RSS FeedPolice Were Instigators in Montebello – Report Holds
When the North American Summit Leaders’ Summit was held in Montebello, Quebec in August 2007, something came to the attention of Dave Coles, President of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union.
Amidst a seemingly peaceful protest, Coles noticed that three bandana-clad “burly” men were attempting to incite the protestors to become violent toward riot police.
As with many of these situations at the national level, the R.C.M.P. has jurisdiction or control if you will over security, however, then Minister of Public Safety Stockwell Day indicated that security on the front line and directed toward controlling the protesters was the responsibility of Quebec’s provincial police agency, the Sureté du Québec. That in my opinion, is fairly normal.
What Mr. Coles charged is that the three burly men were actually police officers. This seems to go against the rationale to what the police were there to do. To quell violence not insight it. After concluding in quickie internal investigation there was no wrongdoing, the Comité à la déontologie policière said yesterday in a media release there was grounds to believe wrongdoing occurred on the part of the officers, and has now summoned them to a hearing on the matter.
Now the committee, which has the power to issue binding rulings on the Quebec police, will hold public hearings on the issue within the next six months. The three officers – Jean-François Boucher, Joey Laflamme and Patrick Tremblay – are required to appear – The Globe and Mail reports.
Aside from the obvious disciplinary sanctions that these officers now potentially face. Mr. Coles and many like him are asking the tough question of who directed these officers to take such action? Accountability needs to be had in order to restore faith in the public’s perception of how the police handle these situations.
Like one of my other articles, (also found here), I have the fortunate ability to break this down as a former police officer, who was also part of the York Regional Police’s Public Order Unit. Just to qualify my skills, I receive basic Public Order training at Downsview park with the Toronto Police Service’s Public Order Unit, and did requalification training at C.F.B. Meaford with a number of Ontario police agencies. I was also deployed to Caledonia at the height of the tension between the First Nations people and local residents.
In my training we were taught how to deal with such situations and my superiors would have never instructed officers to take up such actions. Just as the protestors arms themselves with video cameras and other “weapons” of technology, so do the police. In such public order situations, there could be plainclothes officers in the crowd monitoring situations, recording for evidentiary purposes, and watching certain groups known to police to cause problems. Nothing wrong with that.
But the thought that the police were the ones instigating the problems is quite saddening. I hope justice is swift, and those responsible, whether it is the Sûreté du Québec, R.C.M.P., or politicians are able to dealt with appropriately, especially after watching the YouTube video:
And hearing all of the evidence the Committee has ruled in the following manner:
ALLOWS the application for review in respect of the three respondent
sergeants on the allegations stated by the Commissioner in his decision:
Was disrespectful or impolite towards any person (section 5 of the Code);
Used obscene, blasphemous or abusive language (section 5 of the Code);
8 Item 4.10 of the Commissioner’s investigation report.Failed to respect the authority of the law by inciting persons to violence (section 7 of the Code);
Refused to produce identification when a person asked him to do so (section 6 of the Code);
Furthermore, now that the Committee has overruled the Commissioner, the door has probably been opened for a criminal investigation in relation to assault charges against one officer, and potentially this:
Unlawful Assembly:
63. (1) An unlawful assembly is an assem- bly of three or more persons who, with intent to carry out any common purpose, assemble in such a manner or so conduct themselves when they are assembled as to cause persons in the neighbourhood of the assembly to fear, on rea- sonable grounds, that they
(a) will disturb the peace tumultuously; or
(b) will by that assembly needlessly and without reasonable cause provoke other per- sons to disturb the peace tumultuously.
(2) Persons who are lawfully assembled may become an unlawful assembly if they conduct themselves with a common purpose in a man- ner that would have made the assembly unlaw- ful if they had assembled in that manner for that purpose.
Like all interesting developing stories, we shall see where this leads us.
Polygamy legalization may be in sight
Petti Fong writes:
The province has had its hands tied with proceeding with charges for fear that if the polygamy law is struck down by a successful challenge under the Charter, it could strike down the law and make polygamy legal in Canada.
Link to Precedent Magazine Article
I have written an opinion piece on the relationship between police officers and lawyers for Precedent Magazine.
