While I agree that the idea of a "jail term" for not answering the census is a bit harsh, I think most Canadian realize that they will never likely be put in jail for not answering a census form (or for providing false information). The reason the jail term part is there is because all federal legislation, especially for summary offences (equivilent to a misdemeanor for our American cousins), require both a fine and a jail term. I've never heard of someone going to jail for not filling out the census form.
I've also never heard of Stats Can or any other Federal Ministry of Department for that matter, sharing "localized statistical data" with any "direct marketing agencies". The majority of the clients my company serves in Ottawa are Federal Ministries, Agencies and Departments and I can tell you with great confidence that this does not happen. Hell, they hardly share such information amongst themselves, let alone with private industry or direct marketers.
And as you stated, the information is anonymous. The reason they track down to the postal code is the reason they do statistics in the first place - so they can see where to properly allocate our tax dollars and programs. If you lie or fail to fill out the form, you just might screw yourself out of some benefits you are entitled to (an extra postal route, re-drawing of riding boundaries, more federal health care money etc).
So as for the Jedi stuff, well I'd guess many people aren't really Jedi (although a sizable geeky minority might just be), but would identify themselves as such if you asked them on the street today. Why? Is it a protest against the Stats Can survey? I suspect that, given our recent history in Canada with the Christian Brothers or the Residential Schools, this shows a "protest" against mainstream religions. This same Stats Can survey shows 4.8 million (16%) Canadians have no religion, a 33% increaswe over a decade ago (12%) and way more than before 1971 (1%).
Sounds to me that Canadians are loosing faith in religion more than in ther government.
Sorry you missed my point, but I see you are just proving it.
It's not whether the things I listed are the fault of the USA. I know most are not. Not the people, not the government, but the system. Which is supposedly controlled by the government, who are supposedly controlled by the people.
A system that seems to care more about awarding $65 million USD to a guy who said "hey you stole my sex.com" (or $100 million USD to an old lady who apparently doesn't know what a cup holder is or what the phrase "Caution, Contents are Hot" means) than about some real important issues (yes, I'm trying real hard not to say "Get some Priorities").
Wouldn't the time, money and judicial resources wasted on this crap have been better spent? The guy is not likely to see his $65 Million any way. How many people in the US could have recieved medical insurance for the public money this case has used up? How many more important cases could the judges and court staff helped to reolve instead of this one.
I really hope you guys DO fix it.
But I was simply giving you a taste of what many of us on the outside perceive when we hear about this kind of thing, which seems to be unique to the American system.
I'm just a little disturbed that this kind of money can and is awarded for such trivial things like stealing web site names or spilling hot coffee on your own lap.
The US taxpayer didn't pay the award, but you bet they paid for the courthouse, the jury costs, the judge, the baliff, the court reporter, the filing papers etc in the place this case was decided. And now the Supreme Court of the US, clearly a government supported institution, is involved.
If such frivoulous law suites were disallowed or restricted by the "loser pays all" rule that many Commonwealth countries have, that money could be used to fix some of the US centred ills I spoke of, instead of being wasted on something so dumb.
If the guy committed theft, send him to jail. 8 years of litigation for an ungodly sum of money he is not likely to see even if he wins seems like a big waste of time, money and judicial resources.
North Korea is doing a little nuclear dance, with Pakistan and India waiting in the wings and Iran putting on its dancing shoes.
Isreal and the Palestinians are murdering each other daily at the drop of a hat.
Children in parts of Central Africa are being sold into slavery to fight for a rebel army, who like to slaughter civilians.
Millions die of disease, malnutrition every hour of every day.
Bush and Blair get nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for starting a war.
Millions of American citizens have no Health Care coverage and can't afford even basic medications.
Thousands of American citizens have had their rights trampled by the Patriot Act.
With these kinds of injustices going on all over the world and in the US, the US justice system, courts and resources are being used up by two idiots who have been fighting for 8 years over the words "sex.com"? One guy has even been awarded $65 million USD for wasting the time, money and resources of the US Judicial System all the way up to the Supreme Court!
