Quotulatiousness

June 29, 2012

Shikha Dalmia attempts to pull some lessons from the confusion of the Supreme Court’s Obamacare ruling

Filed under: Health, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:51

The biggest loser in this ruling may well have been the remains of the Supreme Court’s dignity. At Hit and Run, Shikha Dalmia pokes through the smoking ruins of the decision to try to make some sense out of it all:

One: We know a ruling is a going to lead to a holy legal mess when it begins like this:

    ROBERTS, C. J., announced the judgment of the Court and delivered the opinion of the Court with respect to Parts I, II, and III–C, in which GINSBURG, BREYER, SOTOMAYOR, and KAGAN, JJ., joined; an opinion with respect to Part IV, in which BREYER and KAGAN, JJ., joined; and an opinion with respect to Parts III–A, III–B, and III–D. GINSBURG, J., filed an opinion concurring in part, concurring in the judgment in part, and dissenting in part, in which SOTOMAYOR, J., joined, and in which BREYER and KAGAN, JJ., joined as to Parts I, II, III, and IV. SCALIA, KENNEDY, THOMAS, and ALITO, JJ., filed a dissenting opinion. THOMAS, J., filed a dissenting opinion.

Another instance where a ruling began this way was in the 1978 Bakke case. In it, Justice Powell could not convince a majority of his colleagues to sign off on his tortured claim that the University of California could not reject white candidates because of their race. But it could give blacks and other minorities extra bonus points because of their race. He was against racial quotas, you see, but thought racial preferences were just peachy — a distinction that his conservative and liberal justice had difficulty seeing. The upshot was multiple opinions with multiple dissents and multiple concurrences without any clear guidance as to which one was applicable. This has lead to 40 odd years of conflict and confusion in the lower courts that the Supreme Court is still trying to sort out

[. . .]

Three: No one should ever again believe that conservative justices are opposed to judicial activism, preferring, instead to read and apply the law as written, computer-like. Justice Scalia proved this in his ruling in the Raich case when he happily signed off on an expansive understanding of Uncle Sam’s Commerce Clause authority to nullify state medical marijuana laws duly passed by voters just because he happened to disagree with them. Had it not been for his misguided reasoning, ObamaCare’s constitutionality — or lack thereof — under the Commerce Clause would not have even been an issue.

But Scalia at least chose to exercise one of the two options presented to him: uphold or overrule the law as written. Justice Roberts, on the other hand, as many have already pointed out, has rewritten ObamaCare as per his taste. The law itself repeatedly noted that the fine for not purchasing health care was a penalty not a tax, a designation that Roberts accepts in order to determine if the court had standing to rule under the Anti-Injunction Clause (the Clause bars legal challenges to federal taxes before they have gone into effect). But he rejected that designation and redubbed the “penalty” a “tax” in declaring it constitutional.

Update: Ace gets a bit heated about the political switch of opinion on the part of the chief justice:

What galls me is that a majority of the public wanted this overturned — but we don’t count. What counts is the opinion of the elites Roberts socializes with. They are a decided minority, but continue imposing their political will on the nation as if they were a majority.

And the actual majority? The Little People don’t count. They don’t have the right schooling, nor the socialization to truly understand how to best manage their affairs.

I was just reading a bit about the making of The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly. Sergio Leone included a brutal Union prison camp; he noted that there was a lot written about the Confederates’ brutal prison camps (like Andersonville) but nothing about the Unions’ similar camps. The winners, he noted, don’t get written about that way.

Roberts has aligned himself with the elites, who he supposes will be the Winners, and will thus have the final say in the history books about him. And he’s probably right that they will have the final say: Conservatives simply do not have much sway at all in some of the most critical institutions in America. And we’ll continue paying a high price for that until we change that.

Update, the second: Mark Steyn, on the other hand, sings the praises of Obamacare, now that it has hurdled the Supreme Court:

Still, quibbling over whose pretzel argument is more ingeniously twisted — the government’s or the court’s — is to debate, in Samuel Johnson’s words, the precedence between a louse and a flea. I have great respect for George Will, but his assertion that the Supreme Court decision is a “huge victory” that will “help revive a venerable tradition” of “viewing congressional actions with a skeptical constitutional squint” and lead to a “sharpening” of “many Americans’ constitutional consciousness” is sufficiently delusional that one trusts mental health is not grounds for priority check-in at the death panel. Back in the real world, it is a melancholy fact that tens of millions of Americans are far more European in their view of government than the nation’s self-mythologizing would suggest. Indeed, citizens of many Continental countries now have more — what’s the word? — liberty in matters of health care than Americans. That’s to say, they have genuinely universal government systems alongside genuinely private-system alternatives. Only in America does “health” “care” “reform” begin with the hiring of 16,500 new IRS agents tasked with determining whether your insurance policy merits a fine. It is the perverse genius of Obamacare that it will kill off what’s left of a truly private health sector without leading to a truly universal system. However, it will be catastrophically unaffordable, hideously bureaucratic, and ever more coercive. So what’s not to like?

