In light of Thursday’s Canada Day celebrations, pointing out that efforts to outlaw hurt feelings is now a regular part of this country’s modus operandi may make me a party-pooper. But waiting for another time won’t make the truth any easier to bear: From human rights commissions to hate crime laws to civil law suits, Canada has made an art of punishing otherwise perfectly legal behaviour simply because it happens to make someone feel bad. We’ve become a nation of petty grievance-hoarders and tip-toers terrified of offending.
The big problem with this state of affairs (besides how generally unbecoming it is)? It’s slowly making us a spiritless, brittle people. The ability to navigate the ups and downs of life — with a particular emphasis on the downs — is what fosters resilience and flexibility.
If you never have to face the consequences of getting cut from a team, or turned down for a job, or insulted by a heartless idiot, you never develop the sense of perspective (or sense of humour) that it takes to be a well-rounded and capable individual who has the confidence to handle defeat. That’s something parents have to teach their kids, and countries have to teach their citizens. Losing hurts, but you can’t expect mom and dad or a human rights commission to shield you from everything but sunshine and roses.
Marni Soupcoff, “Hockey dads need to grow up”, National Post, 2010-06-29
June 29, 2010
QotD: Canada’s ongoing self-esteem binge
Even though the G20 is over, the atmosphere remains
Mike Brock discovers that the hostile environment on the street hasn’t dissipated with the end of the formal protests:
I was sitting down on University Avenue, when a group of police officers approached me and said they wanted to talk to me. Stunned, I opened my mouth getting ready to reply to the request, when one of the officers at the top of his lungs yelled: “I DON’T GIVE A FUCK WHAT YOU THINK!”
Another officer said they didn’t want to hear about my rights.
They then proceeded to demand I remove the earphones from my ears, forcing me to get off the phone with my colleague. I told them I was on the phone to which another officer responded, “we don’t care.”
Then they said they wanted to search my bag, because I was “wearing a black shirt”. To which I replied, that I did not consent to any searches. I told them that I would not resist them, and that any search they conducted was under protest. They simply said, “we don’t care. We want to make sure you don’t have any bombs to kill us with.”
The protests may be over, but the malady lingers on. If this is the way the police are now treating members of the public, they appear to be letting off steam after the events of the weekend. If they were trying to prove the point of all the overwrought “OMFG!! We’re living in a POLICE STATE!!” posts on various blogs over the weekend, this is a pretty good way of doing it.
Update: StageLeft suspects that a complaint about police behaviour will get the standard boilerplate response:
Our investigation of our behaviour and conduct in case #xxxxx found that the police officers involved acted properly and in accordance with the law and standard police procedure… next case please.
June 26, 2010
G20 arrests not considered “major enough” to release details
Siri Agrell notes the inconsistency of Toronto police over the (32 at time of writing) arrests made around the G20 area:
When asked for details of the arrest of a deaf man at Friday night’s demonstration, Burrows [of the Integrated Security Unit] said he had neither a name or the charges.
“Very rarely do we ever release information unless it’s a major arrest, major charges, big investigation or something like that,” he said. “That’s our standard practice. This guy was arrested last night, there’s nothing major about it. we’d never put a release out about that.”
And yet, the police regularly release information about minor incidents, ranging from lost property to suspicious behaviour. Surely, the arrest of Toronto citizens exercising their right to protest during a major international event warrents some transparency?
Yet another example of the police taking advantage of the situation to expand their practical reach?
So teenagers sending sext messages, a lost urn and some guy trying to pick up Toronto women are worthy of police updates, but details of arrests made during the G20, when police have been given huge powers, aren’t worth releasing?
In a nutshell, yes.
What other “secret laws” did they pass?
Much noise and confusion over the discovery of a recently passed law allowing police to arrest anyone who fails to show ID within 5 metres of a “public work”. The law itself isn’t new, but the secret was the silent addition of the area of the G20 meetings as a “public work” for the definition of that law. Hijinks ensue:
Police are now able to jail anyone who refuses to furnish identification and submit to a search while within five metres of a designated security zone in downtown Toronto.
Critics reacted furiously to the new rules, which remained unpublicized until Thursday when a 32 year-old man was arrested in Toronto for refusing to show ID to police.
New Democrat MPP Peter Kormos said Friday the provincial Liberals created a “Kafka-esque” situation where people could be arrested for violating rules they didn’t know existed.