Am I the only one who thinks this is just plain wrong? Stupid? Couldn't any of that public money (incurred by the courts for providing courtrooms, reporters, etc) be better spent?
Let me tell you, as a non-American who has lived close enough to the US all my life (about 15 KM) to have observed this, this is the reason the US is disliked and even hated in many parts of the world. Not individual American citizens mind you, but American culture and especially various American governments, especially Republican administrations. Outside the US you are seen as a petty, greedy society that only cares about yourself and are willing to use all your military and economic might to back it up. Kinda like the school yard bully...
Fair or unfair, that is the perception beyond the land of the stars and stripes. And this entire story, in all it's sordid detail, only backs up that perception.
In the first world, we outside the US just shake our heads in disgust and wonder at such things. In the third world, they throw stones, pick up guns and drive trucks full of explosives when they hear about this (especially if they are living under a repressive regime and their children are starving). So when there is a "next time", don't act surprised...
I hate to be harsh, but as a friend and a cousin, just thought you'd like to know.....
How many times have we seen the videos of Mohommed Atta and his buddy walking through Logan airport and entering the gate on CNN over the last 1.5 years?
Millions.
Most major airports already have plenty of video surviellance to stop baggage theft. That didn't stop the 9/11 guys, nor would it stop anyone bent on a suicide mission.
All that was needed was a good, solid cockpit door and 9/11 would just be another day on the calander. Or maybe an Air Marshall and 1 or 2 Glazer safety slugs. Or better intelligence gathering by the people whose job it is to know about and prevent these things (NSA, CIA, FBI).
Better yet how about stopping the root cause of terrorism in the first place? As other posters have pointed out, terrorists don't usually recruit from populations that are happy and treated fairly . Perhaps US foriegn policy should concentrate less on supporting repressive regimes so they can get cheap oil and more on helping the people live free (without all the bombing;) ). I'd be willing to bet more terrorism would be stopped 10 minutes after the creation of a Palestinian state, than with all the cameras, bombings and special ops combined. People won't attack your country if they feel you are acting fairly.
Any and all of the above would help, But not more cameras.
While JDO is interesting, the Apache OJB (Object Relational Bridge) project is even better. It provides a JDO implementation as well as an ODMG impelemtation and a low level PersistenceBroker API. Lots of choice. More than one way to do things, allowing the developer to trade-off make trade-off when they are appropriate. It is fully transactional and supports the latest JDO as well as ODMG specs.
And it can be used to persist objects transparently...you can set it up to persist objects you already have and completely control how the object relation mapping takes place in a few config files.
We've used it on projects since November, and I don't think we'll ever go back to Entity Beans. This project allows you to choose when you would like to use byte code enhancment techniques (JDO) or reflection techniques(ODMG) or even combine the two.
I agree. Love your country because it earned your love, not because you were brainwashed to do so from kindergarten on.
An loving you country is not the same as blindly following your leaders. Loving your country is knowing your leaders are humans that you may agree with or not, depending on the situation.
Our Prime Minister is a knob. But he's the best of a group of knobs that we have to choose from (notice the "group"...much more than 2). When he says "NO" to involvment in a war without UN support, I agree and support him. When he says he'll get rid of the GST and then doesn't, I can't stand him.
Thanks for saying something I've always beleived to succinctly.
Woops you're right...the Act is Canada Act 1982...the Charter simply didn't come into effect until 1984 (I think that irony was intended by Pierre....)
Please enumerate specific incidents when this provincial Human Rights Code, the Human Rights code of any other province or territory (apart form Bill 101, we know about that) or the sections in the Criminal Code of Canada dealing with Hate Crimes have:
1) Resulted in someone being sent to jail. 2) Resulted in someone loosing their property. 3) Resulted in someone self-censoring hateful thoughts. (yeah I know this is tougher to show but I'm making a point) 4) Been applied in the past 2 years.
