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In Canada, Criminal Libel Charges Laid For Criticizing Police
BitterOak writes "A Calgary man is facing criminal charges of libel for criticizing police. According to the story, the RCMP have filed five charges against John Kelly for claiming on his website that Calgary police officers engaged in perjury, corruption, and obstruction of justice. What makes the story unusual is that the charges are criminal and not civil. Even in Canada, which has much less free speech protection than the United States, it is extremely rare for people to be charged criminally with libel. It is almost always matter for civil courts."
time to pack my bags and head north. ohh wait....
It meant that they could raid his house and get a copy of everything that he had, possibly then loosing some of it for him. If it was a civil action then they would not have been able to do this. What is dreadful is that the ''other side'' (ie the police in this case) get an immediate advantage. This is abuse of power.
http://www.bownessca.com/
The purpose of this site is to inform the residents of Bowness, the citizens of Calgary and others, as to how senior individuals within the City of Calgary placed the Bowness Community Association (the BCA) into receivership by illegal, corrupt and criminal means.
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There has been over 5 years of corrupt and criminal acts that have been committed and they are continuing to be committed by Derek Podlubny and the present Board, ably assisted by lawyers from the law firm of Blake Cassels and Graydon.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantees a Canadian's right to free speech, is inherently weaker than the US constitution because it contains a notwithstanding clause that allows a province to suspend many rights for 5 year periods. Quebec's language laws wouldn't stand up to a first amendment challenge in the US but it is allowed to violate the charter of rights and Freedoms in Canada because they used the notwithstanding clause.
Even in Canada, which has much less free speech protection than the United States ...
Really?
The first item in the US bill of rights guarantees freedom of speech. What does the first item in our charter of rights do?
1. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
Oh, right, it effectively nullifies the rest of the charter by including vague language about "reasonable limits".
You also can't start a chapter of the KKK, start publishing material that has no value and offends a large audience.
Yeah, that's the problem. See, I don't think we should have government bureaucrats decide whether or not something "has no value". How about we let the audience decide that for themselves? If we want to prove that our ideologies are indeed superior to those of the KKK, that can only be done on a fair and equal forum of debate where the other side has a fair chance to speak. Right now, all we've proved is that the anti-racists have bigger guns.
All the guy has to do is raise a reasonable doubt in the minds of ONE juror.
When he's not convicted, this will be seen by many as proof that the RCMP did in fact perjure themselves. Dumb move, cops.
The problem is that whenever you stop protecting the unpopular speech, and let the government decide what is and is not of "value" or "useful" or whatever, you open the gates to restricting speech for all sorts of bad reasons. It is the unpopular speech that must be protected.
As an example, look at the sham that is the Canadian Human Rights Commission. You have a lead investigator that said, on the record "Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don't give it any value. It's not my job to give value to an American concept." Where you don't have the right to question your accuser, hearsay is admissible with few exceptions, and truth is not always a defense. Basically, if a plaintiff can demonstrate you hurt their feelings (with rather dubious standards of evidence to do so), even if your statements were true you can get in trouble.
Really you want free speech very protected, where there are clear lines as to what can't be done and those lines are only there as needed to protect people (like you can't order someone to kill someone else and claim free speech). As it stands in Canada, the laws are used to shut down unpopular speech.
I think the GP is right actually. The problematic part of Quebec law is the requirement that French be predominant on all business signs. I can't see that surviving in the US.
Note that the restriction is not on what you can say, it's on the language of business signage. Practically speaking I'm not sure if that means Canada has less free speech that the States.
Given that this was one of only two uses ever of the notwithstanding clause, I don't consider it to be a weakness in the constitution. Think of it more as a shortcut constitutional amendment. Note that notwithstanding overrides expire after five years in order to give voters a chance to express their opinion via a general election it before they are renewed.
The US constitution has...how many amendments? The Canadian Constitution has none, and two uses of the notwithstanding clause. I wouldn't say one is stronger or weaker than the other.
Finally, as clear as the 1st amendment appears to be, we all know you can't say anything you want whenever you want wherever you want. There are limits. The Canadian constitution is explicit about that so when you read them side by side the Canadian text appears wishy-washy, but in effect they are equivalent.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
Apparently, when the Cajuns left Nova Scotia they left the pussies in Quebec.
Someone's probably going to call Godwin's law and ignore the rest of this post, but speech is the means by which the Holocaust got under way
That's a shifty and deceptive rationalization. It only makes sense if you take a cartoonish view of what happened in the build up to the Second World War.
The thing to keep in mind is that Hitler didn't rise to power because he said bad things. He rose to power because of three things. Germany had been shafted badly by the Treaty of Versailles and most of Germany had an ax to grind. The Nazis had simplistic solutions to the considerable problems of the everyday German. The Weimar Republic was toothless and weak, not all due to the Treaty of Versailles. For example, it couldn't have enforced a restriction on speech against Hitler. (We know this because they tried even to the point of imprisoning him.) Third, both the Germany military and the elite of Germany had prepared the end of the Weimar Republic. For example, the Junkers funded Hitler and the Nazi Party. Meanwhile, the German military was planning out blitzkrieg warfare (a way of using a highly mobile military with combined arms to defeat a more static force) long before they had a military with which to conduct that sort of warfare. The military ramp up following Hitler's takeover probably was planned years before Hitler took power and would have required considerable support from both military and business elites to carry it off. I can't prove it, but where did Hitler get those ideas and that kind of experience to pull off a six year transition from weak client state to first class military power?
A serious implication of your statement is that somehow regulated speech would have saved the Weimar Republic from the Nazis. I think that absurd. The average German probably despised the Weimar Republic as a puppet government imposed by military defeat and the government was being undermined by its military and elite. My view is that the Weimar Republic would have ended anyway, even if Hitler remained rotting in jail. Some dictator would have taken over. Then the military strategy of rapid build up and selective invasion via blitzkrieg would have led to the Second World War anyway.
But instead, we must assume that a healthy country is going to fall into Nazism or worse just because kooks can say mean things. That hasn't happened in the US, for example, despite our (no doubt criminally) lax laws on restricting bad speech. Or perhaps Canada is composed of potential criminals who are only kept in check by careful regulation of their speech?
When I read naive and ignorant argument like the above, I have to wonder, do you ever think about what you say? No offense, but if you're going to argue for a major restriction on Canada speech based on events leading up to the Second World War, you really should understand those events first. Similarly, if you're going to argue for such a broad restriction on Canadian speech, you really need to understand what is being lost and how these powers can be abused by government.