RSS FeedSOCAN goes after Vancouver transit buskers
It seems that SOCAN has finally decided to take a piece of the incredibly rich Vancouver transit busker pie, and has informed the Vancouver transit authority of their intent to enforce SOCAN tariffs for buskers.
The Vancouver transit authority says those tariffs could drive the cost of a Translink busker licence as high as $1,500.
SOCAN, short for the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada, is a collective society whose job it is to “make sure [members] get paid for the public performance and communication to the public of their music.” SOCAN does this by negotiating new royalty tariffs with the Copyright Board of Canada, and making licences available to “customers” interested in legally playing music in public.
Pretty much everything you can think of is covered by a SOCAN-negotiated tariff, outside of “Showers, Singing in, One or more other users of bathroom” and “Campfires, Guy with guitar, Compensated with beer from cooler.” My personal favourite existing tariff has to be tariff 3C, the pole-dancing tariff, but there are many, many more depressingly bean-counted avenues of creative expression listed on the SOCAN tariffs page. The Vancouver buskers are likely covered under “3A Live Music” or (more hilariously) 10A Strolling Musicians and Buskers; Recorded Music.
Charging a royalty fee every time the unicycling juggler blares “Life Is A Highway” may sound absurd to some, but it’s definitely the law. However, it seems clear that most (if not all) buskers in this program would find ponying up $1,500 for a licence to be a challenge. In fact, TransLink spokesman Ken Hardie said that with such a big jump in licencing fees, “We’re probably faced with possibly having to cancel the program.” So no performance space for buskers, no busker program at all… and no royalty fees for SOCAN. Brilliant.
It’s true that artists deserve to be compensated for their work, and it’s also true that the current state of Canadian copyright law encourages a royalty fee system. But after reading about SOCAN’s approach to this – “that businesses that allow musical performance on their premises obey the law” – coupled with Translink’s approach to SOCAN’s demands (passing the cost along to the buskers) makes me wonder if anyone wanted to make this work in the first place.
In the event that the Vancouver busker project isn’t canceled, I just hope SOCAN accepts payment in loose change.
Women Ski Jumpers Grounded…
The BC Court of Appeal has dismissed an appeal filed on behalf of a number of a group of women ski jumpers attempting to get inclusion into next years olympics being held in Vancouver. Written statements were not given, but will be available next week.
Previously, the BC Superior Court ruled that although there are definite Charter breaches and discrimination is evident, they do not apply to the Swiss based International Olympic Committee. On behalf of the women ski jumpers, they argue because the women’s event is not yet a recognized sport, they are under the jurisdiction of VANOC (Vancouver Olympic Committee), which as a Canadian organization is bound by the Charter.
There is no word to whether this will be appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada.
Should they continue to the SCC and win the IOC will be forced into one of three options:
1. Include them
2. Cancel the men’s event.
3. Hold the men’s event outside Canada, so the Charter does not apply, and they can hold only the men’s event.
As the eleventh hour of the games near, if they decide to go to the SCC, expect a quick turnaround.
The Ocean Lady: Rethinking “Illegal” Migration in Canada
The recent arrival by boat in Vancouver of 76 Sri Lankan Tamil men has triggered heated debate about Canada’s refugee system. On October 28, the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Columbia held a forum on the topic, entitled “The “Ocean Lady”: A New Challenge of Illegal Migration on Canada’s West Coast?” One of the panellists, Daniel McLeod, who is duty counsel for the migrants, called these men “classic refugees,” because of the persecution they face in Sri Lanka. “It’s young Tamil men in Sri Lanka who are most at risk,” he said. He also observed that though “the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam at their peak had probably 1500 to 2500 soldiers,” there are currently a quarter of a million Tamils awaiting security clearance by the Sri Lankan government in internment camps in the northern parts of the island.