“This is very very repugnant stuff and should be troubling to everybody,” he said.
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) said it was “extremely concerned” that the new measures violate constitutional safeguards.
I’m not a fan of violent protests, but I don’t believe the police need this additional tool in order to arrest people who attempt to breach the barricades or attack other people: this is granting too much arbitrary power to police officers. The way the power was granted is even more disturbing . . . it shows that the government knew there’d be an outcry if they did it in the public view, so they arranged it so that nobody would know about it in time to do anything about it. Nice work, Ontario, got any other nasty legal surprises you want to spring on us?
Update, 29 June: According to a report in the National Post, the Ontario government denies that there was any such regulatory change and that no arrests were made using the authority of this act.
Texas conservatives want to take you back
Take you back to the middle of the last century, or even further:
Texas Republicans are a conservative lot. Still, it’s difficult to imagine mainstream GOP voters demanding their neighbors be jailed for engaging in a little hanky-panky behind closed doors.
Nevertheless, the state’s Republican party has voted on a platform by which their candidates will stand, and it includes the reinstatement of laws banning sodomy: otherwise known as oral and anal sex.
The party’s platform also seeks to make gay marriage a felony offense, which may be confusing to most given that the state does not sanction or recognize same sex marriages, meaning any such ceremony conducted does not bear the weight of law. Whether this means the GOP wants gay couples married in other states to be pursued through Texas as dangerous criminals, the party did not specify.
“We oppose the legalization of sodomy,” the platform states. “We demand that Congress exercise its authority granted by the U.S. Constitution to withhold jurisdiction from the federal courts from cases involving sodomy.”
Texas Republicans must be a much more sexually repressed bunch if all of this managed to pass muster with the party faithful. They also appear to be in an anti-immigrant frenzy, with measures custom-designed to alienate Spanish-speaking voters also passed as part of the platform.
June 24, 2010
Tempest in a wine glass
The most recent issue of OntarioWineReview included a snippet from an article originally published in Decanter on the outcome of a legal tussle between Reidel and Eisch over the term “breathable glass”:
Austrian glassmaker Riedel has declared victory in its lawsuit against its rival Eisch Glasskultur over false claims for breathable glass.
Riedel, Nachtmann and Spiegelau filed suit in Munich, Germany alleging that Eisch’s advertisement boasting ‘breathable glass’ constituted false advertising.
On 19 January the two parties agreed to settle after Eisch’s claim that its ‘breathable’ glasses were made using a secret process that ‘opens bouquet and aromas within 2 to 4 minutes’ was not supported in court.
The court ordered Eisch to cease claiming its glass is ‘Breathable’ or ‘Opens bouquet and aromas within 2 to 4 minutes’, or face penalties of up to €250,000, or imprisonment of up to six months for senior directors.
A few years ago, Elizabeth and I bought a set of the Eisch “breathable glass” wineglasses and actually tested them. I doubted the claim, as I couldn’t think of a way that glass could be altered to allow air to pass through that would not also change other characteristics like clarity. Later that evening, we sat down with our friend Brendan and tried to determine if there was any difference between the “breathable” and ordinary glasses.
It may just have been our willingness to believe, but we each thought the wine in the breathable glass was better than the same wine in an ordinary wine glass. That being said, we didn’t think the degree of improvement was enough to justify replacing all our Riedel glasses.
June 23, 2010
Bunch of “radical extremists”
Protest groups at the G20? No, the Heritage Minister’s sweeping characterization of the people and organizations opposed to the new copyright bill:
So when Moore warns about radical extremists opposing C-32, who is he speaking of? Who has criticized parts of the bill or called for reforms? A short list of those critical of the digital lock provisions in C-32 would include:
* Liberal MPs
* NDP MPs
* Bloc MPs
* Green Party
* Canadian Consumer Initiative
* Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada
* Canadian Association of University Teachers
* Canadian Federation of Students
* Canadian Library Association
* Business Coalition for Balanced Copyright
* Retail Council of Canada
* Canadian Bookseller Association
* Documentary Organization of Canada
While there are bound to be a few individual “radical extremists” in any organization, these particular groups aren’t known for their bomb-throwing agitator ways.