June 23, 2012

The Turing inquest verdict of suicide may not have been consistent with the evidence

Filed under: Britain, History, Law — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:46

Brilliant mathematician Alan Turing died in an apparent suicide after undergoing chemical castration, but the inquest seems to have rushed to a conclusion:

At a conference in Oxford on Saturday, Turing expert Prof Jack Copeland will question the evidence that was presented at the 1954 inquest.

He believes the evidence would not today be accepted as sufficient to establish a suicide verdict.

Indeed, he argues, Turing’s death may equally probably have been an accident.

[. . .]

The motive for suicide is easy to imagine. In 1952, after he had reported a petty burglary, Turing found himself being investigated for “acts of gross indecency” after he revealed he had had a male lover in his house.

Faced with the prospect of imprisonment, and perhaps with it the loss of the mathematics post he held at Manchester University, which gave him access to one of the world’s only computers, Turing accepted the alternative of “chemical castration” — hormone treatment that was supposed to suppress his sexual urges.

It is often repeated that the chemicals caused him to grow breasts, though Turing is only known to have mentioned this once.

[. . .]

In his authoritative biography, Andrew Hodges suggests that the experiment was a ruse to disguise suicide, a scenario Turing had apparently mentioned to a friend in the past.

But Jack Copeland argues the evidence should be taken at face value — that an accidental death is certainly consistent with all the currently known circumstances.

The problem, he complains, is that the investigation was conducted so poorly that even murder cannot be ruled out. An “open verdict”, recognising this degree of ignorance, would be his preferred position.

None of this excuses the treatment of Turing during his final years, says Prof Copeland.

June 21, 2012

Addressing society’s hypocrisy on drugs

Filed under: Britain, Health, Law, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:13

There’s apparently a call in Britain for the police to be given discretionary powers in certain cases where they could push civil rather than criminal penalties for drug offences. A better solution would be to fix the massive disconnect between the law and reality:

‘Ease drug penalties on the young,” a government adviser has urged. And of course, Professor Les Iversen, chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, is absolutely right. After all, if every young man who had dabbled with drugs had felt the fullest penalty of the law, then David Cameron would not be prime minister nor Barack Obama US president.

But in my view, Les Iversen doesn’t go nearly far enough. He talks of police being granted the discretion as to whether to press for civil rather than criminal penalties in certain drugs cases. This, however, is a fudge that doesn’t address the real issue. If our drugs laws are antiquated, expensive, inconsistent, socially damaging, draconian and counterproductive — and they are — then the solution is not to give the police more leeway to turn a blind eye. The solution is to change the laws.

[. . .]

What’s the thing I’m scared of most about my children and drugs? Not the drugs themselves, that’s for sure. The way we class drugs bears almost no relation to their relative degrees of harmfulness, as Professor David Nutt, the former government drugs adviser and Cambridge-educated neuropsychopharmacologist, made himself extremely unpopular by explaining. Alcohol and tobacco, Nutt infamously pointed out, are more dangerous than LSD; Ecstasy is safer than horse riding.

No, what worries me far more about my kids and drugs is the grubby illegality of that culture: the fact that whoever supplies them will, by definition, come from the criminal underworld; the fact that, there being no consumer protection or quality control, their drugs could be cut with any quantity of rubbish; the fact that they risk being imprisoned and having their futures blighted for the essentially victimless crime of seeking an altered state.

There are some authoritarian types, I know, who reading this will say: “And serve them bloody right!” It was a similar warped mentality that, at the height of Prohibition, led the US government to poison the nation’s supply of industrial alcohol (used to make moonshine) with a contaminant called Formula No 5. As Christopher Snowdon notes in his book The Art of Suppression, this resulted in as many as 10,000 needless deaths.