I note that you present to our American cousins a law that they have no way of knowing about, that represents only one part of Canada, and you represent it as the law of the entire nation. You imply in your pleadings that the police are running around arresting people for saying "I hate (your favourite minority here)" like some kind of Stasi, which is simply NOT TRUE. Back on the farm, we call this type of intellectual dishonesty FUD.
I am willing to bet that the "chilling effect" you talk about doesn't happen since most ordinary Canadians don't know what is in their provincial human rights codes, so they express their opinions as always. So which has a greater "effect" on personal liberty, some Provincial Human Rights legislation that few Canadians know about and a rarely used section of the Criminal Code, or the "effect" of criminal sanctions that can result in arrest and detention without charge or trial, finger-printing and registration of any Arab-looking men entering the US (including the Canadian-born legislative assistant to the Minister of Immigration!) or the unilateral declaration by a leader that a citizen is an "enemy combatant" and therefore deprived of all liberty without due process of law (think Padilla)?
Thus I will stand by my opinion, informed by my own study and experience in Canada and the experience of my relatives currently living in the US. And as a former Customs Officer with CCRA, I can tell you with absolute certainty that Customs if far more worried about getting tariffs and taxes on traded goods and preventing illegal handguns and drugs from entering Canada (mostly from the US, I might add) than from wasting time censoring your poor, deluded pamphlets about Ayn Rand....
(2) Subsection (1) does not apply to a private communication or to a communication intended to be private.
You appear to have answered you own question. You can say you hate anyone for any reason...this law does not stop that and, as indicated above, actually says it does not apply in that situation.
But you can't publish it. Publish means flyers, leaflets, newspapers (other than letters to the editor), videos etc (and possibly web sites, but this has never been tested...and likely never will since most ISP have their own rules about this ans would teminate your service).
This law is a direct result of the various trials in Toronto of Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel, who was formerly procecuted under an old law for "knowingly spreading false news". The law is not meant to stiffle free expresion of opinions, but to prevent propoganda that incits violence and hatred against identifiable groups and minorities (or even women, who in Canada are a minority of 52% of the populace). You should have provided a link to the purposes of the act. BTW, even if this was challenged, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms would prevail.
BTW, the law you've quoted is the Human Rights Code of the Province of British Columbia from 1996. It does not apply to all of Canada nor is it a criminal law.It applies only in the province of BC. This law is a private law sanction requiring an individual or group to file a complaint with the provincial human rights commission for investigation within 1 year of the incident. Therefore there is no prior restraint of an individuals actions. This act also has nothing to do with or no affect on the University of Toronto, which is a different province!
Canada Customs has been quite "overzealous" in it's holding up of shipments of various forms of "porn" (gay literature, occasionally some pro-choice literature, and, of course, the kooks from the aynrand institute), but the information has almost always get through (as in the case you quoted).
In other words, no-one's liberty was taken away without due process of law...perhaps we could ask some of the prisoners at Gitmo or Jose Padilla and his ilk about due process, habeous corpus and fair trails, if we or their lawyers were allowed to meet with them.
As for displaying swastikas publicly, you've clearly never been to Toronto when the Heritage Front or when the Church of the Creator/George Burti and those pin heads are marching.
Canada may not be perfect, but it does a hell of a lot more for individual and group liberties and rights than is the current norm in the US. And next time, please at least get you facts straight before spreading your right-wing, libertarian, Ayn Rand-ish FUD.:)
Canada Act 1984..we've had a codified Charter of Rights and Freedoms for about 20 years now. That doesn't mean we didn't have them before (as they we part of our English Common Law heritage back to the Magna Carta and our Napoleonic Code heritage in Quebec back to, well, Napoleon)
Our Charter contains mayny of the same fredoms that your Bill of Rights has.
Isn't it more likely that the criminals will just carry bigger guns? Or start wearing kevlar vests? Or shoot you first in a surprise attack, so you don't have a chance to use your gun?
