Quotulatiousness

March 8, 2026

The comfortable illusions Canadians tell themselves about the criminal justice system

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

L. Wayne Mathison describes how far too many Canadians see crime in Canada and how their pleasant imaginings depart from reality:

Let’s talk about the fairy tale we keep telling ourselves about crime in this country.

If you listen to a certain very loud and very sheltered crowd, you would think our justice system is basically a giant vacuum cleaner wandering the streets accidentally sucking up innocent people who somehow tripped and fell into a robbery charge. Apparently every person behind bars is just a tragic first-timer who made one bad decision on a difficult Tuesday afternoon.

That story collapses the moment you look at the numbers.

Statistics Canada shows something much less romantic. Our prisons are not packed with unlucky amateurs. They are filled largely with repeat performers. If someone is standing in court for a property crime, there is about an 80 percent chance they have already been convicted of doing the exact same thing before. For a lot of these offenders, theft is not a moment of desperation. It is a routine. Court is not a moral reckoning. It is paperwork.

Breaking into garages, lifting bikes, stripping catalytic converters. That is not chaos. It is a job description. Getting caught is just an occupational hazard.

Meanwhile the public is told to take a deep breath, retreat into their “inner Stoic,” and accept that having your property stolen is just part of modern urban weather. File the police report. Replace the lock. Pretend the system is working. It takes real mental gymnastics to watch the same small group of chronic offenders rack up dozens of charges while experts patiently explain that we simply need more empathy.

Look at what happens when these people are actually caught. Most walk out with bail conditions that amount to a polite note asking them to please behave. Unsurprisingly, a huge chunk of new convictions in Canada are administration-of-justice offences. That means breaching bail, skipping court, ignoring probation. They break the rules almost immediately. The revolving door barely slows down.

We do not need some grand philosophical rewrite of the social contract to fix this. We just need to stop pretending the public cannot see what is happening. A very small group of highly active repeat offenders causes a huge share of the damage in our communities.

Until the justice system stops treating career criminals like lost lambs who simply wandered off the path, the rest of us will keep paying the bill.

January 4, 2026

Venezuela in the news

Filed under: Americas, Government, Law, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Tim Worstall explains that despite the usual suspects’ claims that “it’s all about the oil!”, it actually isn’t very much about the oil at all:

Trump taking — kidnapping, arresting, to taste — Maduro and his wife simply isn’t about the oil business. Please note, this also isn’t about whether it’s a good idea or not although I’ll admit to thinking that it’s way damn cool — getting in and out of hostile territory without, so far as we know right now, a single American casualty at all? Damn cool in that military sense.

This is about the shrieking we’re getting from the usual suspects — this is all about the oil! See! Ms. Raisin is one I’ve seen online already, there are those quoting that Counterpunch article with the idiot Michael Hudson and so on.

My point is solely and only about access to that oil.

So, travel back 10 to 15 years.

Venezuela’s Orinoco Belt oil is very “heavy”. Technically it is about viscosity but think about it as “thick”. It’s more like treacle than it is like a free flowing liquid. There are also issues with sulphur but leave that alone here. It is, in the technical parlance, “cheap shit”. So bad that it has to be mixed with much lighter (and usually “sweeter”, which means less sulphur) crude oil from different oil fields so you can pump it through a pipeline or get it into a tanker.

Venezuela used to have — still could have — fields of that light and sweet oil but they ran those fields — during and after Chavez — so badly that production fell over. So, they used to actually import US crude oil to then mix with that heavy crude so they could export. They also price petrol — gasoline — so low that they cannot possibly run refineries to make their own gasoline. So, they would import the US crude, mix it, export the blend to the US and then buy back the gasoline from those US Gulf Coast refineries. This was ridiculous, of course, but you know socialists with prices and economies.

It also meant that those US Gulf Coast refineries were adapted to use that Venezuela mix. You can change the mix a refinery uses but it’s potentially costly. The more the mix changes the more the cost rises. But the important thing to note is that the only refineries within cheap shipping distance that could use the Venezuela crude efficiently were those US Gulf Coast ones. Sure, they’d be pissed if they lost access to their supplies but they could be altered to work with other crude mixes. The reliance was much more of Venezuela upon the refineries than the refineries upon Venezuela — at least, the cost of adaptation to a change was lower for the refineries.

OK, so that was the old situation.

Over this past decade and a bit the US — under both Trump and Biden — has been saying, well, you know, we don’t think much of the Venezuelan Government. We also know the only money they get is from crude oil sales, so, if we refused to take that for those Gulf Coast refineries then we could screw with Maduro. Which is what happened — sanctions on Venezuelan oil exports which, most obviously, apply to people shipping into the US and so obeying US law.

Other people who do not, or don’t have to, obey US law haven’t, wholly, been abiding by those sanctions. OK. Maybe that’s all a good idea and maybe it isn’t — not my point here at all.

We should also note that the oil fields in Venezuela actually owned/managed by Chevron, a US company, have still been allowed to ship to the US and elsewhere under US law.

One more little fact. The US is now — as a result of fracking — a net oil exporter. This is also something done under Trump I, the lifting of the ban on crude oil exports. It can still be true that maybe buying in some Venezuelan oil — or Mexican, Canadian, whatever — meets either geographic or blend desires. We’d like some really heavy sludge, for example, or maybe Canadian oil works for Wyoming (not real examples, just ideas). But in terms of total oil production and usage the US produces more than it uses now. So any decision to import is about those marginal issues of location and blend, not urgent necessity for simple crude oil. Fracking works, d’ye see?

Shaded relief map of Venezuela, 1993 (via Wikimedia Commons)

On the other hand another bunch of the usual suspects are screaming about this as a violation of international law. ESR comments on the social media site formerly known as Twitter:

Since there’s a lot of screaming about the legality of black-bagging Nicolas Maduro going on, let’s talk about the game theory of international law.

Before I do that, though, I’m going to acknowledge that the Trump administration’s legal posture doesn’t even implicate international law significantly. Their theory is that Maduro stole an election, is not the legitimate head of state of Venezuela, and is a criminal drug-cartel leader; universal jurisdiction applies.

This is why a photograph of Maduro restrained by a soldier wearing a DEA patch was released.