It can be found on page 17 of the Fall 2009 edition or via this link:
Please check it out and we welcome comments. Thank you.
Toronto bomb plotter sentenced
Toronto 18 member gets 14-year sentence
A Mississauga man who confessed to being part of a homegrown terror plot aimed at blowing up buildings in downtown Toronto was sentenced today to 14 years, with credit given for pre-trial custody he was ordered to serve an additional seven years behind bars.
Bon Cop, Bad Cop
Today the dramatic and costly case against the Toronto drug squad officers see-saws yet again when prosecutors try to revive charges thrown out by a judge in 2008. The charges were tossed because the Crown took too long to bring the case to trial.
Taser International
Taser maker to file suit over inquiry
… “The assertion is that commission breached basic principles of fairness and fundamental justice,” Mr. Neave said in an interview with CTV at his Vancouver office. “They were biased in the sense that a substantial body of science and medical study we provided to the commission was not considered.”
Interesting. A commission of inquiry does not administer justice. It’s a “study” commission. How can it breach principles of fairness and fundamental justice?
A Tale of Two War Criminals: Bush and Clinton do Toronto
Reproduced with permission of the author.
[1]When you accuse anyone of war crimes, you’d better be sure you have the evidence to back it up; such an accusation is the equivalent of yelling “fire” in a crowded shopping mall.
It’s a serious charge, something that sits heavily on our psyche as fragile human beings who generally tend to disbelieve that any one could be capable of committing crimes against humanity, especially if they have elected him president.
Perhaps that’s why such a presidential event as a “conversation” between George W. Bush and Bill Clinton happened in Toronto, Canada on May 29, 2009 — the event was billed as a “conversation,” [2] maybe because the terms “meeting of the minds” or “great intellectual debate” would embarrass one of the two parties involved?).
The two men got a standing ovation from a packed audience that paid from $200 to over $2,000 a ticket at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.
Yes, that’s right, a standing ovation from the crowd inside the Convention Centre. And both Presidents got paid for their time. While no one is telling how much each ex-President made off the 90 minute conversation, Bush reportedly received (US) $160,000 for his last appearance in Canada, in Calgary Alberta in March 2009. Clinton can charge up to (US) $350,000 per speaking engagement. Good work if you can get it.
But ask the 500 or so protesters across the street from the Convention Centre, organized by the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War [3], and the only standing up the presidents got were erect middle fingers. It was this side third and uninvited side of the conversation that chanted slogans such as “Bush and Clinton, war criminals: shame on you!”
Here are a few of the numerous examples of war crimes committed by each of the two men.
Bush as a war criminal
Bush is accused of numerous war crimes, resulting from him ignoring his own constitution’s “supremacy clause,” Article II, section 4, and the War Crimes Act of 1996 (18USC §2441).
Regarding the United States’ War Crimes Acts, author Mike Ferner from Veterans for Peace [4], writes:
“To give just a snapshot of how serious these laws are, consider this portion of 18 USC 2441 which defines a war crime as ‘… a grave breach in any of the international conventions signed at Geneva 12 August 1949, or any protocol to such convention to which the United States is a party …’ The guilty can be ‘… fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death.’”
Not to mention important international treaties and conventions such as the Geneva Conventions, the Nuremberg rulings, the Laws and Customs of War on Land and UN General Assembly Resolution 3314. Breaches of these international treaties and conventions amounting to war crimes are too numerous to mention here (though they are listed at the website War Criminals Out [5], which has lists of charges and broken resolutions.)
The invasion of Iraq is cited as a prime example of Bush’s war crimes, where activists insist Bush should be charged under the UN Resolution 3314, Article 5 (codified from the principles of Nuremberg concerning “Wars of Aggression,” [6] which cites as an historical example Hitler’s invasion of Poland) for committing a “crime against peace.” The invasion of Iraq is thus considered a war crime and a crime against humanity, which is spelled out in detail in the Geneva Conventions [7].
In Iraq alone, Ferner points out that Bush is responsible for, among other things, “illegally invading a sovereign state, using banned weapons such as white phosphorous and napalm, bombing hospitals and civilian infrastructure, withholding aid and medical supplies, terrorizing and knowingly killing civilians, torturing prisoners, killing a million people and displacing 4 million more in Iraq alone.”