By your logic, the US having a lot of nukes or a large army (a gun) should deter a criminal (Iraq) from harming them. So why did you invade again? To disarm them? Hmmmm.....
You think your safe, but you are not. And that is most dangerous of all for you....
My point was that Canada, which has very strict gun control is a very safe place because of it.
Yes DC is one of ther worst area's. That's why I picked it as an example. I live in our nation's capital (Ottawa, in case you didn't know). We have a population of 1 million and I can count the number of murders last year on one hand, NONE of which involved a firearm.
I suspect the the insanely restrictive gun laws in DC are a response to gun violence not the cause of it. This year DC had about 250 murders. 10 years ago DC had over 700 murders. Sounds like the insanely restictive gun laws are working....
Let's compare similar cities then like say Toronto and New York? Toronto had a total of 78 murders last year. How many did New York have (excluding, of course, the Twin Towers)? How about Detroit? How about Philly? Las Vegas? Aren't these all similarly sized cities? Toronto and Montreal are the 2 biggest cities in Canada (To about 4 million, including the GTA and Montreal about 2.5 million) and they each had 78 killings, of which, statistically only about 1/3 were gun realated. Of that 1/3, 65 percent were by hand guns. That's not very much. Vancouver is third, but that's because they had a serial killer! How many murders in LA, or New York or Philly involved guns? On average in the US it's 2/3. So your country, on a per capita basis, has WAY more murders than mine, and of those, the majority of the murders in your country are commited with guns. Both our countries have similar urban populations (actually Canada is more urban than the US), but the main difference is our gun control laws.
I think my point is made.
BTW, just so you don't think we're all Inuit or something. 80% of our 32 million people live withing 300 km of the US border...and can you guess where most of the handgus used in the commision of an offense up here come from?
You guessed it....
Oh yeah, and it's not illegal to own guns in Canada. Just about every farm and cottage has a hunting rifle. Hunting is a way of life up here. But since you don't do a lot of "hunting" with a Glock 9mm or a Kalashnikov, they are illegal or strictly controlled ->I can own the Glock but it must be locked up separately from the ammunition, it cannot be carried on you person unless you are entitled to do so (think cop), it is usually only used at licenced target ranges and it cannot be transported to that range without a permit.
As for "It only disarms law-abiding members of the public, leaving them defenseless against any criminals.", maybe criminals carry guns in the US because they know that they need them because everyone else is armed? Just a thought, using your logic...
"Of the 171 firearm-related homicides, 110 were committed with a handgun, 46 with a rifle or shotgun, 7 with a sawed-off rifle or shotgun, 3 with a fully automatic firearm, and 5 with another type of firearm.
Handguns were used in 65% of all firearm homicides. This proportion has risen from 46% in 1998 as a result of the continuing decline in the number of homicides involving rifles or shotguns."
That's out of 554 total murders in the entire country of 32 million during 2001. Compare that to Los Angeles, with 658 murders in the same time, but with 1/3 the population.
In the "civilized nation" 65.6%of all the murders were committed with a firearm during the same time.
Hmmmm, perhaps there are some people who are "too stupid to have a gun".
Say what you will about "mummy government", I am quite safe from gun violence here as are my children. That is, after all, why I elected my governement - to ensure my life, liberty and security of the person.
If all you have protecting you from sending ammo clips through the mail is a minimum wage postal clerk, then you have the country you deserve...:)
I can tell you for sure, Canada Customs wouldn't let this into my country because owning automatic weapons is illegal unless you can prove that you need it for your work (that means only cops and certain members of the military).
Hey man, good luck even getting this in the first place. If it comes through the regular mail, it's likely to be delivered in person by FBI/RCMP/Federale/MI5/(your national police force here) officers...;)
If it's couriered, it's likely to be inspected by their internal security and then reported to the above just the same...
Even if you get it, how long can you use it before your shot by a state trooper of you lodal police service when they see it and decide not to question you as to the location of the rest of the Kalashnikov...
