Four more shopping days until Saint Patrick's Day ... 🍀
Section 13 was drafted and passed in 1977. It reached the Supreme Court in 1990 as part of a trio of cases about Canada’s uniquely balanced approach to hate crimes. The ruling against neo-Nazi hotline operator John Ross Taylor, upholding Section 13, defined hate as “unusually strong and deep-felt emotions of detestation, calumny and vilification,” the same language, with one minor tweak to delete “calumny,” that appears today in the Liberal legislation. It was a split decision, though, and in her dissent, former Justice Beverley McLachlin (who was not yet the chief justice) said the idea of hate is “vague and subjective, capable of extension should the interpreter be so inclined.” As she put it, “Where does dislike leave off and hatred or contempt begin?”
In 1998, a penalty section was added to Section 13 that allowed fines of up to $10,000, which would later become a major legal problem for the law’s constitutionality. But it was the expansion to the internet in 2001 that caused the greatest headaches. New worries began to emerge.
One of the oddest things about Section 13 was that the hate speech did not require a specific victim. It was enough that published material was “likely to expose” a protected group to “hatred or contempt,” for example on the basis of their race, religion or gender. It didn’t have to actually do this, just make it likely. ...
Richard Warman worked for the Canadian Human Rights Commission from 2002 to 2004. He had been filing complaints beforehand, but after he left he started bringing online hate speech cases to the tribunal on more of a freelance basis, sometimes supporting the CHRC prosecution. On paper, it was all him. He brought 16 cases and won them all, getting fines and cease and desist orders against offenders, in some cases through settlements, but mostly by winning at tribunals. The CHRC could bring cases itself, but in practice never did.
Warman’s methods were unorthodox and unsupervised. As part of his efforts to document his targets and confirm their identities, he would sometimes pose as an extremist in online forums. He would go so far that a 2009 tribunal ruling, which he nevertheless won, criticized him for “disappointing and disturbing” online behaviour, including posting hate messages written by others that “could have precipitated further hate messages.” ...
He compared his method to “triage,” going after the worst offenders and working his way down, but starting with clear cut calls for genocide or ethnic cleansing. “I never ran out of bright-red targets to address, so I never had to question myself, as to saying whether, well, this is getting a little grey, it’s a little weak, maybe this is something that doesn’t merit a human rights complaint. It was always situations where there was a crystal-clear violation of the law,” Warman said in the interview in 2012.
Warman filed the fateful case against Lemire in 2003, but no one paid it much attention until the Mark Steyn affair.
That was when the writer published an excerpt of his book America Alone in Maclean’s magazine, with provocative claims about the demographic rise of Muslims, titled “The Future Belongs To Islam.” Soon after, Mohamed Elmasry, a computer engineering professor at the University of Waterloo, met with a small group of York University law students in the Al Madina restaurant in Waterloo, and decided upon a legal response on behalf of Canada’s Muslims.
Having been refused equal space for a rebuttal in Maclean’s, they filed human rights hate speech complaints in three jurisdictions: Ontario and British Columbia, where provincial human rights law applies to printed material; and federally, which applies to online material. ...
They all eventually failed, and only B.C. actually heard the case on its merits at a tribunal, where the complaint was dismissed. But they drew attention to human rights law and commissions in a totally unprecedented manner.
Not long previously, a Calgary imam, Syed Soharwardy, brought a complaint under Alberta human rights law against Ezra Levant and his Western Standard magazine for publishing the Danish Muhammad cartoons, a set of satirical depictions of the prophet that were not published in any other mainstream Canadian outlet, and were the spark to a global outrage.
In response, Levant became the ringleader of a campaign to, as he put it, “denormalize” not just Section 13, but human rights law and quasi-judicial human rights tribunals in general. He recorded and broadcast his meeting with an officer of the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission, and developed online protest strategies he would later use for other political causes.
Seeing this national debate over free speech rise so quickly, Soharwardy had a change of heart and dropped out of the complaint, saying he had only wanted dialogue, not punishment. But another Muslim organization saw it through to a decision, which found the publication did not violate any human rights hate laws. ...
Next year came the bombshell. Finally, there was a decision in Warman v. Lemire, but not just that, a legal indictment of the system from inside. Tribunal chair Athanasios Hadjis ruled that Section 13 violates the Charter right to free expression because it carries the threat of punitive fines. He found Lemire had violated it in one instance, but had removed the offending material as soon as he learned of Warman’s complaint against him, so Hadjis declined to issue a penalty in light of his wider decision.