McLeod, who is also an instructor in Refugee Law at UBC, noted that Canada is a signatory to the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees, which states that refugees cannot be penalised for entering the country through illegal means. Canada’s acceptance of the Convention was triggered by its refusal in 1939 to admit the St Louis, a boat containing 907 Jewish refugees, who were forced to return to Germany, where a third of them were killed in concentration camps. However, host and fellow-panellist, Benjamin Perrin, Assistant Professor at UBC Law and Faculty Associate at the Liu Institute, said that because the 1951 Convention only addresses the criminalisation of the entry, “it does not preclude countries from exercising detention where the identities of the individuals are uncertain or there are undetermined security risks.”
McLeod cautioned against assuming the men were Tamil Tigers. “It is common for people who have been forced to work as labourers for the Tigers, to be rounded up, arrested by the army, police, or the special task force – which is a police commando force – and simply disappear,” he said. When describing the men, nearly all of whom are currently confined in a Lower Mainland jail, McLeod said, “Some of them are students, some are farmers, some of them are clerks, office workers. They are all very scared.”
In Canada the acceptance rate for refugees is approximately 47%. In comparison, according to Andreas Schloenhardt, Associate Professor from University of Queensland, in Australia, that number is 80%. (However, Australia has a very different immigration system, which involves using whole islands far from the mainland as detention centres, so these numbers may not be analogous.) Yet the 2007 acceptance rate specifically for Sri Lankans in Canada was 97%.
In 1986, local fishermen came to the rescue of 154 Sri Lankans found floating off in lifeboats off the coast of Newfoundland. Those people were not subjected to what McLeod called “the political frenzy that’s occurring today,” suggesting that in the intervening two decades Canada’s policing of its borders has become progressively more exclusionary and reactionary. This fear was solidified on November 2, when Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, after accepting the fewest refugees in 10 years, dramatically cut the 2010 target number of refugees to be accepted by more than half. Opposition MPs assert that “by steeply dropping the targets, refusing to appoint Refugee Board members for 2 years, cutting $4 million in the department and allowing for board appointments not based on merit, Harper’s Conservative government is deliberately creating a crisis in the refugee system. The crisis is then used as an excuse to bring in draconian measures to close the door to the most needy and vulnerable.”
At the lecture, Perrin claimed that the focus on the “human interest story” of the 76 men, while legitimate, shifts attention away from an analysis of the means by which refugees move illegally between countries. He argued that “Canada must take action to discourage illegal migration and disrupt migrant smuggling operations where they do exist.” Further, Canada is a party to the 2004 UN Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air, which, he said, “calls for [migrants] not to be criminalised, but to be treated humanely. But at the same time, it does not give them the right to temporary or permanent residence in Canada simply because they are smuggled.”
When one student then questioned him about the language used to describe the men, specifically the term “illegal migrant” (which was featured in the panel title), because of the way it implicitly criminalises the men, Perrin responded that “the title of the presentation has a question mark at the end of it, which was very deliberate.” Another audience member had a query about how that kind of vocabulary negatively affects media coverage. Perrin responded, “I think it’s important that before there’s been an impartial determination of the legal status of these individuals, that our language reflect that. So I’m not calling them refugees right now because I don’t know if they are.”
Perrin maintained that “there are advantages to cooperating with other countries, not just the source countries, but also other countries along the migrant smuggling chain,” because this would assist Canada in “creating proactive responses to protracted refugee situations.” One reporter asked, “How are we to trust the Sri Lankan government if they say these people are members of a terrorist organisation? [...] How do you trust a government which is treating a minority as harshly as them?” McLeod answered, “I hope we’re not going to trust the Si Lankan government to make that determination for us. There are a number of ways that Canada Border Services Agency can obtain information in normal ways.” These include taking fingerprints to run through international police records and analysing accents to determine where in Sri Lanka the men are from. However, the RCMP has already begun collaborating with the Sri Lankan government to identify the men.
“There are 16 million refugees worldwide as of June 2009. There’s another 26 million internally displaced persons, who don’t count as refugees,” said McLeod. “Hundreds, if not thousands, of irregular migrants are reported dead or missing every year,” said Perrin.
—–
A previous version of this article first appeared in Canadian Lawyer. This article was last modified on Nov 5.