Now, we’re talking big crimes here, a big fire someone should point out to the general public.
Clinton as a war criminal
While Clinton’s presidency might enjoy a different reputation (think blue dress), there’s a case to be made regarding his culpability in committing war crimes. He was not the focus of the demo, but I don’t think he should get a free pass. Again, using the same international conventions and treaties listed above, there’s a list of actions to consider in regards to charging him with war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Clinton imposed, through the UN Security Council, sanctions on Iraq between 1990 and 2003, which had a devastating effect on the Iraqi population. The UN, in 1999, reported [8] more that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died as a result of the sanctions, disproportionately among children.
On June 26, 1993, the Clinton administration bombed Baghdad [9] in retaliation for an alleged but unproven Iraq plot to assassinate former President George Bush, Sr.
Clinton’s administration and NATO conducted the bombing campaign of Bosnia from March 22 to June 11, 1999 without UN Security Council approval, against the rules of the Geneva Conventions [10].
Again, big fire here! Not only should Bush and Clinton’s actions translate into war crimes charges, but their disregard for not only American law but also international treaties and conventions undermines the rule of international law and undermines the consensus of the international community.
And we’re not even talking torture charges against Bush regarding his country’s treatment of foreign nationals at military and CIA run prisons, military or rendition sites around the world, an obvious breach [11] of the Geneva Conventions. Reports from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay alone might be enough to prosecute Bush and win convictions.
These reasons alone were enough to compel the group Lawyers Against The War [12] to issue this statement [13] to the RCMP on March 12, 2009, asking that Bush be denied entry into Canada under Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (section 35(1)(a)), because Bush is a war criminal (Crimes against Humanity and War Crimes Act (CAHWC)).
War crimes in World Court
The latest rumour regarding actually holding Bush and his administration accountable for war crimes comes from Spain, where Harper’s reports [14] that the Spanish press El País and Público state,
“the Spanish national security court has opened a criminal probe focusing on Bush Administration lawyers who pioneered the descent into torture at the prison in Guantánamo.”
This could be the first step of bringing the Commander and Chief himself before an international court if the lawyers claim they were just following orders.
Is prosecuting the leaders enough?
While I am certainly not against using international criminal courts to prosecute political leaders with war crimes, I believe their function and scope to be too limiting to bring about real justice to victims of crimes against humanity. The problem with any war crimes court stems from the fact that, as prosecution goes, the international community at best gets to nail one of two ringleaders with convictions but leaves the functioning war machine or war bureaucracy untouched, the unknown number of faceless bureaucrats and military personnel untouched.
While we get a vicarious sense of justice because we got the top brass, those big arrests give the media permission to declare justice complete and us permission to move on to the next conflict of the day. And by “us,” I mostly mean the Western world, as if prosecuting international, political criminals has become a judicial white man’s burden.
This assumed distance can also amount to a coolly calculated mood of international NIMBY and moral superiority, where one nation can quickly vilify another by pointing out the atrocities committed in that country while claiming such crimes could never occur in their own.
It also assumes a stance of culpability after the fact. Regarding Iraq, the American public needs to look inwards to whether domestically they did enough to prevent the events of Iraq from occurring in the first place.
But can we as Canadians sit so smugly with the notion that we did not invade Iraq, or that it was the progressive Left that kept Canada out of Iraq and therefore we have clean hands and the permission to look the other way. Can we point to Bush and Clinton, two American presidents, and declare their country the new international fixture of Evil while in contrast considering ourselves the good guys?
Instead of sitting on our presumed laurels and pointing to our deified notion of peacekeeping, perhaps we should be more aware of our own actions, non-actions and culpability in global and domestic affairs. Everything from Rwanda, Darfur, Sri Lanka to the treatment of our aboriginal citizens.
If Americans need to look inward to understand their own heart of darkness, then we must demand that we as Canadians do the same.
Colour Conscious Justice: Towards a Colour Blind Justice System
Is the justice system blind to colour?