I’m not here to state a position on whether that legal posture is valid; I want to instead outline a game theory of the “rules-based international order”, which people are complaining has been violated because the US black-bagged a head of state.

There are two different ways to establish a framework of governing law. Most people only understand one of them, which is the imposition of law by a ruler or coalition with force dominance. I’ll call this “unitary law”.

The other mechanism is mostly only understood by a handful of libertarians; it is law as a violence-minimizing equilibrium among a number of roughly equal agents playing an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game. In such settings, cooperation evolves naturally and doesn’t have to be handed down by a single ruler or coalition. I’ll call this “IPD law”.

“International law” is enforced by an uneasy combination of both mechanisms. This is more difficult to see than it should be because there’s also a lot of air and bullshit around “international law”, bullshit consisting mostly of wordcels trying to cast magic spells on people with guns.

The air and bullshit is why it’s common to say that international law is a mirage, or a fraud that only serves the interests of the strongest powers. This isn’t true: what is true is that if an international norm is not sustained by being a stable strategy in an IPD game, only force majeure by a dominant power or coalition can uphold it.

Here’s an example of a moral good that was established by unitary law of nations: the general abolition of chattel slavery, which happened because a dominant coalition of Western nations said “Fuck your sovereignty, we’re no longer tolerating this anywhere our militaries can reach.”

Here’s an example of a moral good that was accomplished by IPD law of nations: generally humane treatment of prisoners of war in armed conflicts. This didn’t develop because great powers unilaterally said “stop doing that”, it happened because even a great power at war with a minor one is exposed to effective tit-for-tat retaliation if it abuses POWs.

If you want to understand “international law”, you need to be able to disentangle three different things that claim to be international law: unitary law imposed by great powers, IPD law enforced by the threat of pain-inducing defections in an international tit-for-tat game, and wordcel bullshit.

The thing to bear in mind is just because there’s a lot of wordcel bullshit going around in “international law” doesn’t mean there isn’t a reality underneath.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer rushes to distance himself from Trump’s action, for fear that someone might possibly mistake him for a vertebrate:

Leave it to the Babylon Bee to find the appropriate framing for a news story:

Update, 6 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

December 31, 2025

Do you want tribalism? Because this is how you get tribalism

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, InfantryDort asks the key questions about where our “elites” are taking us:

What’s the point? No, tell me, what’s the point?

What’s the point of laws if judges reinterpret them until they protect everyone except the people who obey them?

What’s the point of defending a nation if the same system refuses to defend your family from criminals it imported on purpose?

What’s the point of paying taxes if they fund fraud, reward deception, and subsidize parallel systems that never owed this place loyalty?

What’s the point of working, building, serving, if your labor is redistributed to those who broke the rules to get here?

What’s the point of accountability if paperwork matters more than reality, and intent matters less than optics?

I’ll tell you what the point is. The point is that any human with a brain is going to retreat to whatever group rewards his values and sacrifice. If it isn’t the nation, it becomes the tribe. And when it becomes the tribe, this American experiment is over.

A warrior can endure hardship, loss, and some long odds. What he cannot endure is betrayal by design.

When a nation stops enforcing its boundaries, its laws, and its obligations to its own people, it doesn’t just lose control, IT BURNS THE VERY WILL REQUIRED TO DEFEND IT.

I want something to defend that I believe in. We all do. I take the oath deadly serious. But one begins to wonder after awhile if that makes for a patriot or a sucker.

If a Soldier can follow it and die in defense of his country, but on the other side of the coin, there is a politician who can spit on it and get rich while importing and funding pirates … it really makes one wonder: What’s it all for?

@POTUS we know what problems you face. It’s not lost on us. But we are running out of time sir.

One of the things that makes these kinds of scam viable in western culture is that we are high-trust cultures with default assumptions that most people are not trying to exploit kindness and charity. This breaks down quickly once you introduce enough people from low-trust and tribal cultures:

The fraudulent spending of taxpayer dollars we are seeing uncovered nationally all rotates around the essential goodness of the American people.

Daycare for children? Of course — we don’t want our children or parents to suffer because Mom has to work.

Foodbanks? We don’t want anyone to starve. Our nation is better than that.

Homeless shelters? Homelessness is a scourge upon the American dream. We’re better than that.

Home elder care? The generations before us deserve dignity and respect. How could anyone oppose that?

Deep down we are a charitable and giving nation unlike most others. That sense of goodness and charity has been hijacked and exploited by foreign predators for their own material gain.

We need to wise up and toughen up, and understand that not every siren song of charity is on the level, particularly when our tax dollars are involved.

(Also, this reality gives an added layer of meaning to the concept of “suicidal empathy”.)

Ian at The Bugscuffle Gazette explains that importing the third world means that you need to expect your culture will start becoming more like the third world:

It says something1 about he state of Legacy Media when a 20-something kid with an iPhone can do a better imitation of 60 Minutes than 60 Minutes can.

No, Gentle Readers, I am not — in any way — surprised that Somalian immigrants in Minnesota are happily committing fraud — remember, do, that I grew up in Africa.

One of the things that endear Americans — and Western Europeans in general — to me is the sheer naiveté displayed by same. The ability of the average American to remain convinced that the entire World is just like them is rather cute.2

Folks, fraud and bribery is the norm in the Third World. In tribal cultures fraud and bribery are not only the norm, but are the rule.

If the average American reader takes nothing else from this essay, please understand that fraud and bribery are not crimes in the Third World; that fraud and bribery are not only not crimes in tribal society, but they are expected, required, and a perfectly acceptable part of every day tribal life.

And Somalia is not only Third World, but it is excessively tribal.

So, I’m not really mad at the Somalis. You can’t get mad at a gopher for digging up your yard. Gophers got to dig, and tribal cultures got to tribal.

That by no means signals that I don’t think the fraudsters should be excused. Hell, no. Public trials, and if found guilty — maximum sentences. Those lacking in U.S. citizenship, once the full prison sentence is completed, loaded onto a C-5 Galaxy and bodily pitched off of the ramp onto a random Somalian airport tarmac.3

What has stoked my ire is the fact that the Somalis used one of the most heavily-regulated industries to commit their fraud — that should have everyone up in arms.

Childcare is the responsibility of at least one Minnesota State agency — probably more — and will have mandated State-level inspections and audits.