Criminalising Refugees
The arrival in Vancouver by boat two weeks ago of 76 refugees from Sri Lanka has triggered a predictable wave of paranoia and xenophobia, not the least of which has come from our own Ministry of Immigration. Alykhan Velshi, director of communications and parliamentary affairs, felt compelled to reassure the public that:
We won’t allow Canada to become a place of refuge for terrorists, thugs, snakeheads and other violent foreign criminals. Nor will we support those who want to create a two-tier immigration system: one tier for law-abiding immigrants who wait patiently in the queue, and a second, for-profit tier for criminals and terrorists who pay human smugglers to help them jump the queue.
Minister Jason Kenney, somewhat less flamboyantly, has said, “We don’t want to develop a reputation of having a two-tier immigration system – one tier for legal, law-abiding immigrants who patiently wait to come to the country, and a second tier who seek to come through the back door, typically through the asylum system.”
On the face of it, the preemptive criminalisation of the 76 men as terrorists and snakeheads aside, it seems like a fair thing to ask: that whatever system Canada have in place for immigration be respected.
The fact is, however, that Kenney is being willfully misleading. As Shauna Lubman, of UBC Law, notes:
[Kenney’s] statement belies the fact that Canada has a two-pronged system already – the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) that legislates the entrance of both immigrants and refugees. There is no “back door.” There is an immigration door and an asylum door. While there is a clear legal process for entering Canada as an immigrant, it is specifically acknowledged in the 1951 Refugee Convention, whose signatories include Canada, that asylum seekers cannot be penalized for illegal entry. [emphasis mine]
Moreover, she continues,
Minister Kenney’s two-tier concern is misleading and completely misses the point that the Sri Lankan men might be genuine refugees. There are legitimate concerns with the arrival of migrants by boat, be they false or genuine refugee claimants. Human smuggling is a corrupt and exploitative criminal enterprise that should not only be discouraged but prosecuted. However, it is the smugglers who are the criminals, not the vulnerable migrants who in desperation pay their way into the smugglers’ hands.
CBC: UBC students tutored on Olympic security rights
I’ve already posted about PIVOT’s and the BC Civil Liberties Association’s mobilisation around Vancouver’s stringent (and possibly unconstitutional) anti-dissent Olympic laws. It now appears that UBC students (undergrads, I think) are now also taking it upon themselves to educate themselves on their rights with respect to the Olympics and how it’ll impact them (given UBC is where some of the games will be conducted, and thus site to both heightened security and protests).
Some University of British Columbia students will be getting extra tutoring to make sure they know their rights when the Integrated Security Unit arrives on campus for the 2010 Winter Olympics in February.
About 330 students are to be trained to staff a legal assistance hotline or act as observers of security operations during the Games. The Student Legal Fund Society has teamed up with the B.C. Civil Liberties Association to host the workshops.
Organizers of the workshops expect that some students will be involved in protests both on and off the campus, where UBC is hosting ice hockey events at the newly expanded Thunderbird Arena.
Emily Griffiths, president of the Student Legal Fund Society, said the group will put up more than $18,000 to train students, stressing that this isn’t about encouraging them to protest but about making sure their rights are protected.
“Because of the nature of the Olympics and the way that it affects students on campus and the ways that students on campus have been treated in the past by law enforcement, we are very nervous,” said Griffiths.
Memories of APEC
Griffiths was referring to the 1997 Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation conference at UBC, when students protesting against several unelected national leaders were pepper-sprayed by the RCMP, and signs urging free speech and democracy were destroyed by police.
The police action led to the creation of the Student Legal Fund, to which each UBC student pays an annual fee, and to a public inquiry which found that police actions “did not meet an acceptable and expected standard of competence and professionalism and proficiency.”
B.C. Civil Liberties Association executive director David Eby said his organization also is putting up $18,000 to fund the student training.
“Our proposal is to provide know-your-rights workshops and legal observer training for students to do legal observing on campus during the Olympic period,” said Eby, “so that students are fully prepared during the Olympic period so we avoid another APEC-type situation.”
