obstruct the enjoyment by Canadians of the full rights of being Canadian?

When The Rich Go Bad

It is always sad – yet funny – seeing someone with inordinate access to resources doing something incredibly stupid:

A South African man who paid a relative to serve a jail sentence in his place has finally been put behind bars. Engineer Rupert Reddi was sentenced in 2001 for kidnapping and assault. After an appeal process, a man believed to be Mr Reddi was imprisoned in 2003. Three months later, prison officials discovered that the prisoner in question was in fact Roland Archery, a relative of Mr Reddi. Both men have now been sentenced to three years’ jail for the fraud. Mr Reddi was originally sentenced to four months’ jail in connection with an assault on his employees following a robbery at a factory he owned.

Discrimination Against Wealth?

It is not really the argument the two plaintiffs have brought to the Supreme Court of Canada today but it is close:

The Supreme Court of Canada will rule Thursday on whether it’s unconstitutional to prevent someone from paying for private medical care – a case that could change the face of Canadian health care. The plaintiffs – a Montreal patient and a doctor – want the court to strike down sections of the Quebec Hospital Insurance Act that prevent people from buying health insurance for medical procedures covered by the public health plan.

Whatever the outcome, the logic of today’s ruling will be interesting to review. I’ll see if I can have a look at it at noon. These rulings usually come out around 11 am I think.

LUNCHY UPDATE: I thought italicization, bold and upper case was warranted.

Here is the ruling and uni-level health care is gone-dee. The majority of the Court only relate it to Quebec’s Charter of Rights and finds it breached. The minority agrees and says it also breaches Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Hang on – there are three rulings from the seven judges with a 4-3 majority. Two majority but different and one minority dissent, maybe in part. Hmmm. I don’t have time to figure this out. Geewilikers. Shouldn’t all law be digestible in under three minutes?

For me, the interesting bit is the minority’s discussion of section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This is the three of four judge majority decision, or at least the version from the headnote of every lawyer’s cheat best pal:

Where lack of timely health care can result in death, the s. 7 protection of life is engaged; where it can result in serious psychological and physical suffering, the s. 7 protection of security of the person is triggered. In this case, the government has prohibited private health insurance that would permit ordinary Quebeckers to access private health care while failing to deliver health care in a reasonable manner, thereby increasing the risk of complications and death. In so doing, it has interfered with the interests protected by s. 7 of the Canadian Charter.

Section 11 HOIA and s. 15 HEIA [Ed.: the operative provisions of the Quebec statute in question] are arbitrary, and the consequent deprivation of the interests protected by s. 7 is therefore not in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice. In order not to be arbitrary, a limit on life, liberty or security of the person requires not only a theoretical connection between the limit and the legislative goal, but a real connection on the facts. The task of the courts, on s. 7 issues as on others, is to evaluate the issue in the light, not just of common sense or theory, but of the evidence. Here, the evidence on the experience of other western democracies with public health care systems that permit access to private health care refutes the government’s theory that a prohibition on private health insurance is connected to maintaining quality public health care. It does not appear that private participation leads to the eventual demise of public health care.

So the government cannot have a regime where it statistically kills us? Is that it? Unnecessary pain is unacceptable? I hope the libertarians out there kiss the ground the Supreme Court of Canada sits upon as this is a great example of the highest court of the land recognizing the autonomy of the individual under the Charter.

Possible Charges

Again, the moral objectionists, boo-hoo bleaters all, have come out full of rage over the Gurmant Grewal tapes. To briefly review, Tim talked to GG and GG taped it without telling Tim. That is OK. But what they talked about? Now the RCMP is listening to the tapes. Moral ragers say “HANG TIM” and “BRING DOWN THE GOVERNMENT!”… though admittedly they say that every day.

What might the RCMP do? Let’s look at some law and consider how it works. The RCMP have to read the Criminal Code and have to find a section under which to review the impugned activity. For someone to be charged, their acts and bits of thoughts must fall into line with all elements of an offence as set out in the section. [Other bits of thought like motive are not so much considered.] Here then are a couple is the section which would be reviewed in this situation:

119. (1) Every one who:

(a) being the holder of a judicial office, or being a member of Parliament or of the legislature of a province, corruptly

(i) accepts or obtains,
(ii) agrees to accept, or
(iii) attempts to obtain,

any money, valuable consideration, office, place or employment for himself or another person in respect of anything done or omitted or to be done or omitted by him in his official capacity, or

(b) gives or offers, corruptly, to a person mentioned in paragraph (a) any money, valuable consideration, office, place or employment in respect of anything done or omitted or to be done or omitted by him in his official capacity for himself or another person,

is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding fourteen years.