June 22, 2010
UK photographers might want to pick up this magazine
BoingBoing advises that the July issue of Amateur Photographer is doing something to assist innocent photographers who are still encountering police and rent-a-cop harassment in public spaces:
The UK Amateur Photographer magazine is giving away free lenscloths silk-screened with the Photographers’ Bill of Rights with its July issue. UK anti-terror legislation gave the police sweeping powers to harass photographers for shooting in public places, and to compound matters, tabloid-driven hysteria over paedophilia has seen many photographers accused to paedophilia for taking pictures of (for example) public busses and empty playgrounds.
Between the anti-terror laws, the anti-pedophilia panic in the newspapers, and the general busy-bodiness of security guards, photographers in the UK are being treated like criminals. More on the anti-harassment campaign here.
Sparkly legal shenanigans
As I indicated in a Twitter update yesterday, the nice folks at ThinkGeek received their best-ever cease and desist letter:
Recently we got the best-ever cease and desist letter. We’re no stranger to the genre, so what could possibly make this one stand out from the rest?
First, it’s 12 pages long and very well-researched (except on one point); it even includes screengrabs of the offending item from our site. And we know they’re not messing around because they invested in the best and brightest legal minds.
But what makes this cease and desist so very, very special is that it’s for a fake product we launched for April Fool’s day.
June 18, 2010
The final word on the Air India atrocity?
This National Post editorial summarizes the report on the bombing of Air India flight 182 twenty-five years ago:
Yesterday, former Supreme Court justice John Major delivered his report into the attack, and the bungled investigation that followed. It is a damning indictment of the performance of the police and the government which does not mince words in portraying officials as slow, disorganzied and curiously detached from the enormity of the attack, which killed all 329 passengers, most of them Canadians. The government was simply not prepared to deal with terrorism, he said, and the two major investigating forces — the RCMP and CSIS — became bogged down in turf wars, bureaucratic battles and alarming displays of investigative ineptitude.
It has long been argued that Canadians’ seeming indifference to the bombing derived from the fact most of the dead were of Indian background, a suspicion Mr. Major addressed directly. “I stress this is a Canadian atrocity,” he said. “For too long the greatest loss of Canadian lives at the hands of terrorists has somehow been relegated outside the Canadian consciousness.”
Prime Minister Stephen Harper met with relatives of some of the victims, calling the report a “damning indictment” and pledging to respond to Mr. Major’s call for compensation and an apology to the victims’ families.
Though it has been apparent for years that the police response to the tragedy was riddled with errors, the extent of the blundering as detailed in Mr. Major’s report is no less startling. While victims’ families clamoured for information and some form of justice against the killers, CSIS and the RCMP lost themselves in bureaucratic battles, treating one another more as rivals than as co-operative forces engaged in the same search for answers. Between them, he noted, there was ample intelligence to signal that Flight 182 was at high risk of being bombed by Sikh terrorists. Yet taken together, their performance at gathering, analysing and communicating information was “wholly deficient.
As I mentioned the other day, the RCMP has largely squandered their once sterling reputation, and Mr. Major’s report makes it clear that the rot has been long-established and festering. It’s up to the federal government to make some serious changes to save that organization — or to disband it and start over fresh. For historical reasons, I hope reform is possible, but I’m not betting on it.
The point that most Canadians didn’t see this atrocity clearly because the vast majority of the victims were of Indian origin is well made: Canadians, for all of our vaunted “multicultural values”, didn’t see all those innocent people as part of our nation. Racism isn’t pretty, especially for a country that pretends to be beyond such historical problems.
June 17, 2010
The RCMP: determined to shed that do-good reputation
Matt Gurney looks at the explicitly non-apologetic “apology” offered by the RCMP to the mother of Robert Dziekanski, and points out that the RCMP is its own worst enemy:
So, let’s get this straight. Four Mounties jump a confused, helpless man, who could have almost certainly been dealt with by a Polish-speaking translator and a few kind words, and they Taser him repeatedly, and he dies screaming and kicking. Then they confiscate the tape of the event, and an inquiry into the incident reveals appalling attempts by officers to provide false statements and generally whitewash the whole debacle. And the best the RCMP can muster up is to say, “Gee, that’s a shame. But we’re not really sorry.”
As soon as the tape of four Mounties repeatedly shocking a defenceless man became public, the Mounties should have realized they’d dug themselves an enormous hole and swiftly apologized for this tragedy. Instead, they circled the wagons and did their best to deny what was blindingly obvious — that their officers acted too fast, too violently and then refused to allow the medics who arrived soon after to properly treat a man who was dying before their eyes. It was callous and horrible and has badly shaken the faith millions of Canadians have in their police force, a force now known for corruption and institutional arrogance as much as they are for their iconic red uniforms.