This looked like the end. Other Section 13 cases were thrown into a strange limbo. How could they be prosecuted if the tribunal chair himself thinks the law is invalid? It would be appealed, of course, and everyone would intervene, and eventually the Supreme Court would side with either Warman or Lemire. Or so it seemed.
By the time Warman v. Lemire got to Federal Court, where tribunal decisions are appealed, the ruling Conservatives had a majority in Parliament and had signalled their support for Section 13 was over, and that they would now seek to repeal it as an affront to free speech. That vote went through in 2012, but the saga was far from over. The decision in Whatcott had yet to land.
Read the whole thing.
**
If Canadians don't believe in this bill, then they need to get off of their @$$es and protest because this censorship bill isn't going anywhere:
Fewer than half of Canadians believe the federal government’s plan to regulate social media sites will make platforms safer, a new survey suggests.
Polling firm Leger recently asked Canadians about the Liberal government’s proposed Online Harms Act, which contains a suite of measures meant to make social media platforms safer, particularly for children.
Half of respondents said they are wary of the government’s ability to protect free speech, and a majority said they support the controversial proposal to introduce stiffer sentences for hate speech crimes.
Introduced by Justice Minister Arif Virani, the proposed legislation would create a new digital safety commission to regulate social media companies and establish an ombudsperson to hear complaints from Canadians. The law would also require companies to create safety plans to mitigate exposure to harmful content.
No one should be regulating anything.
It is not up to the government to tackle the digital monster that is the Internet, nor could it.
If the Liberals were serious about preventing harm to children, they would increase penalties for perpetrators of sexual abuse against children and women and certainly wouldn't allow life-damaging mutilations of children to occur.
But this is not about harm prevention and everyone knows it.
Also - part of the problem right here:
The Supreme Court of Canada ruled in a recent sexual assault case that it was “problematic” for a lower court judge to refer to the alleged victim as a “woman,” implying that the more appropriate term should have been “person with a vagina.”
In a decision published Friday, Justice Sheilah Martin wrote that a trial judge’s use of the word “a woman” may “have been unfortunate and engendered confusion.”
Martin does not specify why the word “woman” is confusing, but the next passage in her decision refers to the complainant as a “person with a vagina.” Notably, not one person in the entire case is identified as transgender, and the complainant is referred to throughout as a “she.”
The case was R. v. Kruk, which involved a 2017 charge of sexual assault against then 34-year-old Maple Ridge, B.C., man Charles Kruk.
“Mr. Kruk found the complainant intoxicated, lost, and distressed one night in downtown Vancouver,” reads the background to the case. “He decided to take her to his house, and connected with the complainant’s parents by phone.”
It’s then that the accounts diverge. The complainant testified that she woke up to find that her pants were off, and Kruk was vaginally penetrating her. Kruk testified that the complainant’s pants were off because she’d removed them herself after spilling water on them earlier in the night – and that what she assumed was a rape was actually just Kruk startling her awake.
Does anyone believe that an unelected and unaccountable judge who can't tell what a woman is or what assault is can protect the vulnerable?
No one could have predicted that violent criminal with multiple convictions for violence could have ever stabbed people.
That came out of nowhere:
A government review has found there were no warning signs that could have predicted Myles Sanderson’s violent rampage that left 11 people dead, despite his previous arrests for violent crime and a history of not following release conditions.
Sanderson stabbed 11 people to death and injured another 18 on the James Smith Cree Nation reserve and in nearby Weldon, Sask., in September 2022. He had been serving a four-year sentence prior to the killings, but was released at the two-thirds mark of his sentence under what is called statutory release.
The Parole Board of Canada and Correctional Services Canada convened a joint board of investigation to look at their involvement with Sanderson and whether there were mistakes made in releasing him. Prior to releasing the report publicly Tuesday, the agencies provided it to families of survivors in both communities.
The board found nothing in his history indicating Sanderson, 32, would launch such a deadly rampage, beginning with killing his own brother.
“There were no pre-incident indicators or precipitating events known to Correctional Service Canada staff that would have suggested Sanderson would act out in the violent and destructive fashion that he did on September 4, 2022,” the report reads. “There was, however, significant information that Sanderson was at risk for both general acts of violence and acts of domestic violence, particularly if he was misusing substances.
(Sidebar: wait for it.)
Sanderson had a lengthy criminal record that included 46 convictions between 2008 and 2017. Most of the crimes were minor in nature, but there were more violent ones such as armed robbery, assaulting a police officer and assault with a weapon.