I believe under California law, the death of an unborn child is murder if it occurs in during an assault on the mother. So the mother does not have to die for the death to be considered murder (though we know that this is not true in the Laci Peterson case). By the same token, an doctor performing an abortion is protected because assault is usually defined legally as non-consensual contact with another person. Since during an abortion, the patient is consenting to the doctors contact, the doctor cannot be charged with murder (no matter what the pro-lifer's would like) even though s/he causes the death of the baby.
Quite a clever law actually...no need to define the unborn child as a "person" at all. the whole law revolves around the mother being a person, of whcih there is no debate.
Why would I buy or use an html/web page editor form a company or organization with quite possibly one of the most ugly and ametuerish web sites I have seen in a long time?
I don't mean to be rude (or to sound like Simon Cowell!) but after the excellent web page designs we saw here and most especially here, how could I take any tool seriously when created by people who clearly can't do good web design.
I personally would like to know what Radu used...;)
And for the record, I don't pretend to be a web designer extrodinaire, but I'm quite sure ANYONE could do a better job than that. If I had created an HTML editor, I'd make damn sure the web page I "sold" or "promoted" it on looked a little better than one created by a grade 9 student...
Slashdot Mirror
While I agree that the idea of a "jail term" for not answering the census is a bit harsh, I think most Canadian realize that they will never likely be put in jail for not answering a census form (or for providing false information). The reason the jail term part is there is because all federal legislation, especially for summary offences (equivilent to a misdemeanor for our American cousins), require both a fine and a jail term. I've never heard of someone going to jail for not filling out the census form.
I've also never heard of Stats Can or any other Federal Ministry of Department for that matter, sharing "localized statistical data" with any "direct marketing agencies". The majority of the clients my company serves in Ottawa are Federal Ministries, Agencies and Departments and I can tell you with great confidence that this does not happen. Hell, they hardly share such information amongst themselves, let alone with private industry or direct marketers.
And as you stated, the information is anonymous. The reason they track down to the postal code is the reason they do statistics in the first place - so they can see where to properly allocate our tax dollars and programs. If you lie or fail to fill out the form, you just might screw yourself out of some benefits you are entitled to (an extra postal route, re-drawing of riding boundaries, more federal health care money etc).
So as for the Jedi stuff, well I'd guess many people aren't really Jedi (although a sizable geeky minority might just be), but would identify themselves as such if you asked them on the street today. Why? Is it a protest against the Stats Can survey? I suspect that, given our recent history in Canada with the Christian Brothers or the Residential Schools, this shows a "protest" against mainstream religions. This same Stats Can survey shows 4.8 million (16%) Canadians have no religion, a 33% increaswe over a decade ago (12%) and way more than before 1971 (1%).
Sounds to me that Canadians are loosing faith in religion more than in ther government.
Sorry you missed my point, but I see you are just proving it.
It's not whether the things I listed are the fault of the USA. I know most are not. Not the people, not the government, but the system. Which is supposedly controlled by the government, who are supposedly controlled by the people.
A system that seems to care more about awarding $65 million USD to a guy who said "hey you stole my sex.com" (or $100 million USD to an old lady who apparently doesn't know what a cup holder is or what the phrase "Caution, Contents are Hot" means) than about some real important issues (yes, I'm trying real hard not to say "Get some Priorities").
Wouldn't the time, money and judicial resources wasted on this crap have been better spent? The guy is not likely to see his $65 Million any way. How many people in the US could have recieved medical insurance for the public money this case has used up? How many more important cases could the judges and court staff helped to reolve instead of this one.
I really hope you guys DO fix it.
But I was simply giving you a taste of what many of us on the outside perceive when we hear about this kind of thing, which seems to be unique to the American system.
David,
Point taken.
I'm just a little disturbed that this kind of money can and is awarded for such trivial things like stealing web site names or spilling hot coffee on your own lap.
The US taxpayer didn't pay the award, but you bet they paid for the courthouse, the jury costs, the judge, the baliff, the court reporter, the filing papers etc in the place this case was decided. And now the Supreme Court of the US, clearly a government supported institution, is involved.