(2) No proceedings against a person who holds a judicial office shall be instituted under this section without the consent in writing of the Attorney General of Canada.

Chatting in some contexts then could be bad for both chatters. And, as you can see, unlike the sections relating for public officials at s.124 and s.125 , where the crime is about the generic concept of giving or getting “reward”, here in 119 it is about giving or getting only the listed things and one of those listed – but one of those things is an “office”. [I still think “reward” is in fact a very interesting word in these tapes as it is used, perhaps unfortunately – some folks might wish “shoe” or “grannies old soup” were used instead.] So, if two folk sit around thinking about how “offices” might be transacted that is maybe possibly bad. Again with the lists, section 118 defines “office” so that it includes

(a) an office or appointment under the government,

(b) a civil or military commission, and

(c) a position or an employment in a public department

Which offices does this include? Note also that it is important to see a separate element in the word “corruptly” – that word alone is the fall back for the defence as the Crown would have to prove some sort of particular wicked intent. I wonder if there is a case out there on the meaning of “corruptly” by a Parliamentarian? Note also that the Federal Attorney General has to agree under 119(2). Hmmm – interestink. We need not go beyond that for educational purposes the noo.

But wait. Consider if one side was setting the other up without an intention to find themselves in that hot water. Consider this Criminal Code provision of general application:

22. (1) Where a person counsels another person to be a party to an offence and that other person is afterwards a party to that offence, the person who counselled is a party to that offence, notwithstanding that the offence was committed in a way different from that which was counselled.

(2) Every one who counsels another person to be a party to an offence is a party to every offence that the other commits in consequence of the counselling that the person who counselled knew or ought to have known was likely to be committed in consequence of the counselling.

It would appear to me that if one was trying to get another to do a wrong – whatever the first person’s motives – that too is a crime. You cannot in effect chat someone up into a crime – taking advantage of their corruptability – and to do so without being held accountable for that inducement. Sensible. We do not want that sort of thing going on, either. So if you are in on the deal – bad. If you are not in on the deal but make someone else commit to the deal – also bad. Depending on the facts. Which only the RCMP know about – except for a few of others. We just have the transcripts or maybe 30% of them. I am sure lil’ Stevie told GG all this.

I have to go make supper. I’ll plug in more links later. Dinner done and good. But still comments on potential defences to these sections might be in order.

Let My Hoodie Go!

Tony Blair, fresh from victory at the polls is taking on a new enemy – the hoodie:

Britain has a new public enemy: the teenager in a hooded sweatshirt. Hoods, no longer just an adolescent fashion statement, lie at the centre of a debate over what many people, including Prime Minister Tony Blair, see as an alarming rise in bad behaviour. Mr. Blair says rowdy public drunkenness, noisy neighbours, petty street crime, even graffiti and vandalism are top concerns. He is enthusiastically backing an English shopping mall’s ban on hoods, baseball caps and other headgear that obscure the face. “It is time to reclaim the streets for the decent majority,” Mr. Blair told the House of Commons. “People are rightly fed up with street-corner and shopping-centre thugs….”

You might think that something is amiss when a garment I and my children wear has become the icon of the evil in British Society. You might think that there is something else to this. Which of course there is. The knowing amongst you may know I did a wee thesis for my LLM a couple of years ago on the implications under Canadian law for distant biometric surveillance. The interesting thing is that the western nation most interested in using superfast cameras to gather biometric images of people’s faces and immediately cross reference them against databases of the known is the UK. No koo-koo wingnuttiness. That is just reality.

The hoodie over the face defeats this watching, making it difficult for the computers to figure out who you are through simply the cloaking and even the face down posture. So when he speaks of “the decent majority”, keep in mind that the UK government reserves to itself tools for the identification and logging of individual citizens which would be unacceptable under Canadian and US law, which, though the technolgy is here, still provide more by way of autonomy for the citizen from the state. Sure there are likely other aspects to it as there always are but keep in mindw who is watching and how they watch when the hoodie is separated out as the new evil.

Travellers

From what I understand, Travellers are families of Scots or Irish origin, an indigenous UK minority community, which were disrupted generations ago by landlord evictions and who took up the road as a means to maintain their own continuity. I first came upon them when, for a law school paper, I was looking for community outside of Canada to describe which had first suffered legal discrimination then human rights protection. I find the fact of their existing fascinating.  Unlike, for example, the familiar story of the Highland Scots culture crushed after 1745 or the less well-known story of the Fenland people in England, whose life off the land was destroyed by industrialization from the 1600s to the 1800s, the Travellers have survived.