Let me re-state that: Minnesota government employees would be legally-required and paid to walk their happy little arses into those businesses and use their Mk1 Mod 0 Eyeballs to look around at least once a year. If you were an inspector for whichever Minnesota agency(ies) regulates child care facilities, and you never filed a “Hey, something ain’t right” report, it’s time for a Come-To-Jesus Meeting in a brightly-lit room with humour-impaired law enforcement types.

If nothing else, the fact that one of these allegedly fraudulent pre-schools not only mis-spelled “Learning” as “Learing”, but mis-spelled the name of the street in the publicly-posted address should have been a red flag to someone.4

This sheer dollar amount of fraud, over this amount of time, and using this many separate corporate entities means that multiple people in the Minnesota State government knew something stunk to high heaven.

Minnesota government employees who knew of this fraud need to do the maximum allowed felony time.

  1. Not, you know, anything good.
  2. The ability of the average American leader — who is supposed to know better — to do the same is aggravating and dangerous.
  3. Bringing the aeroplane to a full stop during this process not absolutely required.
  4. Us cynical retired law enforcement types call this a “clue”.

December 15, 2025

Clankers on the bench, again

Filed under: Britain, Law, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On Substack, Helen Dale discusses the most recent high profile case of clanker mis-use in the justice system, as Scottish Employment Judge Sandy Kemp clearly leaned far too heavily on ChatGPT or another AI instance to crank out 312 pages of dubious content:

Grok generated this in response to the request for “Robbie the Robot as a judge”

Maybe Judge Kemp only identifies as a judge, because the farrago of nonsense he’s managed to produce in the Peggie matter is, well, a sight to behold.

Industry news/gossip magazine Roll on Friday — otherwise known as the “orange time-suck” among City solicitors — has a handy run-down of the most egregious fake quotations, selective editing, and incorrect citations. It’s a concise one-stop-shop for Peggie errors, although they’ve already had to add to it since it was published yesterday.

The situation is far more serious than the single — and that was bad enough — fake quotation from Forstater, since corrected by means of what lawyers call “the slip rule”. Notably, the corrected quotation does not support the point Judge Kemp wanted to make, rendering the passage nonsensical.

The slip rule or procedure — something many of us have seen in practice — exists to fix typos, wrong page/paragraph numbers, misspellings. One common error I remember from my pupillage days is fat-fingered judges leaving the “o” out of county in “County Court”, which of course litters the judgment with “Cunty Court”. Yes, everyone laughs and says “typo”, but things like this do have to be fixed.

The Roll on Friday piece notes that the Peggie opinion presents “a summary as if it was a quote from a judgment”, something that “appears to be a recurring issue”. This, as most people know by now, is a hallmark of AI.

I can’t prove that Judge Kemp used ChatGPT or Grok or a bespoke AI made available through the Judicial Office, although my suspicions are strong on this point. As an associate back in the oughts (a special kind of pupil barrister who works for a judge in a superior state or federal court in Australia), I’ve drafted multiple legal judgments. I have a good idea about what goes into them.

I also don’t know if Judge Kemp is on the transactivist side of this particular debate. I do know, however, that the judgment is dreadfully written and full of woolly reasoning, and — as other people have pointed out — all the errors tend in one direction.

I’m now going to set out what I think has happened, with the caveat that I could be wrong — something no-one will know until the appeal is heard and an opinion handed down.

December 1, 2025

If they’re behind bars, they can’t easily re-offend

Filed under: Government, Law, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In City Journal, Tal Fortgang makes the case for keeping repeat offenders in prison (which used to be the norm) rather than allowing the small minority of violent criminals to rejoin society ever more easily and more speedily:

Approaching the dock at Alcatraz on a foggy January afternoon, 1991.
Photo by Nicholas Russon

It’s fashionable to blame America’s high incarceration rates on social injustice — and law enforcement — rather than lawbreaking. If policymakers would just provide disadvantaged people with sufficient resources and economic opportunity, on this view, the crime problem could be solved. That utopian vision gained traction during the mad summer of 2020, when activists, rioters, and the mainstream press, reacting to the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, sought to replace law enforcement with programs that target the root causes of antisocial behavior. “As a society,” wrote activist Mariame Kaba in the New York Times, “we have been so indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm”.

The truth is otherwise. As Hyland’s case exemplified, violent crime is overwhelmingly the work of a small group of repeat offenders — that is, it is highly concentrated. The remedy, as [political scientist James Q.] Wilson argued half a century ago in his classic book Thinking About Crime, is not social engineering but incapacitation: keeping the violent few from striking again.

Most people are not teetering on the edge of felony, waiting to become, in the Left’s favored euphemism, a “justice-impacted individual”. The overwhelming majority of Americans never engage in serious criminal behavior, let alone commit violent felonies like murder or armed robbery. But those who do are likely to do so again, the evidence shows. Indeed, crime’s concentration is one of the most well-established findings in social science. In 1972, University of Pennsylvania criminologist Marvin Wolfgang reported that just 6 percent of males in a birth cohort accounted for 52 percent of all police contacts. (Violent crime, in particular, is overwhelmingly committed by young males.) Thirty years later, a similar study in Boston found that 3 percent of males were responsible for more than half of their cohort’s arrests after age 31.

The pattern holds across time and place. In 2014, data showed that three-quarters of state prisoners — the core of America’s incarcerated population — had at least five prior arrests. Nearly 5 percent had 31 or more, a larger share than those imprisoned after just a single arrest. In 2022, the New York Times reported that “nearly a third of all shoplifting arrests in New York City … involved just 327 people,” or 0.004 percent of the population, who had been “arrested and rearrested more than 6,000 times”. And in Oakland, a gun-violence-prevention group found that about 400 individuals — 0.1 percent of the city — were responsible for most of the city’s homicides. Violence is concentrated geographically as well. It occurs primarily in poor minority neighborhoods, whose members make up most of its victims.