June 18, 2012

New proposal: HTTP Error Code 451 to indicated “content censored by authorities”

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:04

Kevin Fogarty at PC World looks at a new HTTP error code proposal:

A high-profile Google developer has proposed that the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) that it endorse a new HTTP Status Code to warn readers the page they’re looking for has been censored by authorities, according to TheVerge.

Tim Bray, who co-invented XML and works as Android Developer Advocate at Google, is submitting a proposal that pages censored by someone other than the owner of the site or of the user’s local network display the error code “451 Unavailable for Legal Reasons.”

The number in the code is a reference to Ray Bradbury’s “Farenheit 451,” which describes a dystopian future in which book burnings and the censorship of unacceptable material is routine. Google already highlights search terms that may return censored results, in some countries.

The wins and losses in the C-11 copyright reform bill

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:14

Michael Geist on the good and the bad aspects of bill C-11 which will probably pass third reading today in the House of Commons and be sent to the Senate for approval:

There is no sugar-coating the loss on digital locks. While other countries have been willing to stand up to U.S. pressure and adopt a more flexible approach, the government, led by Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore on the issue, was unwilling to compromise despite near-universal criticism of its approach. It appears that once Prime Minister Stephen Harper made the call for a DMCA-style approach in early May 2010, the digital lock issue was lost. The government heard that the bill will hurt IP enforcement, restrict access for the blind, disadvantage Canadian creators, and harm consumer rights. It received tens of thousands of comments from Canadians opposed to the approach and ran a full consultation in which digital locks were the leading concern. The NDP, Liberals, and Green Party proposed balanced amendments to the digital lock rules that were consistent with international requirements and would have maintained protection for companies that use them, but all were rejected. [. . .]

Since the Conservatives took power in 2006, there were effectively four bills: the Pre-Bill C-61 bill that was to have been introduced by Jim Prentice in December 2007 but was delayed following public pressure, Bill C-61 introduced in June 2008, and Bill C-32/C-11, which was introduced in June 2010 (and later reintroduced in September 2011). The contents of December 2007 bill was never released, but documents obtained under the Access to Information Act provide a good sense of what it contained (a call was even scheduled on the planned day of introduction between Prentice and U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins to assure the U.S. that digital locks were the key issue and would not be altered). This chart highlights many of the key issues and their progression over the years as the public became increasingly vocal on copyright:

Issue Pre-Bill
C-61 (2007) 		Bill C-61
(2008) 		Bill C-11
(2012)
Fair Dealing Expansion No No Yes (education, parody, satire)
Format Shifting No Limited (only photographs, book,
newspaper, periodical, or videocassette) 		Yes (technology neutral, no
limit on number of copies, includes network storage, and no reference
to contractual overrides)
Time Shifting No Limited (no network PVRs,
Internet communications) 		Yes (C-61 limitations removed)
Backup Copies No No Yes
User Generated Content Exception No No Yes
Statutory Damages Cap No Limited ($500 cap for
downloading) 		Yes (Max of $5000 for all
non-commercial infringement)
Enabler enforcement provision No No Yes
Internet Publicly Available
Materials Exception for Education 		Yes Yes Yes
Public Performance in Schools No No Yes
Technology Neutral Display
Exception in Schools 		No No Yes
Limited Distance Learning
Exception 		Yes Yes Yes
Limited Digital Inter-Library
Loans 		Yes Yes Yes
Notice-and-Notice Yes Yes Yes
Notice-and-Takedown No No No
Three Strikes//Website Blocking No No No
Internet Location Tool Provider
Safe Harbour 		Yes Yes Yes
Broadcaster Ephemeral Change No No Yes
Expanded Private Copying Levy No No No
Commissioned Photograph Change Yes Yes Yes
Alternate Format Reproduction No No Yes

[. . .]

Public engagement on copyright continuously grew in strength – from the Bulte battle in 2006 to the Facebook activism in 2007 to the immediate response to the 2008 bill to the 2009 copyright consultation to the 2010 response to Bill C-32. While many dismissed the role of digital activism on copyright, the reality is that it had a huge impact on the shape of Canadian copyright. The public voice influenced not only the contents of the bill, but the debate as well with digital locks the dominant topic of House of Commons debate and media coverage until the very end. Bill C-11 remains a “flawed but fixable” bill that the government refused to fix, but that it is a significantly better bill than seemed possible a few years ago owes much to the hundreds of thousands of Canadians that spoke out on copyright.