If such frivoulous law suites were disallowed or restricted by the "loser pays all" rule that many Commonwealth countries have, that money could be used to fix some of the US centred ills I spoke of, instead of being wasted on something so dumb.
If the guy committed theft, send him to jail. 8 years of litigation for an ungodly sum of money he is not likely to see even if he wins seems like a big waste of time, money and judicial resources.
Saddam and OBL are still on the loose.
North Korea is doing a little nuclear dance, with Pakistan and India waiting in the wings and Iran putting on its dancing shoes.
Isreal and the Palestinians are murdering each other daily at the drop of a hat.
Children in parts of Central Africa are being sold into slavery to fight for a rebel army, who like to slaughter civilians.
Millions die of disease, malnutrition every hour of every day.
Bush and Blair get nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for starting a war.
Millions of American citizens have no Health Care coverage and can't afford even basic medications.
Thousands of American citizens have had their rights trampled by the Patriot Act.
With these kinds of injustices going on all over the world and in the US, the US justice system, courts and resources are being used up by two idiots who have been fighting for 8 years over the words "sex.com"? One guy has even been awarded $65 million USD for wasting the time, money and resources of the US Judicial System all the way up to the Supreme Court!
Am I the only one who thinks this is just plain wrong? Stupid? Couldn't any of that public money (incurred by the courts for providing courtrooms, reporters, etc) be better spent?
Let me tell you, as a non-American who has lived close enough to the US all my life (about 15 KM) to have observed this, this is the reason the US is disliked and even hated in many parts of the world. Not individual American citizens mind you, but American culture and especially various American governments, especially Republican administrations. Outside the US you are seen as a petty, greedy society that only cares about yourself and are willing to use all your military and economic might to back it up. Kinda like the school yard bully...
Fair or unfair, that is the perception beyond the land of the stars and stripes. And this entire story, in all it's sordid detail, only backs up that perception.
In the first world, we outside the US just shake our heads in disgust and wonder at such things. In the third world, they throw stones, pick up guns and drive trucks full of explosives when they hear about this (especially if they are living under a repressive regime and their children are starving). So when there is a "next time", don't act surprised...
I hate to be harsh, but as a friend and a cousin, just thought you'd like to know.....
No, it is quite insightful.
;) ). I'd be willing to bet more terrorism would be stopped 10 minutes after the creation of a Palestinian state, than with all the cameras, bombings and special ops combined. People won't attack your country if they feel you are acting fairly.
How many times have we seen the videos of Mohommed Atta and his buddy walking through Logan airport and entering the gate on CNN over the last 1.5 years?
Millions.
Most major airports already have plenty of video surviellance to stop baggage theft. That didn't stop the 9/11 guys, nor would it stop anyone bent on a suicide mission.
All that was needed was a good, solid cockpit door and 9/11 would just be another day on the calander. Or maybe an Air Marshall and 1 or 2 Glazer safety slugs. Or better intelligence gathering by the people whose job it is to know about and prevent these things (NSA, CIA, FBI).
Better yet how about stopping the root cause of terrorism in the first place? As other posters have pointed out, terrorists don't usually recruit from populations that are happy and treated fairly . Perhaps US foriegn policy should concentrate less on supporting repressive regimes so they can get cheap oil and more on helping the people live free (without all the bombing
Any and all of the above would help, But not more cameras.
While JDO is interesting, the Apache OJB (Object Relational Bridge) project is even better. It provides a JDO implementation as well as an ODMG impelemtation and a low level PersistenceBroker API. Lots of choice. More than one way to do things, allowing the developer to trade-off make trade-off when they are appropriate. It is fully transactional and supports the latest JDO as well as ODMG specs.
And it can be used to persist objects transparently...you can set it up to persist objects you already have and completely control how the object relation mapping takes place in a few config files.