These figures may even understate how concentrated antisocial behavior is. Wolfgang found that the offending minority committed dozens of crimes for every one that led to arrest. Fifty years later, a similar study reported that delinquent youth “self-reported over 25 delinquent offenses for every one police contact … with some youth reporting upwards of 290 delinquent offenses per police contact or arrest”. Combined with the fact that more than 60 percent of violent crimes reported each year go unsolved, the implication is clear: by the time a violent offender ends up in prison, he has likely committed multiple violent acts and many lesser offenses. Again, these patterns are most common among young men “who exhibited more psychopathic features”, the 2022 study’s authors noted, and “who displayed temperamental profiles characterized by low effortful control and high negative emotionality”. As a massive study from Sweden concludes: “The majority of violent crimes are perpetrated by a small number of persistent violent offenders, typically males, characterized by early onset of violent criminality, substance abuse, personality disorders, and nonviolent criminality”.

Update, 2 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

October 29, 2025

Clankers on the bench

Filed under: Australia, Law, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The cynic in me wonders if having AI judges would make the justice system any worse, given the ever-increasing pro-criminal bias on display in courtrooms across North America and Europe:

Grok generated this in response to my request for “Robbie the Robot as a judge”

It’s the question rattling through chambers and law schools. Are we in danger of a world where the solemn business of justice, liberty, livelihood, and who really owns the back fence is entrusted not to a human in robes but to a chirpy algorithm with a software bug and a 4,000-word disclaimer? Are we handing over judgment itself to machines, or simply giving them the photocopying and hoping they don’t start offering opinions?

Because, depending on whom you ask, AI in law is either (a) the long-delayed democratization of justice for ordinary people or (b) the first act of a constitutional farce in which courts drown beneath PDFs full of nonsense and fake footnotes.

The Machinery Arrives

Beneath the wood paneling and the reassuring thump of legal pomposity, something mildly heretical is afoot. Judges, clerks, and barristers — those high priests of precedent — are quietly feeding their briefs to generative AI, which now whirs away in the background, summarizing, drafting, and rummaging through case law while its human overlords wrestle with the biscuit tin and their consciences.

According to the Judicial Commission of New South Wales (NSW), the robots are already in the building. Their latest handbook cheerfully notes that AI is used for legal analytics, mass document review, “natural language” searching, and predictive modeling — all of which sound terribly sophisticated until you realize they’re essentially Excel spreadsheets with delusions of grandeur. A UNESCO survey adds the clincher: nearly half the world’s judges, prosecutors, and court staff have used generative AI for work, and only 9 percent have had what’s politely called safe-usage training. This is training where someone explains that you shouldn’t upload confidential evidence to a chatbot that lives in the cloud or take legal advice from a program that thinks Brown v. Board of Education was a musical.

The Law Society of NSW, in a rare fit of clairvoyance back in 2016, created something called the Future Committee — the sort of name that already sounds like a sci-fi tribunal convened to ban fun. Their brief was to consider what might happen when clients demanded more for less, junior lawyers were burnt to a crisp, and artificial intelligence started politely asking, “Shall I draft that for you?” The conclusion was simple: adapt or be eaten.

Meanwhile, in London, the Law Society of England and Wales skipped the warm-up act and went straight to the apocalypse. Its 2021 report, Images of the Future Worlds Facing the Legal Profession 2020–2030, envisioned a legal world in which routine advice would be swallowed whole by AI portals, full-time lawyers would be reduced to an endangered species, and the survivors would work alongside AI and be mandated to take “performance-enhancing medication in order to optimise their own productivity and effectiveness.” The whole thing reads like 1984 rewritten by a management consultant — right down to the faint violin of self-pity playing somewhere in the distance.

Oh, but those were in Australia and the UK, it’s not that bad in North America, surely? Uh, well …

Across the Atlantic, the award for Legal Farce of the Century goes to Mata v. Avianca, Inc. (S.D.N.Y. 2023). In this modern masterpiece of professional self-immolation, a team of lawyers filed court papers quoting three magnificent precedents: Varghese v. China Southern Airlines, Martinez v. Delta, and Zicherman v. Korean Air Lines. Unfortunately, none of them existed — not in Westlaw, not in Lexis, not even in the fever dreams of law students. When the judge asked, quite reasonably, to see the cases, counsel could only offer the look of people discovering gravity for the first time. Sanctions followed under Rule 11 for what the court delicately called “subjective bad faith”, which is American for “you made this up”. The ruling is now shown at continuing-education sessions under the optimistic title Let’s Not Do That Again.

The sequel writes itself:

  • Massachusetts: A lawyer submitted memoranda stuffed with phantom cases, blamed “the office AI”, and was fined. The judge, channeling divine exasperation, warned that blind acceptance of AI-generated content is not a defense — it’s a lifestyle choice.
  • Alabama: Attorneys for the state prison system filed citations to imaginary authorities and were sentenced to the most humiliating punishment known to the bar: writing apology letters to their law school deans and delivering public lectures on ethics.
  • California: One overzealous litigator managed to produce a brief in which twenty-one of twenty-three authorities were pure fiction. The court fined him, the press dined out on it, and AI-compliance seminars across America gained a new slide.

Thus, the first commandment of the digital age is: the robot may write it, but the Submit button still belongs to a human — and the human still gets to explain it to the judge.

October 12, 2025

Restricting activism from the bench

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:05

As we’ve seen far too many times in Canadian courts, when judges become politically active, they can produce far worse situations than the politicians who cynics might say are specialists in that discipline. British judges, however, are still well ahead of their Canadian counterparts:

Until judges are replaced by robots, we will have to accept the reality of activist judges. Even the most august patriarch of the bench cannot wholly escape his innate human biases. And so perhaps there was something in Robert Jenrick’s speech at this week’s Conservative Party Conference, in which he announced that, if elected, the Tories would empower the Lord Chancellor to appoint judges and more carefully scrutinise their political activities.

Those who have supported the ideological capture of our major institutions were understandably furious. The New Statesman claimed that Jenrick had “declared war on the judiciary”. But then, the New Statesman is an activist publication which can make no serious claim to impartiality or sound journalistic standards. (Those in any doubt about its mendacity should take the time to read about its shameful treatment of Roger Scruton.)

The problem of an activist judiciary is currently preoccupying the White House, given that a number of federal judges have attempted to block executive policies or have issued nationwide injunctions. Trump himself was convicted on thirty-four felony counts by a judge who had made small political donations to Democratic-aligned causes. It seems clear that given these circumstances he ought to have recused himself. The entire case, of course, was an example of the law being twisted for politically partisan ends. (The best overview is by the senior legal analyst for CNN, Elie Honig, which can be read here.) Little wonder that Trump now appears to be seeking revenge through the courts.