That a high-ranked official such as Deputy Commissioner Bass would sit before a press conference and mouth words of sympathy and apology to the mother of a dead man whilst simultaneously assuring his colleagues that he doesn’t mean a word of it is disgusting and will only add to the calls for a total overhaul of the RCMP. It is a bitter irony that his make-believe apology was given, of all days, on April Fool’s Day. What will the next revelation in this unfolding farce be? Were his fingers crossed, too?
Update, 18 June: The report on this incident has been released, and while it stops short of calling the RCMP officers murderers, it does call the Tasering “unjustified”.
June 16, 2010
June 9, 2010
Glee as piracy central
Christina Mulligan points out that a popular mainstream TV show is not only encouraging illegal behaviour, it’s actually indulging in it:
The fictional high school chorus at the center of Fox’s Glee has a huge problem — nearly a million dollars in potential legal liability. For a show that regularly tackles thorny issues like teen pregnancy and alcohol abuse, it’s surprising that a million dollars worth of lawbreaking would go unmentioned. But it does, and week after week, those zany Glee kids rack up the potential to pay higher and higher fines.
In one recent episode, the AV Club helps cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester film a near-exact copy of Madonna’s Vogue music video (the real-life fine for copying Madonna’s original? up to $150,000). Just a few episodes later, a video of Sue dancing to Olivia Newton-John’s 1981 hit Physical is posted online (damages for recording the entirety of Physical on Sue’s camcorder: up to $300,000). And let’s not forget the glee club’s many mash-ups — songs created by mixing together two other musical pieces. Each mash-up is a “preparation of a derivative work” of the original two songs’ compositions — an action for which there is no compulsory license available, meaning (in plain English) that if the Glee kids were a real group of teenagers, they could not feasibly ask for — or hope to get — the copyright permissions they would need to make their songs, and their actions, legal under copyright law. Punishment for making each mash-up? Up to another $150,000 — times two.
I’ve never watched Glee, but I find this quite an amusing juxtaposition, as the corporate owners of Fox are among the loudest and most active copyright enforcement goons around.
June 8, 2010
Attention drivers: Ohio police can now just “estimate” your speed
. . . and then write you a ticket based on their estimate, no further proof needed:
Police don’t need radar to cite you for speeding.
The Ohio Supreme Court ruled this morning that an officer trained to estimate speed by sight doesn’t need an electronic gauge to catch speeders.
The 5-1 ruling was a defeat for 27-year-old Akron-area motorist Mark W. Jenney and speeders across the state. Jenney had challenged a visual speed estimate by a Copley police officer, but a trial court and the 9th District Court of Appeals upheld his conviction.
So, Ohio drivers, expect to see your state assess a lot more speeding tickets (a nice form of revenue for the depleted state coffers), now that the police have been given carte blanche. There’s little reason for them not to treat this as a newly imposed tax on drivers: no evidence is required, other than the officer’s estimate, and the court clearly isn’t too worried about the legal implications of this.
As Eric Moretti says:
Hey “Supreme Court Justices” why don’t you guys get this part of what laws are supposed to do through your thick skulls. It’s safe to say that officers might be trained to identify speeds, and they might even be great at it — but it blasts the notion of burden of proof being on the state out of the water. You didn’t just blast it out, you nuked that fish to dry land. There is no factual evidence when officers have the ability to do this, “I think you were going 120 mph.”
Where is the public recourse for police officers who abuse their abilities? We have to take an officer’s (the state) word that we committed a crime? Did you guys even go to law school?
June 3, 2010
Toronto Police tougher than the RCMP?
Kelly McParland notes that even though the RCMP have a lot of tough-guy things on their list of “will do”, there’s one thing Toronto Police will do that the RCMP won’t:
The RCMP will Taser an old lady at the drop of a hat.
They’ll Taser a guy in an airport because he’s holding a stapler and looks upset.
They’ll Taser the disabled.
They’ll Taser a 15-year-old girl in handcuffs.
They’ll Taser an 82-year-old heart patient in a hospital bed.
They’ll Taser someone who’s been hog-tied, pepper-sprayed, handcuffed and manacled.
They’ll Taser just about anything that can be Tasered. But they won’t use “sound cannons” in the middle of a city. Too risky.
Toronto police are buying four of the ear blasters for the G20 summit.