We've used it on projects since November, and I don't think we'll ever go back to Entity Beans. This project allows you to choose when you would like to use byte code enhancment techniques (JDO) or reflection techniques(ODMG) or even combine the two.
Best of both worlds.
Jim Dandy...
How's tourism anywhere in the US since the War?
Testify Brother!
...much more than 2). When he says "NO" to involvment in a war without UN support, I agree and support him. When he says he'll get rid of the GST and then doesn't, I can't stand him.
I agree. Love your country because it earned your love, not because you were brainwashed to do so from kindergarten on.
An loving you country is not the same as blindly following your leaders. Loving your country is knowing your leaders are humans that you may agree with or not, depending on the situation.
Our Prime Minister is a knob. But he's the best of a group of knobs that we have to choose from (notice the "group"
Thanks for saying something I've always beleived to succinctly.
Woops you're right...the Act is Canada Act 1982...the Charter simply didn't come into effect until 1984 (I think that irony was intended by Pierre....)
Ok,
Please enumerate specific incidents when this provincial Human Rights Code, the Human Rights code of any other province or territory (apart form Bill 101, we know about that) or the sections in the Criminal Code of Canada dealing with Hate Crimes have:
1) Resulted in someone being sent to jail.
2) Resulted in someone loosing their property.
3) Resulted in someone self-censoring hateful thoughts. (yeah I know this is tougher to show but I'm making a point)
4) Been applied in the past 2 years.
I note that you present to our American cousins a law that they have no way of knowing about, that represents only one part of Canada, and you represent it as the law of the entire nation. You imply in your pleadings that the police are running around arresting people for saying "I hate (your favourite minority here)" like some kind of Stasi, which is simply NOT TRUE. Back on the farm, we call this type of intellectual dishonesty FUD.
I am willing to bet that the "chilling effect" you talk about doesn't happen since most ordinary Canadians don't know what is in their provincial human rights codes, so they express their opinions as always. So which has a greater "effect" on personal liberty, some Provincial Human Rights legislation that few Canadians know about and a rarely used section of the Criminal Code, or the "effect" of criminal sanctions that can result in arrest and detention without charge or trial, finger-printing and registration of any Arab-looking men entering the US (including the Canadian-born legislative assistant to the Minister of Immigration!) or the unilateral declaration by a leader that a citizen is an "enemy combatant" and therefore deprived of all liberty without due process of law (think Padilla)?
Thus I will stand by my opinion, informed by my own study and experience in Canada and the experience of my relatives currently living in the US. And as a former Customs Officer with CCRA, I can tell you with absolute certainty that Customs if far more worried about getting tariffs and taxes on traded goods and preventing illegal handguns and drugs from entering Canada (mostly from the US, I might add) than from wasting time censoring your poor, deluded pamphlets about Ayn Rand....
Ah yes, facist Christian Fundementalism rears its ugly head and shows it's true colours.
;)
Thank you for confirming that I have you an the correct list...
(2) Subsection (1) does not apply to a private communication or to a communication intended to be private.
:)
You appear to have answered you own question. You can say you hate anyone for any reason...this law does not stop that and, as indicated above, actually says it does not apply in that situation.
But you can't publish it. Publish means flyers, leaflets, newspapers (other than letters to the editor), videos etc (and possibly web sites, but this has never been tested...and likely never will since most ISP have their own rules about this ans would teminate your service).
This law is a direct result of the various trials in Toronto of Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel, who was formerly procecuted under an old law for "knowingly spreading false news". The law is not meant to stiffle free expresion of opinions, but to prevent propoganda that incits violence and hatred against identifiable groups and minorities (or even women, who in Canada are a minority of 52% of the populace). You should have provided a link to the purposes of the act. BTW, even if this was challenged, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms would prevail.
BTW, the law you've quoted is the Human Rights Code of the Province of British Columbia from 1996. It does not apply to all of Canada nor is it a criminal law.It applies only in the province of BC. This law is a private law sanction requiring an individual or group to file a complaint with the provincial human rights commission for investigation within 1 year of the incident. Therefore there is no prior restraint of an individuals actions. This act also has nothing to do with or no affect on the University of Toronto, which is a different province!