Also:
Exclusive:
— Mocha Bezirgan 🇨🇦 (@BezirganMocha) March 13, 2024
Pro-Khalistan Protesters Clash with Edmonton Police
Khalistan supporters, armed with daggers, swords, and spears, gathered in Edmonton, Alberta to protest against India's high commissioner to Canada.
Yesterday's protest lasted several hours with non-stop anti-India… pic.twitter.com/U1dn1ePOgN
ArriveCan is the new Ad-Scam/SNC-Lavalin/Aga Khan/India ... :
The Department of Public Works in a briefing note claims ArriveCan charges were “fair and reasonable” despite irregularities and multi-million dollar cost overruns. Anita Anand, the public works minister at the time of ArriveCan spending, earlier told reporters she was not to blame: “Did you know about any of this?”
Wow ... :
Canada’s auditor general recently fired and called in police to investigate two employees who had been privately earning money from government contracts they had not declared.
In a statement to National Post this week, the Office of the Auditor General (OAG) said it is still investigating a third employee that it also discovered had contracts with another arm of the federal government the employee had not disclosed to their employer.
The firings, which occurred between September and December last year, come to light as questions swirl about how a federal public servant’s company was able to obtain a nearly $8-million contract to work on the ArriveCan app.
It also indicates that no federal organization — including the biggest watchdog of government contracting who recently published a scathing report on ArriveCan — is immune from employees breaking the code of conduct, and potentially the law, by failing to report all secondary employment, particularly government contracts.
Ian Stedman, a York University assistant professor specializing in ethics in government, said it’s time for the government to start being more proactive in checking if public servants are respecting their employment codes, instead of relying on attestations signed by each bureaucrat.
For example, he said each department and agency could have a team whose job is to randomly pick certain public servants to be “audited,” which could include a review of their expense reports and verifying that they don’t have undeclared secondary sources of income.
Put these sites in gated white liberal communities.
Let them live with the consequences of their political leanings:
Drug users using miniature torches to light up in common areas. Graffitied walls bearing the scars of repeated damage. Men and women slumped in unnatural positions, surrounded by scattered food.
This was the scene captured inside a low-barrier East Vancouver shelter in a video published Sunday on the social media site X by U.S. activist Kevin Dahlgren. A former outreach worker based in Portland, Oregon, Dahlgren now advocates for the notion that existing approaches to homelessness primarily create dependency and serve to exacerbate the problem.
Dahlgren explained his philosophy in a column published by the New York Post: “We are loving the homeless to death … we will end this humanitarian crisis not with big budgets or unrealistic utopian fantasies but by empowering people to reach their fullest potential.”
Dahlgren’s social media channels are ordinarily filled with video interviews of Oregon homeless — many of them decrying a system that supplies food, tents and other materials to live on the streets, but offers few options to get clean.
Just last week, he featured a woman living in a trailer inside a tent encampment who told him that regular handouts of “supplies to make this sort of lifestyle possible … make it way too easy for people to become complacent and just keep doing this.”
But despite more than 20 years of moving among the tent encampments and skid rows of the U.S. West Coast, he reported that the Downtown Eastside was “the most chaotic street I have ever been on.”
“It felt like I was walking in hell,” he said in a statement to National Post.
In a caption accompanying the video – which has now garnered nearly two million views – he wrote “staff were nowhere. It was horrifying.”
“Easily the best example why the decriminalizing of drugs and poorly regulated safe injections sites is a bad idea,” he added.
Who could have seen this coming?:
The insolvent Saltwire Network newspaper chain, largest in Atlantic Canada, pocketed taxpayer subsidies while failing to pay its taxes, court records show. The CEO earlier testified the chain was “vital to our democracy.”
Pierre Poilievre's Conservatives are launching a full-court political press against the Trudeau Liberals' April 1 carbon price increase — and there's already a Liberal premier signing on.
Newfoundland and Labrador's Andrew Furey — an ally of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — added his voice Tuesday to Poilievre's demand the Liberals pause the planned increase, a request also made in the last week by Ontario's Doug Ford, P.E.I.'s Dennis King and New Brunswick's Blaine Higgs, all conservatives.They all argue going ahead with the scheduled increase to the levy asks too much of Canadians already feeling the pinch from higher living costs.
Oh, good!
Now do halal food!:
In a statement of claim filed earlier this week in Federal Court, the applicants seek to strike down new Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) rules requiring that non-stunned animals be subjected to cognitive tests to ensure they’re irreversibly unconscious before being processed.
No, Biden is not senile.