In the UK, there have been a number of revelations of judges tied to political causes whose claim to impartiality seems shaky at best. During his speech, Jenrick spoke of those judges who have been associated with pro-immigration campaign groups and have “spent their whole careers fighting to keep illegal migrants in this country”. Many commentators have observed a generalised bias toward asylum applications, sometimes to an absurd extent. Who could possibly forget the Albanian criminal whose deportation was halted by an immigration tribunal on the grounds that his ten-year-old son did not like foreign chicken nuggets?

Leaving such outliers aside, most of us will have noticed patently ideological remarks occasionally uttered by judges during sentencing. In the Lucy Connolly case, the judge explicitly expressed his support for the creed of DEI before sentencing her to 31 months in prison for an offensive and hastily deleted post on social media. “It is a strength of our society that it is both diverse and inclusive”, he said. It couldn’t be much clearer than that.

That lawfare has become a major weapon in the settling of political disputes should trouble us all. Judges are not accountable to the electorate, and so any suggestion that they are exercising power for their own political ends is bound to be interpreted as a threat to democracy. Inevitably, Jenrick’s criticism of activist judges, and his call for them to be removed, has led to some commentators assuming that he would prefer judges who simply acted according to the government’s bidding. That way lies tyranny.

October 11, 2025

Crossing the line between “justice” and “persecution”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At The Intrepid Viking, Roxanne Halverson notes just how determined the Canadian justice system was to inflict the most pre-trial punishment as possible on Tamara Lich and Chris Barber for their leadership role in the Freedom Convoy:

Tamara Lich and Chris Barber
Photos from The Intrepid Viking

The convoy leaders, Lich and Barber, […] finally learned their fate in an Ottawa courtroom on October 7th, 2025, almost four years since the trucks first rolled into the capital, and over two years since their trial began on September 5, 2023. Rather than the unwarranted and what can only be described as vindictive prison terms sought by the Crown, Justice Heather Perkins-McVey instead sentenced them both to conditional non-custodial sentences of 18 months. A decision, one can be sure, the Crown is not pleased with and one that is nothing short of humiliating given it falls farther short from the seven and eight year terms they argued for than they could have possibly imagined.

[…]

But Lich and Barber have indeed suffered. Both have been put through the legal grist mill of what now serves as Canada’s justice system since they day they were put into handcuffs and arrested on February 17/18, 2022. Barber was released on a bail bond of $100,000 after a night in jail with his wife acting as surety, meaning she would forfeit that amount if he breached his bail conditions. Under those conditions he was required to leave Ottawa within 24 hours of his release and depart Ontario in 72 hours, no longer support the Freedom Convoy and cease contact with fellow organizers. Breach of these conditions could also have landed him back in jail. His business and personal finances were also frozen for three months as part of the government’s illegal actions under the Emergencies Act. And now, to further try and impair and punish him financially the Crown prosecutors on this case are still attempting to seize and destroy his truck and livelihood, Big Red, which became a symbol of the Freedom Convoy. That matter is expected to be settled by Justice Perkins-McVey in court in November of 2025.

Lich, after her arrest spent a total of 49 days in jail before she was even convicted of any offence. Denied bail after her initial arrest in February, she spent 19 days in remand custody in an Ottawa jail because a judge deemed it was “necessary for the protection and safety of the public“. She was finally released on March 7, 2022 after an Ontario Superior Court Justice overturned the lower court’s outlandish ruling.

The vindictive nature of the first Crown prosecutor on their case, Moiz Karimjee, soon came to light when Lich was announced the winner of the George Jonas Freedom Award in May of 2022. He petitioned to have her bail revoked, arguing that being a recipient of the award was a breach of her bail conditions. Justice Kevin Phillips disagreed and amended provisions of her bail to allow her to attend the award dinner in Toronto, but still prohibited her from communicating with “certain” individuals at the dinner unless in the presence of legal counsel.

Karimjee, seemingly obsessed with seeing her back in jail, accused Lich of another alleged bail breach after she attended the award dinner when video evidence later surfaced of her having a brief congratulatory interaction with Tom Marazzo a Freedom Convoy organizer she was prohibited from interacting with. As a result, on June 27 Karimjee dispatched two Ottawa homicide detectives, yes homicide detectives, to her home in Medicine Hat to put the diminutive grandmother in shackles and fly her back to Ottawa and throw her back in jail. She was finally released following another bail hearing, in which Karimjee made every effort to keep her behind bars, but justice prevailed and she was released from custody on July 27, 2022.

Lich’s lawyer Lawrence Greenspon was highly critical of Karimjee’s actions stating, “This is the third time the crown has tried to incarcerate Ms. Lich, this time for a three-second interaction, and a photo. The prosecutorial response to this far exceeds the severity of the alleged breach“. Further remarking on the situation, Greenspon added, “Had there been a proper investigation before Tamara Lich was arrested, shackled, hauled halfway across the country and then kept in jail for 30 days, they would have realized that her then-counsel were present at the time and therefore these charges should never have been laid“.

And like Barber, and many other convoy protesters, Lich’s bank accounts were also frozen by the government under the Emergencies Act for a period of three weeks.

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Eve Chipiuk posted:

Read it and weep, snowflakes. The lies are exposed, the facts don’t lie, and people across the world can see the truth.

The question remains: when will you stop lying to yourself and others, and start thanking your fellow citizens for fighting for your freedom?

“Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, organizers of the most successful protest in Canadian history, kept their cool, kept the peace and brought national unity, patriotism and common sense back to Canada after the pandemic – this, despite the sustained efforts of the most aggressively controlling, divisive government the nation has ever had. They achieved this under intense pressure and at great personal cost.

They’re national heroes, and the persecution waged against them is destroying trust in the Canadian judicial system, though the judge involved does not seem to realize it. Justice Perkins-McVey said in court that if she discharged the defendants, it would “undermine confidence in the administration of justice”.

But it’s quite the opposite …

There was another ironic moment at the sentencing. The judge announced, “Politics has no place inside this courtroom” – yet the trial has been widely viewed as nothing more than the political vengeance of Doug Ford and the Ontario government.