The Travellers are like the Roma (the people most call “gypsies”, an error from an assumption in the 1500s that they came to England from Egypt) in that they had long lived in horse drawn caravans, have come into conflict with greater society, and have much the same needs but they form a distinct Gaelic culture, compared to the complex Indian roots of the Roma.  A third group, new age travellers, has also been identified.   Here is some information on the legal issues these communities have faced from the angle of their education needs in Scotland. This is an interesting passage illustrating someting of the nature of the community:

While it was important to establish and highlight Travellers’ very specific, special or particular needs it also brought a degree of exposure and limelight which many Travellers had not sought and often did not want. They had survived many centuries of often brutal and repressive legislation, usually by keeping a low profile, a degree of separateness and by being ‘unseen’ as they went about their lives.

This current story characterizes some of the tension and attitudes they live with or trigger, depending on your point of view:

“If the Irish travellers acted like everybody else and stopped intimidating people and went through planning permission, people wouldn’t have to have such a problem with them.” Next to the Irish travellers’ site is a small row of legally-built houses belonging to Roma Gypsies who have been in the area three decades. Residents are unanimous about this smaller group of settled travellers. They are variously described as “fabulous”, “excellent people” and “never a problem”. For the Irish travellers, the local authority, Basildon council, is resolute. The council says it provides many legal traveller sites, but it does not plan to build more and expects central government to take a lead in the issue.

Local municipal governments in the UK have provided caravan parks and other housing suitable for the life of the travellers though there are still organizations needed to advocate for the recognition of the legitimacy of the lifestyle of these communties. Governments even have a challenge identifying how many there are and where the communties are located at any given time, what services they need and the extent of their rights and the obligations of greater society to address those rights.

What I find most interesting is the perception and the subjective reality, the seeming desire to perpetuate a dislocation that is no longer forced upon them, the failure to grasp the thing at the heart of the community that speaks to them of themselves. It is an excellent illustration that where discrimination occurs, it is largely based on lack of understanding, some real conflict but also and likely mainly false assumptions of the discriminator having little to do with how the community which suffers the discrimination knows itself.

Vatican Radiowave Crime!

You just never see a story like this every day – a cardinal convicted in a sordid shortwave radio plot:

A court in Rome on Monday convicted a Vatican cardinal and the head of the city-state’s radio station for electromagnetic pollution. They were given 10-day suspended sentences, which they have appealed. Cardinal Roberto Tucci, former head of Vatican Radio’s management committee, and the Rev. Pasquale Borgomeo, the station’s director general, were charged with “dangerous launching of objects,” referring to the station’s electromagnetic waves. Residents of the Rome suburb Cessano near the station complained they could hear Vatican Radio broadcasts through their lamps because of electromagnetic disturbances.

That is just beautiful. Sadly, it is not just funny nutty tale as the high intensity transmitters, still using shortwaves to broadcast to the globe, are a possible source of illness in the neighbouring residential area. Within the actual city, there are around 100 Kw worth of transmitters dated to the early 1950s. That is a lot less than the 1700 Kw worth of tranmitters Canada has at Sackville, NB (seen left 60 years ago when style was king) but they are surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of acres of salt marsh as opposed to Italian suburbs. This 2001 defence of Vatican Radio‘s transmitters indicates that the allegation was leukemia rates were higher and is contrary to this statement in support of the correlation between RF and leukemia. It also indicated that the district of Rome in question is not cheek to jowl with Vatican City’s walls but one called Santa Maria in Galeria where the Vatican’s transmitters pump out 2410 Kw under an agreement reached decades ago. The VR PR looks better in Italian but what doesn’t.

The defence I came across in favour of the Vatican contains one most charming argument in terms of its sensitivity to public health issues:

All the more “correct” were the observations made by the director of Vatican Radio, Father Borgomeo, who recalled that in 1951 the area where the transmitters were being installed was virtually uninhabited. The development of the area, and the construction of homes there, began only after the transmission facility was in place. So one might ask: If there is a direct link between the electromagnetic transmissions and cancer statistics, why aren’t the local builders and administrators, who allowed the residential developments in the area, called to account? For that matter, why are only radio broadcasters being investigated, and not television stations? After all, the transmission facilities of the state-owned RAI television network are located right in the heart of Rome, on Via Teulada.

Amazing and takes no responsibility for the fact that 2000 Kw of the 2410 Kw were built since 1976. No wonder they can hear the radio through light bulbs. I bet if they checked, there also would be a low instance of perms being ordered at hair dress salons as well.


“I’m on the Vatican, woe-oh, Radi-o…”