The Vancouver 2010 Integrated Security Unit is headed by the RCMP and includes members of the Canadian Forces and municipal police departments.
Government promises tougher refugee legislation
Canada to take hard line with would-be migrants
Jane Armstrong and John Ibbitson write for the Globe:
Canada’s Immigration Minister has signalled that he intends to play hardball with 76 men believed to be from Sri Lanka who arrived on a rusty boat off Canada’s West Coast, as the government battles the perception of Canada as a soft touch for asylum seekers.
Isn’t it too early to presume these people to be bogus, if they supposedly crossed an ocean to come from a recent war zone?
Vancouver 2010 and Civil Liberties
The British Columbia Civil Liberties Association and Pivot Legal Society are looking for volunteers for Legal Observer teams during the Olympics. They’ll be having training sessions (in fact, their training manual is already online (PDF)):
Legal Observer teams will be observing major protests and other potential conflict hot spots like Olympic venues and the Downtown Eastside. They’ll report observations back to the BCCLA’s team of volunteer lawyers who are prepared to go to court to protect people’s rights where complaints can’t be resolved informally. Our Observers’ first-hand evidence will form a solid foundation for those legal actions. Observers are the watchful eyes that will be focused on police, military and private security conduct to ensure accountability.
The BCCLA has a pretty good roundup of reasons to be concerned about how the Olympics are negatively impacting civil rights:
- The Olympic Torch Run Manual that calls on cities to limit the distribution of political leaflets during the torch run.
- The Clean Venue Agreement that outlines a VANOC swat team that will seize offensive literature on public property, how the IOC required VANOC to prevent anyone other than Olympic sponsors from advertising during the Games, and how private security guards will prevent people from holding signs or wearing clothes with political messages in Olympic venues.
- The Olympic Host City Agreement in which the IOC required the City of Vancouver to prevent international media and attendees at Olympic venues from seeing political speech inside and outside the venues, which was signed by then Mayor of Vancouver Larry Campbell.
- The Olympic Charter in which the IOC dictates at Rule 51 that “No kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas. “
- The Manual for Candidate Cities which demands compliance with the terms of the Olympic Charter for all candidate host cities, including Vancouver, during and after the bid process.
- The Olympic Technical Manual on Media, in which the IOC attempts to limit coverage of the Games to coverage that “by its content, spreads and promotes the principles of Olympism,” and which grants the IOC the ability to withdraw accreditation from any journalist at any time for any reason.
- Letters in which the Olympic Integrated Security Unit and Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) refuse to refrain from using Agents Provocateur or to assume the leadership of activist organizations, following a request from the B.C. Civil Liberties Association to foreswear the tactics. Such tactics may be permissible under certain interpretations of Canadian criminal and constitutional law, but their legality is disputed by the BCCLA.
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?
What to do with tasers
B.C. Taser inquiry report released
The Dziekanski case
Charge Mounties in taser case, Polish watchdog says
The Legal Intersection Between Sexuality and Race
What do Sikh immigrants to B.C. almost a century ago have to do with gay issues?
Everything. Or, maybe nothing.
On Oct. 24, 2008 I saw a film, Rex vs Singh, a 20-min. short film on a legal case from B.C. in 1915.
The event was hosted by Standing Against Queer Discrimination (SAQD) as part of a film festival at the University of Western Ontario.
One of the film-makers, John Greyson, introduced the film and answered questions.
A New City with Big Problems
Vancouver was a new city at this time, but was still Canada’s most multicultural city with a few pockets of Chinese, Japanese and Sikh communities. In 1907 riots ensued, destroying Chinese and Japanese neighborhoods, while the rioters sang ‘White Canada Forever.’
In 1914, a year before the case of Rex v. Singh, the Komagata Maru tried to dock in Vancouver. It resulted in a split within the Sikh community, and increased xenophobia by the rest of the population.