If it weren’t for politics, Lich and Barber would never have been arrested, let alone put through jail time, solitary confinement, loss of employment, years of drawn-out, costly legal proceedings, onerous bail conditions and emotional strain …

This means the public is paying twice – once as taxpayers, with money intended to pursue real criminals wasted on a political vendetta – and once again, voluntarily, to support the brave people who stood up to ask for an end to lockdowns and vaccine mandates.

This is the same public that already gave $24 million to the truckers to help them go to Ottawa and protest vaccine mandates and lockdowns: $24 million that never reached them, because politicians colluded with fundraising sites and banks to freeze the money, debank the protestors and doxx the donors, all without a court order. No criminal charges have been laid in Canada, to this writer’s knowledge, against the perpetrators of these deeds, though they damaged national institutions far more than any protest ever could.

Justice Perkins-McVey is right to be concerned about confidence in the administration of justice. Many Canadians share her concern. Sadly, her handling of this case has done little to dispel their fears.”

October 8, 2025

Sentenced for their role in the largest peaceful demonstration in Canadian history

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The longest “mischief” trial in Canadian history finally concluded on Tuesday with Chris Barber and Tamara Lich receiving much lighter sentences than the crown had asked for, but in my opinion, far harsher than justice demanded:

One of the readers at Small Dead Animals got a clanker to summarize this: “Regarding the convictions of Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, compare their trials and sentences to leftwing protesters who have openly and violently broken laws in Canada.”

In comparison, left-wing protesters in Canada involved in violent or disruptive actions — such as anti-pipeline blockades (often tied to environmental and Indigenous rights causes) or Black Lives Matter (BLM) demonstrations against racism and police violence — have typically faced shorter trials and lighter sentences for similar or more destructive offenses. These cases often involve civil disobedience escalating to property damage, blockades, or clashes with police, but convictions emphasize non-violent intent or police misconduct, leading to minimal incarceration.

Overall, Lich and Barber’s cases drew unusually aggressive prosecution (e.g., multi-year sentences sought) despite no violence, contrasting with lighter outcomes for left-wing actions involving property destruction or direct confrontations. This disparity has fueled debates on selective enforcement, though courts in both contexts prioritize deterrence while considering protest motivations.

Unlike a lot of clanker slop, that is pretty fair. More reactions on the social media site formerly known as Twitter:

In the Toronto Sun, Joe Warmington accurately calls it a “show trial of sorts”:

Even though this is far better than making these two go to prison or jail, these are still stiff sentencing considering neither were violent during the Convoy and both worked with police to tone things down during the three week protest that came to an end when the Trudeau government invoked the Emergencies Act.

But this was a show trial of sorts, and Lich and Barber were political prisoners. Remember, both of these people have had the hardship of waiting 1,328 days through the longest mischief trial in Canadian history to get to this point. They had their bank accounts frozen during the convoy, Lich lost her job and Barber’s business is at risk of going under. A hearing is scheduled for next month in an effort to seize his famous “Big Red” truck.

It’s also lost on few that so many criminals with far more serious crimes have received far less in terms of length of trial, effort of the Crown and sentencing.

These are certainly stiffer sentences than some parliamentarians have received. For example, in 2021, Former Liberal Kitchener South-Hespeler MP Marwan Tabbara was handed a conditional discharge and put on probation for three years after his guilty plea was entered for two charges of assault on a man and a woman in Guelph. He also pleaded guilty to the amended charge of “unlawfully” being “in a dwelling” or home.

Conservative Sen. Patrick Brazeau was given an absolute discharge in 2015 on his guilty plea to assault and narcotics counts, which allowed him not to serve time or gain a criminal record. But while they did avoid jail time, Lich and Barber did get the book thrown at them harder than most.

Update, 9 October: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

August 19, 2025

Bad laws in Canada must be challenged in court

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Rigid Thinking, Damian Penny says — and I wholeheartedly agree — that it’s a good thing for laws to be challenged in the courts, but especially when it’s called an “emergency”:

[Retired Canadian veteran Jeff] Evely, with the help of some conservative/libertarian-ish legal organizations, plans to challenge the woods ban in court as a violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This is not a popular position here in Nova Scotia (in online discussions, the phrases “Maple MAGA” and the venerable “American-style” come up a lot) and I am not sure he’ll be successful.

But, honestly, I give him credit for trying. In fact, I’d argue his Charter challenge is win-win for everyone in Nova Scotia, whether one supports, opposes or remains indifferent to the policy.

That’s not despite the pressing emergency posed by the forest fire threat, but because of it.

When we’re faced with a crisis, that’s precisely when governments are tempted to seize as much power and authority as possible – and, more importantly, when the public is more inclined to go along with it.

Hence, Trudeau I imposing War Measures Act provisions during the 1970 October crisis, the PATRIOT Act debate after 9/11, COVID-19 restrictions during the pandemic, Trudeau II using the Emergencies Act when the “Freedom Convoy” set up shop in downtown Ottawa, and now Premier Houston (whom I support, despite some misgivings about this issue) using sweeping measures to tramp down the forest fire risk.

And sometimes such powers are justified under the circumstances. Even self-professed libertarians will admit as such when the emergency is something they’re personally worried about, and when a leader from the “good” team is in power.1

But they aren’t always justified. And governments definitely can’t be trusted to handle such power responsibly the longer the “emergency” goes on.

  1. The rise of Trump has allowed many “libertarians” to reveal themselves as authoritarians, but that’s for another post.

August 3, 2025

“Even when accused men win, they lose”

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media, Politics, Sports — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Janice Fiamengo on the recent court decision that acquitted five former junior hockey players of sexual assault charges in a London, Ontario court:

The acquittal, last week, by Justice Maria Carroccia of five former members of the Canadian World Junior Hockey Team charged with sexual assault has provoked the usual exaggerations and question-begging from feminist advocates.

A common theme has been the alleged negative impact of the verdict on “survivors”. Canada’s state broadcaster, the CBC, titled an article “Hockey Canada trial outcome a ‘crushing day’ for sexual assault survivors, says prof“. The Globe and Mail had the same focus: “After the Hockey Canada verdict, advocates fear survivors will fall silent“. For CTV News, also, “Advocates worry about message to survivors following Hockey Canada sex assault trial“. It seems that any not-guilty finding — no matter the accuser’s proven lies and venality — is said to constitute an assault on rape victims everywhere.