He is just whimsical and charming and decidedly forgets where he is all the time:
Special counsel Robert Hur testified on Tuesday that the White House attempted to pressure him into changing aspects of his report on President Biden’s mishandling of classified documents.
The revelation came during Hur’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, in which Rep. Tom Tiffany, R-Wis., probed the special counsel head about a Feb. 5 letter the White House Counsel sent to Hur days before his report became public. When Tiffany asked whether the White House requested he “change [the report’s] references to the president’s poor memory,” Hur confirmed the administration did, in fact, make such a request.
“There was a request, yes,” Hur said, contradicting claims issued earlier in the hearing by Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., who asserted Biden did not “seek to redact a single word of Mr. Hur’s report.”
Hur confirmed this during a prior exchange with committee chair and Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio.
“Did the White House try to weigh in with your investigation on elements of that report and frankly try to get that report changed,” Jordan asked, to which Hur replied, “They did request certain edits and changes to the draft report.”
At this point, everyone has seen Biden and his baffling behaviour.
One must ask why the Democrats persist with this fantasy that no one has guessed that he is senile.
If your dark horse is set for the glue factory, you probably shouldn't have bet on him in the first place.
Then there is the matter of classified documents:
Trump and his classified document charges were brought up repeatedly throughout the briefing by both parties, with Republicans using the situation to point out an alleged double standard while Democrats emphasized differences between the two cases.
Imagine sensitive documents getting into the wrong hands.
Someone owes Trump an apology:
Ariel Henry was a brilliant neurosurgeon and a man the United States, at least, was convinced would be a safe pair of hands to manage the chaos in Haiti after the shocking 2021 assassination of President Moise, shot several times at his residence allegedly by Colombian commandos.
But Henry, Haiti’s urbane, somewhat aloof 74-year-old prime minister, has — like almost all his predecessors — completely failed to improve the plight of the Caribbean nation’s 11.5 million people. Instead, he has overseen Haiti’s latest descent into anarchy.
Henry announced he would step down via video link during an emergency summit in Jamaica on Monday after mounting pressure from all sides: street gangs, the population, regional leaders and, crucially, the US State Department. …
In office, Henry promised to focus on improving the calamitous state of security in Haiti, which had been so vividly exposed by the assassination of Moise.
He has totally failed in that mission. Last year, more than 8,400 people were reported killed, injured or kidnapped, more than double the number reported in 2022. Half the population survives on international aid. Some 15,000 have been made homeless by the recent violence.
Gangs, who have been an ever-present reality in Haiti for decades, have begun to extend their power over a weakening state at a level not seen before.
Last week, nearly 30 police stations came under direct attack and many were destroyed. Thousands of prisoners escaped from the country’s two main prisons after they were stormed by heavily armed men in a co-ordinated attack.
Two formerly competing alliances of criminal groups, one led by the notorious former elite police officer Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier, have begun to work together against their common enemy: the state.
Cherizier — who has said his nickname derives from when his mother ran a chicken shop, rather than for a penchant for burning his enemies to death as his foes claim — has threatened to pursue hotel owners who hide politicians or collaborate with Henry.
China -
- is demanding that Japan compensate for releasing Fukushima water into the sea:
China has demanded Japan set up a compensation system for potential economic damage stemming from the release of treated radioactive wastewater from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant into the sea, diplomatic sources have said.
Japan has refused the demand, noting that the International Atomic Energy Agency has concluded that the water discharge is safe, but China is unlikely to retract it, the sources, who are familiar with bilateral relations, said Tuesday.
Senior Chinese officials presented the demand to Japan several times last year through diplomatic channels, the sources said. Beijing has imposed an import ban on all seafood products from its neighbor since the start of the water release in August 2023.
The two Asian countries have been at loggerheads over China's blanket import ban. Japan has urged China to lift the trade restriction soon, but Beijing has accused Tokyo of discharging "nuclear-contaminated water."
In July 2023 the IAEA submitted a report to Japan concluding that the Fukushima water release aligns with global safety standards and that the discharge would have a "negligible radiological impact on people and the environment."
China, however, has put emphasis on establishing a compensation framework as one of its "three major mechanisms" to deal with the water release issue, along with building its own monitoring system and engaging in dialogue with Japan, the sources said.
With regard to how to monitor the maritime environment, China has called for an "independent and effective long-term international monitoring arrangement," while Tokyo says it should be carried out through the IAEA.
One of the sources said China may have proposed the creation of the compensation system with the intention of gaining leverage in negotiations with Japan on the water discharge issue.
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