Legal pratfalls ensue

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:33

Scott H. Greenfield at the Simple Justice blog on how the legal equivalent of “two 12-year-olds rolling in the mud” morphed into a lawyer beclowning himself in an epic fashion:

But Matthew Inman, who does the Oatmeal, put the lawyer Charles Carreon’s letter demanding $20k on the web, with his own special touches, in a masterful response, one aspect of which was that rather than succumb to Carreon’s demand, he would raise some money for charity.

[. . .]

Three things to note: First, Carreon started suit in his own name, not that of his client, which suggest that this is for the wrong done him by the mean children of the internet. Second, he’s sued not only Inman, apparently for “incitement to cyber-vandalism,” but the Indiegogo, which handles charitable collections, as well as the two charities to whom Inman’s collection goes.

This is nuts. For a fellow who foolishly stepped in shit, he’s doubled quadrupled down. My guess is that he’s included the charities as stakeholders or beneficiaries of Inman’s actions, and wants the money collected to go to him rather than to fighting cancer or saving bears. He wants money collected to fight cancer to go to him instead. It’s unthinkable [that] anyone could do such a thing.

June 14, 2012

The Commerce Clause: how it evolved to empower government control of everything

Filed under: History, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:36

U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson ruled that because the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate to purchase health insurance is unconstitutional, the entire law “must be declared void.” Judge Vinson cites this Reason.tv video on page 47 of his decision.

What is at stake in the amendment process to the omnibus bill

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:02

As Andrew Coyne points out, if nothing else the stack of amendments the opposition have proposed does accomplish something (even if none of the amendments are accepted):

The House of Commons was to begin voting Wednesday night on several hundred amendments to Bill C-38, the 425-page monster known as the omnibus budget implementation bill. The voting was expected to go on all night and all day Thursday.

Viewed one way, the whole thing is quite silly. Given the government’s majority, none of the amendments is likely to pass, nor is the bill itself in any danger of defeat. Viewed another way, however, this is an important moment. For the first time since the last election, the opposition is putting up a serious fight against the abuses this government has visited upon Parliament: not only the omnibus bill, which repeals, amends or introduces more than 60 different pieces of legislation, but the repeated, almost routine curtailing of debate by means of “time allocation”; the failures of oversight, misstating of costs, and abdication of responsibility in the F-35 purchase; and the refusal to provide basic information on spending to Parliament or the Parliamentary Budget Officer — to say nothing of the stonewalling, prorogations and other indignities of the minority years.

What’s the point? Once, as in the famous “bell-ringing” episode of 1982, the point would have been to hold up parliamentary business until the government relented: not on the substance of the bill, which a duly elected government is entitled to pass, but on the principle that the bill should be split, that Parliament is entitled to vote on each of its several major parts separately, and to give each the kind of informed scrutiny and debate it warrants. Again, that is not only in the opposition’s interests, or even Parliament’s, but the nation’s: it makes for better legislation.

June 13, 2012

When is a bribe appropriate?

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Business, Law, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:59

The British government is trying to crack down on bribery, which on the surface seems like a good thing to do: but will it cripple British businesses in third world countries?

We used to draw a distinct line between what was acceptable business conduct here at home and what we did abroad with Johnny Foreigner.

Inviting Bertie from your major customer to Henley or the Derby, or waving Cup Final and Olympic tickets in his face was entirely acceptable. Slipping him £500 for an order was bribery and both illegal and immoral.

But what you did abroad was an entirely different matter: bribery was until very recently tax deductible.

[. . .]

This is of course very different from the system of old. Which was, essentially, that soft soaping someone with experiences and days out was just absolutely fine while any mention at all of cash was not just legally but also socially verboten.

At home, in Britain, that was. Having worked in some pretty odd and even rough places I’ve done my share of bribing people, but even so I would be profoundly shocked if I was asked for a bung in Blighty. But the system also most definitely facilitated the payment of bribes to Johnny Foreigner.

At one point, working in Russia, I needed to get cheap railway prices out of the Russian railroads to make the numbers on a metals shipment add up. The only way known to do this was to make a deal with the North Koreans who had special state-set prices on said railways. Which is how I found myself inside the N. Korean embassy in Moscow handing over $10,000 in crisp notes to their KGB-style guy after the successful conclusion of the shipment.

Yes, of course, it’s terribly naughty subverting the employees of a communist dictatorship, but the reaction here at home was the most interesting. When I made gentle enquiries to the taxman as to how I might account for this transaction, hinting gently at first, he finally pointed out that since I’d paid the bribe in a foreign currency to a foreign chap that was just fine. Just list it as a business expense and it was tax deductible.