Our era’s motto: Better 100 innocent men go to prison than one potential accuser hesitate to come forward.

Many commentators also gushed about the courage of the woman, still identified only as E.M., who took the witness stand to proclaim her truth. E.M.’s lawyer, Karen Bellehumeur, called her “a remarkable person and truly a hero“. Professor Daphne Gilbert credited E.M. with provoking important public conversations at enormous personal cost. Supporters on the courthouse steps carried signs saying “We believe E.M.”

It’s hard to fathom that those declaring their anguish at the verdict and their admiration for E.M. have actually read Judge Carroccia’s 90-page judgement.

That judgement, far from revealing the judge’s failure to understand E.M.’s fear, as one feminist organization alleged, should cause any unbiased observer to question how the case was ever allowed to go to trial in the first place.

It had been found to be a loser when police first looked into it back in 2018. The story was that E.M. had met a hockey player, Michael McLeod, at Jake’s Bar in London, Ontario; McLeod was in town with his team to celebrate their World Junior Championship victory at a ring ceremony and gala dinner. E.M. agreed to go back to McLeod’s hotel room, but once there, he invited many other players to the room, where they took turns sexually assaulting her. She went home crying, and when her mother asked her what had happened, she told her. Her mother called the police.

The problem was that the complainant’s story was full of holes. Questioned by investigators in the days following, she couldn’t say she hadn’t consented, confessed that she may have enjoyed the sexual attention of the players, admitted she could have left the hotel room at any time, and never mentioned fear or intimidation as factors in her actions. London police closed the case in early 2019 without laying any charges. Over time, it seems, E.M. constructed a more compelling story to explain herself in a way that would be acceptable to her mother and to E.M.’s boyfriend.

In 2022, a police investigation was reopened after it was reported that Hockey Canada, the sport’s national governing body, had paid out millions in settlement money to women like E.M. who had alleged sexual misconduct on the part of players. E.M. herself received an undisclosed settlement amount in 2022 after suing for 3.5 million dollars.

Charges were ultimately laid, in early 2024, against five men, all of whom had by then launched careers in the National Hockey League: Dillon Dubé, Alex Formenton, Carter Hart, Callan Foote and Michael McLeod. Their NHL careers are now in tatters while their accuser has enriched herself with a false accusation.

July 29, 2025

Crimes less serious than “Mischief” according to Canadian courts

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post, Tristin Hopper notes that the sentences being sought for Freedom Convoy 2022 organizers Tamara Lich and Chris Barber are more severe than prosecutors have asked for what appear to be far more serious crimes:

Chris Barber and Tamara Lich

Last week, Crown prosecutors announced they were seeking jail sentences of up to eight years for Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, two organizers of the Freedom Convoy protest.

Both were convicted of mischief, but the Crown is seeking a minimum sentence of seven years in jail for Lich, and eight for Barber, who was also found guilty of counselling others to disobey a court order.

The Crown has argued that the disruptiveness of the Freedom Convoy blockades warrants the harsh sentence, but in a statement this week, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said courts are throwing the book at Barber and Lich while simultaneously giving free reign to “rampant violent offenders” and “antisemitic rioters”.

It’s certainly the case that you can do an awful lot of heinous things in Canada before a prosecutor would ever think of asking for seven years. Below, a not-at-all comprehensive list of things you can do in Canada, and have the Crown seek a lighter sentence than the one they’re seeking for the organizers of the Freedom Convoy.

  • Sexually assaulting a baby [5 to 6 years]
  • Using a car filled with guns to ram into Justin Trudeau’s house [6 years]
  • Killing multiple innocent people via drunk driving [5 years]
  • Stabbing a man to death because he told you to stop abusing your girlfriend [5 years]
  • Being a police officer who stalks and sexually harasses crime victims [6 months]
  • Amassing enough child pornography to fill a video store [3 and a half years]
  • Torturing a toddler to death [7 to 8 years]
  • Intentionally ramming a car loaded with children and pregnant women [8 years]
  • Beating a fellow homeless shelter resident to death [5 and a half years]
  • Raping a minor and bragging about it online [4 to 5 years]

June 5, 2025

German judges seem to be dedicated to ensuring that the government never changes policy, regardless of voter preference

Filed under: Germany, Government, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The times I despair of the pathetic Canadian government, I look to Germany where eugyppius helpfully explains that German judges are even more dedicated to thwarting the will of the voters than Canadian judges are (and that’s a major achievement):

“German flag” by fdecomite is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

At the start of May, CSU Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt effectively abolished asylum as a path into Germany, empowering federal police to push back all illegal migrants at our national borders.

There ensued a period of messaging chaos, in which Chancellor Friedrich Merz assured our neighbours and the EU that nothing much was happening, while Dobrindt quietly insisted that yes, indeed, he was serious. He gave police orders to step up border checks and to send back all illegal migrants regardless of asylum claims – save for pregnant women, the underage and the sick.

These new borders policies have yet to exercise any significant influence on asylum statistics. It is relatively easy to cross into Germany despite the police spot checks, and we don’t yet know how many asylees are managing to evade them.

The deeper legal issues are much more significant right now. We want to know whether Dobrindt’s intervention is workable in theory, and whether our judges will swallow it. Unfortunately, he is already under siege from asylum advocates on the left and the broader migration industry, who have set and sprung a very telling trap, with the aim of getting courts to overturn even these preliminary and quite meagre interventions.

To understand the issues here, we need a brief legal primer: According to German law (the so-called Asylgesetz), foreigners who enter Germany from “secure” states do not get to claim asylum. They are to be sent straight back to wherever it is they came from. Because Germany is surrounded entirely by secure states, that should really be the end of this insane problem. Alas, this sensible law has been superseded since 1997 first by the Dublin Convention, and later by the Dublin II and now the Dublin III Regulation. The latter forbids the Federal Republic from using her own laws, holding that foreigners entering Germany from secure third states must be welcomed pending a procedure to establish which EU member state is actually responsible for them. Effectively, this means that almost all of these aspiring asylees remain in Germany indefinitely, because deporting people who do not belong here is beyond the meagre capacities of our enormous bureaucracy.