Discrimination Under a Different Name
The men in this case were entrapped by the police and accused of sodomy, which was of course illegal. Apparently this was part of a routine process of discrimination in a series of legal cases stretching back to the 1800’s. The film mentions over a dozen cases between 1905-1930.
But not necessary because these people were gay. In an interview earlier in the year Greyson said,
Were the men having sex? Or were they just entrapped? We don’t even know what the verdict was in this case —that part of the story has never been uncovered. There is so much about it that is unknowable, that is mysterious. This is a video about fragments of a story —the more we try to answer them, the more they fall apart.
Homophobia was used to persecute these minorities because they had full rights as British citizens, and could not be targeted using techniques more routinely used for harassing minorities. Immigration laws were deliberately designed to limit the number of Sikh women arriving in Canada, to discourage permanent settlement as much as possible.
Vancouver historian, Gordon Brent Ingram, who researched the case and also appeared in the film, said,
Certain white people in Vancouver were not happy about this. The early ‘city fathers’ of Vancouver were all white and often quite racist. They didn’t want Indo-Canadians becoming a significant demographic group in Vancouver, and by sexually harassing them they hoped to make these men feel unwelcome.
The film brings to life a transcript from the actual case, as the officer describes his tactics of tricking the accused as being “necessary.” But the accused responded they knew he was a detective, and did not attempt any sexual impropriety.
A witness also claims one of the Sikh men asked him to participate in sexual activities, but could not explain how this could have happened when informed that the man did not speak English.
The outcome of these cases are unknown, but similar cases in California resulted in sentances of 5-7 years.
What’s the Relevance Today?
The point is not whether or not these individuals really were gay. When intolerant elements of Canadian society were unable to persecute ethnic minorities using institutionalized discrimination, they resorted to other legal techniques to accomplish the same purpose.
Some reporters are attributing the recent Tory win to their ethnic strategy, which has given them 10 ridings in the GTA and Vancouver that have significant populations of ethnic minorities. Ruby Dhalla of Brampton-Springdale, a riding with one of the highest Sikh concentrations in Canada, won by a mere 1,000 votes, down from 8,000 in 2006.
Interestingly enough, the new Conservative Minister of Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, Jason Kenney, has himself made disparaging remarks dismissing them in 2000 saying they were,
…overheated Sikhs using the race card, which they so often do when their credentials are being questioned.
Family values, crime and taxes are issues supposedly resonating in these communities. “Family values” is often used as code for anti-homosexual policy.
What all these ethnic communities should realize, and often do, is that issues of discrimination cross boundaries of ethnicity, religion, race and sexuality. Advocacy therefore requires support for others who don’t necessary share your beliefs, culture, lifestyle or identity.
The case of Rex vs Singh is yet another reminder of this lesson.
The Solution is Insite
With an unabating drug epidemic and the winds of political change in the air, interest is growing in the United States for a less punitive and more liberal war on drugs.
One battle in this war is being fought, and won, in Canada by the City of Vancouver, British Columbia—and the tactics being used are controversial, to say the least.
No, not torture. In September 2003 Vancouver opened the first “safe injection site,” a legal facility for users of illegal narcotics. The facility is run by healthcare workers and funded by the provincial government, and it is the only facility of its kind in North America. It is called ‘Insite‘.
In July 2002 I travelled with a friend to Vancouver. We walked the streets of the then-notorious Downtown Eastside. Literally stepping over bodies and discarded needles, and politely declining invitations to enter alleyways, we met a young drug addict named Rob from Peterborough, Ontario. Boasting of his honesty, this former marathon runner told us he needed “$5 for crack.” We obliged, and were treated to a guided tour of misery, desperation, and sickness that exceeded anything I have ever seen in the developed world.
At the time of our visit, Insite had just been established; it was highly controversial and still illegal. I remember doubting that it would survive but coming to believe that it was Vancouver’s only hope.
In a terrific (though slightly dated) article entitled The needle and the damage undone, Mark Follman from Salon.com considers the challenges and successes of Insite since its establishment, as well as its potential application in the United States. Check it out.
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