June 12, 2012

Stop worrying about the approaching police state: it’s already here

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:18

I saw Twitter updates about this, but I assumed it was an Onion story that someone didn’t recognize as being from a parody news site. I was wrong:

The police state is not only here — it is being welcomed with open arms.

Exhibit A: In Aurora, Colorado, police searching for suspected bank robbers locked down an entire intersection, dragooned 40 random motorists out of their cars at gunpoint, handcuffed them and “asked” for permission to search their vehicles. [. . .]

Naturally, no one refused permission.

The action itself is startling: 40 people, guilty of nothing more than proximity, of being in the same general area where a suspected criminal might also be, are literally pulled from their vehicles, shackled and detained for more than two hours — even after it was obvious they were guilty of no crime at all.

Even more startling, however, than these over-the-top tactics is the fact that (apparently) every one of these 40 innocent people complied without a peep of protest. Not one said: “I’m sorry officer, but unless I’ve committed a crime I’d like to be free to go about my business.” Not one said, “I do not consent to any searches.”

None put up a fuss when the cuffs came out.

One woman interviewed by ABC News clucked happily: “Yeah, we all got cuffed (laugh) until they figured out who did what.” No doubt this woman will not object when a gang of armed men kicks in her door, invades her home and holds her family at gunpoint until they figure out who did what. After all, there are criminals about. They could be anywhere. Which means, anything is justified.

In the words of one ABC News blogger, “Sounds like the police did their job — and did it exceptionally well!” And another: “I think the police did a great job in an unusual circumstance and protected the people of the city from a dangerous criminal. Those people should praise the police, not sue them!”

It’s amazing that none of these people who were the victims of an insane amount of police overreaction seem to feel that the police did anything wrong. There must not be a civil liberty equivalent of the ambulance-chasing lawyer.

June 3, 2012

Quebec case may force common-law couples into marriage

Filed under: Cancon, Law — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:00

An interesting development in Quebec’s laws relating to common-law relationships:

Somewhere in North America, there is a place where little girls don’t give the slightest thought to what kind of wedding dress they’ll wear one day. A place where young men have never heard the expression: “why buy the cow when you can have the milk for free?” — because the milk is always free. A place where no one asks an unmarried couple expecting a baby if they’re getting hitched.

This place is the province of Quebec. The French language spoken here is no guarantee for romance. Couples are practical, and lovers treasure their individuality. Quebec has become one of the least marrying places in the world, thanks to the institution known as “de facto spouses.” But now, thanks to a bizarre legal case entangling a Quebec billionaire and his de facto spouse, the freedom to un-marry is under threat. More than 1 million Quebecois in this kind of relationship may soon be automatically married by the state, against their will.

De facto spouses are defined by Quebec’s law as two people who have been living together for a year or more without being married and who check the “couple” box on their income tax statement form. Quebec’s lawmakers have deliberately chosen not to give de facto couples the same rights and responsibilities that married couples have under the Law of Quebec, to preserve the freedom of choice. Upon the termination of a relationship, “no matter how long cohabitation has lasted, de facto spouses have no legal support obligation to each other, even if one spouse is in need and the other has a high income.” Quebec is the only province in Canada where spousal support payments are not recognized by law for de facto spouses.

May 31, 2012

Bush violated US constitution by authorizing drone strikes

Filed under: Government, Law, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:50

At Reason, Judge Andrew Napolitano on the presidential “kill list” and the limits of presidential power under the constitution:

The leader of the government regularly sits down with his senior generals and spies and advisers and reviews a list of the people they want him to authorize their agents to kill. They do this every Tuesday morning when the leader is in town. The leader once condemned any practice even close to this, but now relishes the killing because he has convinced himself that it is a sane and sterile way to keep his country safe and himself in power. The leader, who is running for re-election, even invited his campaign manager to join the group that decides whom to kill.

This is not from a work of fiction, and it is not describing a series of events in the Kremlin or Beijing or Pyongyang. It is a fair summary of a 6,000-word investigative report in The New York Times earlier this week about the White House of Barack Obama. Two Times journalists, Jo Becker and Scott Shane, painstakingly and chillingly reported that the former lecturer in constitutional law and liberal senator who railed against torture and Gitmo now weekly reviews a secret kill list, personally decides who should be killed and then dispatches killers all over the world — and some of his killers have killed Americans.