Dobrindt sought to get around Dublin by appealing to Article 72 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), which allows member states to set aside EU regulations when this is necessary to maintain order and security.

Many have eyed this Article 72 strategy for a long time, but nothing is easy, particularly not in countries unduly enamoured of “the rule of law”, which is a lofty euphemism for “the rule of obscure crazy people in robes for whom nobody ever voted and who enjoy lifetime appointments”. These days the government cannot do anything at all except what it was already doing (and sometimes not even that), or unless it is obviously stupid, expensive and inadvisable, because lurking around every corner is a clinically insane judge eager to explain why sensible things are not allowed. In recent years, our extremely learned and far-sighed judiciary has explained why combating climate change is anchored in the German constitution and why basically everybody is entitled to exorbitant social welfare. All that remains for them is to explain why everybody on earth is also entitled to live in Germany and draw benefits from the state, and they will have completed their suicidal triad.

On Monday, 2 June, the Berlin Administrative Court struck the first blow in this direction. Effectively, they called the whole basis for Dobrindt’s new border policy into question, issuing what amounts to a preliminary injunction in the case of three Somalis (two men and one woman) who had crossed from Poland into Germany on 9 May. Federal police intercepted the trio at the train station in Frankfurt an der Oder; they claimed asylum and the police, in line with Dobrindt’s order, sent them back to Poland anyway. Lawyers from the advocacy organisation Pro Asyl then helped them bring suit in Berlin, and the court intervened in their favour. They get to be professional asylees in Germany now.

May 7, 2025

Ontario versus the courts

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In general terms, you would expect the government — in this case the Ontario provincial government — to pass the laws and the courts — when called upon — to rule on their legality. We don’t expect courts to act as if they can overrule legislation passed by the government unless it clearly contravenes the Charter or goes beyond the powers assigned to that level of government. But Canadian courts seem to be choosing to expand their powers to curtail the actions of elected government more and more these days:

Bike lanes on Yonge Street north of Bloor Street in downtown Toronto.
Image from Google Street View

In the weeks of the election period, Canadian courts were busy preventing any legislation of controversy from taking effect — and they went relatively unnoticed. On March 28, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice blocked the Ontario government from banning supervised consumption sites near schools and daycares. It struck again on April 22, halting the Ontario government from removing Toronto’s bike lanes.

Days later, on April 24, the Quebec Superior Court cancelled the province’s planned mega-tuition hike for out-of-province students.

In the case of Toronto’s major bike lanes — on Bloor Street, Yonge Street and University Avenue — Ontario Premier Doug Ford had, in theory, all the power he needed to remove them. Municipalities are creatures of the province, and traffic regulation is also a provincial domain; thus, provincial legislatures can override just about anything that a city council does, especially if related to roads. So, in November, Ford legislated the removal of the lanes, which were previously constructed by city authorities (he was later re-elected premier, so clearly bike lane preservation wasn’t a priority for voters).

In December, cycling advocates launched a court challenge that, really, should have been laughed out of the room. They argued that the removal of bike lanes amounted to a violation of their Charter rights, specifically the Section 7 catch-all right to life, liberty and security.

It remains to be seen whether there is a Charter right that guarantees two per cent of the population the right to have specialty lanes built for their commuting pleasure — the trial process is still underway. In the meantime, Ontario’s Judge Paul Schabas, a Liberal appointee, has granted the cycling advocates an injunction to keep the lanes in place, because allowing their dismantling to go forward would impose an injunction-worthy risk of “irreparable harm” to Toronto’s cyclists.

“There is no evidence that the government has engaged in any planning as to how the bike lanes will be removed or what will replace them,” Schabas wrote in the decision. “The demolition and reconstruction will create its own impacts on traffic — both for cyclists and motor vehicles — and will likely result in considerable disturbance and congestion while that is taking place. Cyclists who continue to use these routes will be at risk of irreparable physical harm for which … the government will not provide any compensation in damages.”

And, just like that, a judge overruled a decision of the elected legislature, opting instead to take, temporarily, the zero-risk-tolerance advice of unelected government consultants. It’s at least good that Ford is appealing Schabas’ decision.

March 14, 2025

Greenland in the news again … and it’s not about Trump this time

Filed under: Americas, Business, Government, Law — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Tim Worstall sums up coverage from The Guardian about a case involving the government of Greenland and a mining operation going to court for damages from the government’s change of policy:

So, here’s a case:

    Fearing toxic waste, Greenland ended uranium mining. Now, they could be forced to restart — or pay $11bn

Gosh.

    In 2021, Greenland went to the polls, in a contest to which uranium was so central, international media dubbed it “the mining election”. The people voted in a green, leftwing government, led by the Inuit Ataqatigiit party, which campaigned against uranium mining due to the potential pollution.

    When it took power, the new government kept its campaign promise, passing legislation to ban uranium mining. While not primarily a uranium mine, the Kvanefjeld project would require unearthing the radioactive substance to extract its rare earth oxides, putting it in violation of the law.

    Many Greenlanders celebrated the vote as a victory for health and the environment. But three years later, the company is suing Greenland for stopping its plans, demanding the right to exploit the deposit or receive compensation of up to $11.5bn: nearly 10 times the country’s 8.5bn krone (£950m) annual budget.

That part of it isn’t wholly biased. It is, roughly and around and about, true.

Just as an aside I think I met one of the lads behind the mining company once. Mickey Five Names was it? Management and all has changed since then but they were not, say, of the probity of the board of Rio Tinto. Just as an opinion, you understand.

Still, they signed a contract which allowed them to prospect and so they then spent money. The law stated that they would, naturally, advance to an exploitation licence. That’s what they got denied.

[…]

Everyone’s agreeing on what happened. Roughly they are at least. You Mr. Corporation can explore and if you find something you can dig it up and so make money back on your costs. Then the government changed its mind leaving the company facing the total loss of all it had spent.

So, who has to cough up here?

No one — really, no one at all — is saying that a government cannot change its mind. Or even that elections should not have consequences and that policy might change after having had one.

What is being said is that if you nick someone’s property then you’ve got to pay for it.

Well, is not issuing an exploitation licence that you said you would nicking someone’s property? That’s clearly arguable (I would say “Yes!” but then that’s me) so, where do we go to argue this?

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