Jim Rankin and Betsy Powell of the Toronto Star pose this question in an article that is part of the newspaper’s series on Crime and Punishment. The series explores “the state of crime and punishment in Canada, including the social costs of mandatory minimum sentences, in a series of articles and, on-line at thestar.com, in video documentaries, interactive maps and timelines, and a game, where you are the judge”. After two years of fighting a freedom of information battle, the Star obtained and analyzed three sets of data, including details of criminal records and one-day data snapshots of federal and Ontario inmates sentenced to terms of more than two years and less than two years, respectively. A note on methodology and statistical background can be found here.
The article provides synoptic feedback from justice experts who seek to explain the Star’s statistical findings on race and crime. The statistics show that visible minorities charged with a crime are 47 per cent less likely to be convicted, but more likely to have warnings on their files, accessible by computers in police cruisers. Even without a conviction, a record of a criminal charge can remain for years in the Canadian Police Information Center Database (CPIC), which is reportedly accessed tens of million of times a year by a multitude of enforcement agencies and potential employers. The article also indicates that visible minorities are more likely to have samples of their DNA taken.
Attention in this analysis is placed on the first statistical finding (of lower convictions for visible minorities) and the corresponding first part of the article. The focus is on the language used by the legal experts, police and the reporters when talking about race. The following offers a critical reading of how legal discourse can obscure or imagine issues as they relate to race and crime.
A Note on Numbers
The figures mentioned in the article were obtained from the RCMP- administered CPIC database. To avoid stigmatizing communities, Canadian governments and police forces have opted, traditionally, to not distribute race and crime statistics. However, according to the Star this has led to abundant misconceptions by the Canadian public on what constitutes a criminal. For this, the efforts by the Star and the series’ team are laudable as they point out the necessity to bring these issues to light. This graphic showcases how Canadians underestimate the number of people with criminal records generally, and, more specifically, how they overestimate the number of visible minorities who have committed crime. More charts and graphics are available on the Star’s website.
A Note on Language
The data from CPIC, as they relate to and record race, utilize two categories of “white” and “non-white”. Aboriginal people are lumped in the “non-white” category. From the outset, this is problematic. Trite as it may sound, there is variety in “whiteness”, and that is demonstrated by the history of Canadian immigration policies. In fact, depending on definition, “white” can be seen as a system regardless of skin colour. However, CPIC’s most impressive shortcoming is the use of the denomination of “non-white”. It is troubling enough to be “classified” in relation to someone else, let alone in negation to them.
Crowned with quotation marks initially, without critical regard, the two categories repeatedly leap from the pages. To the reporters’ credit, they replaced “non-white” with visible minorities when providing their own analysis. The problem is that this would skew the prolific CPIC data. “Non-white” is barely skin deep and does not account for the nuanced difference that visible or minority suggest.
At the very outset, a judge, who refused to be identified, said that low conviction rates for “non-whites” (his words) can be explained as “rewards”; “if the ‘non-whites’ have spent more time than ‘whites’ in pre-trial custody”. Little is said in way of explaining his account or the reasons for his anonymity. The phenomenon may reflect the commendable colour blindness of judges on the bench at crunch time when giving a verdict. But this observation is a clear incrimination of the colour-bias of the police force and pre-trial judicial procedures. The reporters do note that, after the 1995 Report of the Commission on Systemic Racism in the Ontario Criminal Justice System, it is no secret that “black accused, for example, are more often held without bail”.
Another explanation that should raise some eyebrows relates low conviction rates to over-charging in cases involving multiple non-white accused. The suggestion being, that gangs are predominantly “non-white”, and that over-charging “non-white” is a fact that does not seem worthy of further investigation by the reporters.
Another explanation was the over policing of poorer neighborhoods, which are largely populated by low-income people of colour. This fact should not be read in isolation as a numerical account. This situation results from Canadian immigration policy procuring skilled and educated immigrants and a Canadian labor market and settlement policy that disenfranchises “foreign” expertise, skill and education.
In his response, Toronto police chief Bill Blair, president of the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police, dismissed the defence lawyers’ theories as “quite predictable,” for nothing more than the fact that their role is to “obfuscate” and one way to do that is to “undermine the credibility and confidence the criminal justice system would have in the police”.
