A Post, For It Is Friday

Just in time for the week-end...


What Bill C-24 actually says:

This enactment amends the Citizenship Act to, among other things, update eligibility requirements for Canadian citizenship, strengthen security and fraud provisions and amend provisions governing the processing of applications and the review of decisions. ...

Amendments to the security and fraud provisions include

(a) expanding the prohibition against granting citizenship to include persons who are charged outside Canada for an offence that, if committed in Canada, would constitute an indictable offence under an Act of Parliament or who are serving a sentence outside Canada for such an offence;

(b) expanding the prohibition against granting citizenship to include persons who, while they were permanent residents, engaged in certain actions contrary to the national interest of Canada, and permanently barring those persons from acquiring citizenship;

(c) aligning the grounds related to security and organized criminality on which a person may be denied citizenship with those grounds in the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and extending the period during which a person is barred from acquiring citizenship on that basis;

(d) expanding the prohibition against granting citizenship to include persons who, in the course of their application, misrepresent material facts and prohibiting new applications by those persons for a specified period;

(e) increasing the period during which a person is barred from applying for citizenship after having been convicted of certain offences;

(f) increasing the maximum penalties for offences related to citizenship, including fraud and trafficking in documents of citizenship...

(Sidebar: the language is important. The bill talks of granting citizenship, not of whether one is born in Canada.)

Making this claim misleading:

“It’s a huge step back,” Paterson said to Yahoo Canada. “England, 800 years ago, banned exile and eight centuries later, here we are bringing it back. Exile is something that was practiced back in medieval times when they didn’t have proper criminal justice systems and the rule of law – we don’t think that that’s appropriate, we think that if people are committing various offences it should be enough to deal with them through our Canadian criminal justice system.”

Paterson is referring specifically to the revocation elements of the new bill, which gives the government discretion to strip the citizenship of anyone convicted of terrorism or treason – provided they have or are eligible dual citizenship. Although the bill – referred to by the federal government as the Strengthening Citizenship Act – was tabled last February, it didn’t go into full effect until this week.

Related: what the Magna Carta actually says:

+ (39) No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land. 

+ (40) To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice. 

(41) All merchants may enter or leave England unharmed and without fear, and may stay or travel within it, by land or water, for purposes of trade, free from all illegal exactions, in accordance with ancient and lawful customs. This, however, does not apply in time of war to merchants from a country that is at war with us. Any such merchants found in our country at the outbreak of war shall be detained without injury to their persons or property, until we or our chief justice have discovered how our own merchants are being treated in the country at war with us. If our own merchants are safe they shall be safe too. 

* (42) In future it shall be lawful for any man to leave and return to our kingdom unharmed and without fear, by land or water, preserving his allegiance to us, except in time of war, for some short period, for the common benefit of the realm. People that have been imprisoned or outlawed in accordance with the law of the land, people from a country that is at war with us, and merchants - who shall be dealt with as stated above - are excepted from this provision.

Is there a due process of law in ISIS-run nations?



Don't think this wasn't all in the cards:

A decision from a U.S. circuit court Friday gives a major boost to Omar Khadr’s appeal of his five convictions by the contentious military commission in Guantanamo, says his Edmonton lawyer.

The District of Columbia court dismissed as legally flawed a conviction against another Guantanamo detainee, an al-Qaida recruiter also tried under the military commission system created under former U.S. president George W. Bush.

The court ruled that the conspiracy conviction of Ali Hamza al-Bahlul is invalid because the conspiracy offence is not an internationally recognized war crime. Military commissions only have jurisdiction to try internationally recognized war crimes.

Similar arguments have been made in the Khadr case.

He admitted to killing Christopher Speer. He never denied it.

There is no justice system, only a legal one.


As I was saying:

A veteran in St. John's says a judge in provincial court in St. John's asked him and his service dog to leave small claims court because he didn't recognize the dog as a service animal.

Shawn Lewis, who served with the Canadian Armed Forces in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia in the 1990s, said he was told to leave the courtroom when he arrived with his registered service dog Missy, who helps him cope with post-traumatic stress disorder.

"I'm not willing to roll over on this anymore," Lewis told reporters Friday. "I'm tired of the confrontation and the harassment in regards to having a service dog."

"I don't have a visible disability but that doesn't give anybody the right to — especially upon presenting credentials — to say I can or cannot have access to public spaces."

A Somalian man is arrested for his role in kidnapping Amanda Lindhout:

Almost seven years after the overseas hostage-taking of former journalist Amanda Lindhout, the RCMP have arrested and charged a Somalian man with the crime.

Lindhout and photographer Nigel Brennan were seized by young gunmen near strife-torn Mogadishu, Somalia, in August 2008. Both were released on Nov. 25, 2009.

The Mounties say Ali Omar Ader, a Somalian national, faces a criminal charge of hostage-taking for his purported role as a negotiator.

He was arrested Thursday in Ottawa. The RCMP say Ader, 37, had been in town for a few days but the national police force would not reveal how he arrived in Canada.

You're going to need a bigger boat:

New footage has been released of one of the largest great white sharks to have ever been captured on camera – the monstrous, more than 20-foot-long creature known as Deep Blue, GrindTV reports.

The enormous predator, which calls Mexico’s Guadalupe Island home, was featured last year by the Discovery Network where part of the tagging effort that involved researcher Mauricio Hoyos Padilla can be found.

This week, Hoyos posted new footage of the same shark to Facebook, under the title, “I give you the biggest white shark ever seen in front of the cages in Guadalupe Island… DEEP BLUE!!!”

(source)