[. . .]

The president cannot lawfully order the killing of anyone, except according to the Constitution and federal law. Under the Constitution, he can only order killing using the military when the U.S. has been attacked, or when an attack is so imminent and certain that delay would cost innocent American lives, or in pursuit of a congressional declaration of war. Under federal law, he can only order killing using civilians when a person has been sentenced lawfully to death by a federal court and the jury verdict and the death sentence have been upheld on appeal. If he uses the military to kill, federal law requires public reports of its use to Congress and congressional approval after 180 days.

Penn Jillette: Obama’s War on Weed

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:45

May 30, 2012

Inter-provincial trade in wine comes a bit closer to legality

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Wine — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:13

Gloria Galloway in the Globe and Mail:

Private member’s bills rarely make it this far. But politicians of all stripes rose to echo Mr. Albas’s argument that an 80-year-old wrong needs to be made right.

It is an issue that he says he has been hearing about from his constituents — and from wine growers and lovers across Canada — since the election campaign that brought him to Ottawa for the first time last year.

“Every single winery owner that I have spoken with supports this legislation,” Mr. Albas said in an interview with The Globe and Mail, “especially the small family wineries whose production is so low that they can’t sell through the liquor control monopoly.”

As it stands, anyone who wants to send wine from one province to another for his own consumption must route it through a provincial or territorial liquor control board and must pay the associated taxes and markups.

If a tourist from Saskatchewan visits a winery in Ontario and likes what she is tasting, she is not legally permitted to take it home with her or mail a few bottles to herself. In fact, she could be thrown in prison for up to three months for doing so.

On the other hand, a tourist from Texas could visit the same winery and send crates of the stuff back to his home in Austin.

Update: Whoops. Not so fast … Colby Cosh just sent a twitter update that makes me sad:

Did the NDP really block the wine bill? Why is this occupying more than about 30 seconds of Parliament’s time?

Oh, that’s nice. Thanks, Mr. Mulcair. Good going: that’ll show those wine-swilling Tories who’s boss, won’t it?

Update, the second: Apparently the NDP’s over-enthusiastic supporters talked out the available time to prevent the bill being voted on. This is enough to kill it for this session. Nice, work socialist horde!

The bill would have been sent to the Senate and likely passed into law, if the NDP had agreed to collapse debate and send it to a vote.

Mr. Albas thought he had a deal to do just that because members from all sides of the House were enthusiastic about amending the Prohibition-era Importation of Intoxicating Liquors Act that bans wineries across the country from sending their product to another province.

But six NDP MPs were so enthusiastic about their support for the bill, they used up all the available time in an apparent filibuster and Mr. Albas will now have to wait until the fall before he gets a second hour of debate and the chance to go to a vote.

An NDP spokesman said it was an honest mistake. Really? How absent-minded of them. Perhaps they should eat more oily fish.

‘‘This is the stuff that turns most Canadians off politics. It was completely uncalled for,” said Mr. Albas. “I’m disappointed the NDP used petty procedural games, rather than supporting the B.C. and Canadian wine industry.”

Update, 8 June: Well, somehow the filibuster didn’t stop the bill after all:

Canadians will soon be allowed to transport wines across provincial borders after MPs from all parties voted to support a private member’s bill to end the decades-old prohibition. Bill C-311, from British Columbia Tory MP Dan Albas, passed by a vote of 287-0 during third reading in the House of Commons Wednesday. The bill would also allow Canadians to shop for wines online and ship them across borders. “The wine industry has had this thorn in their side for 84 years. It’s time to free the grapes,” Mr. Albas told reporters before the vote. Under the 1928 Importation of Intoxicating Liquors Act, transporting wines is punishable by a $200 fine or even jail time.

May 25, 2012

Ottawa assault and robbery victim spent 75 days behind bars after 911 call

Filed under: Cancon, Law — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:57

The Ottawa police have promised an investigation into this weird miscarriage of justice:

Ottawa police are investigating how an elderly victim of a vicious attack in his home ended up spending 75 days in jail after calling 911 for help.

Marian Andrzejewski, 74, called 911 after two men broke into his Ottawa apartment in October 2010, robbed him and punched him repeatedly.

But instead of getting help, Andrzejewski was scolded by the dispatcher when he struggled to communicate in broken English and ended up in handcuffs himself when police finally arrived.

H/T to Mike Brock for the link.

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