While plentiful in a later article on “Solving crime? Tackle the root causes first”, a lot of the issues, whether political, systemic, social or economic, involved in such an important study were not expounded nor highlighted. The legal experts shied from connecting the larger forces at play in Canada with racial discrimination. However, it is great that the Star is taking on the task of critically reviewing the processes and effects of the Canadian Criminal Justice System. It is invaluable to have the media and the public hold the system accountable or at least expose its shortcomings and sometimes outright failings. If anything, the article should be a rallying call to question how Canadians, lawyers, police and judges react, read and interpret race, if only to have accurate information and to hopefully effect change. For in order ensure that our Justice System becomes blind to colour, we need to make sure that our legal debates and public policies are anything but.
Cross-posted from The Court
First They Came for the Polygamists…
Susan Drummond, professor of family law at Osgoode Hall, finally weighed in yesterday on the polygamy issue.
She claims that if fully prosecuted many individuals, including herself, would be guilty.
There is a general rumbling afoot in Canada about laying polygamy charges against individuals within certain religious communities across Canada. But there are some things Canadians need to know about our Criminal Code’s “Offences Against Conjugal Rights” before we can be sure we really want to open that particular Pandora’s box. One thing to ask may be whether you, or anyone you care about, has committed one of these indictable offences carrying liability of up to five years in prison. In the spirit of the poem “They came first for the communists…,” let me say that I have committed polygamy.
It’s the End of the World as We Know It
The rumblings have included other law faculty, and Prof. Tom Flanagan of the University of Calgary who said,
The small cult of fundamentalist Mormons will not bring down the social order by itself, but Canada is now accepting substantial immigration from Africa and the Middle East, where polygamy is widely practised.
If we don’t enforce our existing laws against polygamy, we will jeopardize the fundamental institution of our free society and constitutional government.
To the contrary, Drummond responds. She points out one of the many absurd consequences of doing so,
Catholics can never divorce religiously – and yet they can (and do) divorce and remarry civilly. Those who have done so (along with other Canadians who have not put an end to their religious marriage before remarrying civilly) are both in multiple conjugal unions and multiple forms of marriage. So, should the state decide to sweep up all those polygamists, many of us might be astonished at how many of our acquaintances and loved ones would be carted away.
You Heard of Bush’s Brain – Here is Harper’s
Just a reminder – Tom Flanagan is often called the man behind Stephen Harper. According to the Golden Lake Institute, the philosophy he ascribes to is based on the writings of Leo Strauss,
Strauss was very pre-occupied with secrecy because he was convinced that the truth is too harsh for any society to bear; and that the truth-bearers are likely to be persecuted by society — specially a liberal society — because liberal democracy is about as far as one can get from the truth as Strauss understood it.
They Even Came for Rita
And here’s some more truth – the RCMP spied on Rita MacNeil and other feminists during the ’70s.
It has long been known that the now-defunct Security Service spied on a vast array of groups — from trade unionists to student associations — during the Cold War with the aim of gauging the potential threat from left-wing subversives, possibly linked to hostile foreign powers.
As any student of COINTELPRO knows, Big Brother persecutes the Left, not the Right.
Laws Do Signal Values (aka Liberal Fascism)
Robert Janes, a litigation lawyer in B.C. (originally from Newfoundland) who writes on Thoughts from the Western Edge, said,
Professor Flanagan is right though that ultimately it is the role of our laws to signal our values and to reinforce the values we want to encourage. This means though that there is a role — contrary to what most of the right wing would argue –for the state to define preferred values and so to shape society. Professor Flanagan is also right in advocating move away from patriarchy — which marginalizes half of humanity — but this argument should be applied first and foremost to the laws which are having the greatest effect on our society. Professor Flanagan’s arguments are therefore to my mind arguments against all laws that reinforce inequality between men and women and entrench outdated religious notions of the proper ordering of society. The next time you hear a call from the right wingers for the imposition of abortion bans; support for publicly funded religious education; the repeal of laws designed to promote equality (ie the Human Rights Codes and associated tribunals)– just remember Professor Flanagan.
So first it’s the polygamists, then the gays, then immigrants from Africa and the Middle East, and then maybe people who refuse to procreate…
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