Canada Customs has been quite "overzealous" in it's holding up of shipments of various forms of "porn" (gay literature, occasionally some pro-choice literature, and, of course, the kooks from the aynrand institute), but the information has almost always get through (as in the case you quoted).
In other words, no-one's liberty was taken away without due process of law...perhaps we could ask some of the prisoners at Gitmo or Jose Padilla and his ilk about due process, habeous corpus and fair trails, if we or their lawyers were allowed to meet with them.
As for displaying swastikas publicly, you've clearly never been to Toronto when the Heritage Front or when the Church of the Creator/George Burti and those pin heads are marching.
Canada may not be perfect, but it does a hell of a lot more for individual and group liberties and rights than is the current norm in the US. And next time, please at least get you facts straight before spreading your right-wing, libertarian, Ayn Rand-ish FUD.
Canada Act 1984..we've had a codified Charter of Rights and Freedoms for about 20 years now. That doesn't mean we didn't have them before (as they we part of our English Common Law heritage back to the Magna Carta and our Napoleonic Code heritage in Quebec back to, well, Napoleon)
Our Charter contains mayny of the same fredoms that your Bill of Rights has.
Isn't it more likely that the criminals will just carry bigger guns? Or start wearing kevlar vests? Or shoot you first in a surprise attack, so you don't have a chance to use your gun?
By your logic, the US having a lot of nukes or a large army (a gun) should deter a criminal (Iraq) from harming them. So why did you invade again? To disarm them? Hmmmm.....
You think your safe, but you are not. And that is most dangerous of all for you....
My point was that Canada, which has very strict gun control is a very safe place because of it.
Yes DC is one of ther worst area's. That's why I picked it as an example. I live in our nation's capital (Ottawa, in case you didn't know). We have a population of 1 million and I can count the number of murders last year on one hand, NONE of which involved a firearm.
I suspect the the insanely restrictive gun laws in DC are a response to gun violence not the cause of it. This year DC had about 250 murders. 10 years ago DC had over 700 murders. Sounds like the insanely restictive gun laws are working....
Let's compare similar cities then like say Toronto and New York? Toronto had a total of 78 murders last year. How many did New York have (excluding, of course, the Twin Towers)? How about Detroit? How about Philly? Las Vegas? Aren't these all similarly sized cities? Toronto and Montreal are the 2 biggest cities in Canada (To about 4 million, including the GTA and Montreal about 2.5 million) and they each had 78 killings, of which, statistically only about 1/3 were gun realated. Of that 1/3, 65 percent were by hand guns. That's not very much. Vancouver is third, but that's because they had a serial killer! How many murders in LA, or New York or Philly involved guns? On average in the US it's 2/3. So your country, on a per capita basis, has WAY more murders than mine, and of those, the majority of the murders in your country are commited with guns. Both our countries have similar urban populations (actually Canada is more urban than the US), but the main difference is our gun control laws.
I think my point is made.
BTW, just so you don't think we're all Inuit or something. 80% of our 32 million people live withing 300 km of the US border...and can you guess where most of the handgus used in the commision of an offense up here come from?
You guessed it....
Oh yeah, and it's not illegal to own guns in Canada. Just about every farm and cottage has a hunting rifle. Hunting is a way of life up here. But since you don't do a lot of "hunting" with a Glock 9mm or a Kalashnikov, they are illegal or strictly controlled ->I can own the Glock but it must be locked up separately from the ammunition, it cannot be carried on you person unless you are entitled to do so (think cop), it is usually only used at licenced target ranges and it cannot be transported to that range without a permit.
As for "It only disarms law-abiding members of the public, leaving them defenseless against any criminals.", maybe criminals carry guns in the US because they know that they need them because everyone else is armed? Just a thought, using your logic...
Nice site BTW...hope your doing better after Nortel... I live in Barrhaven. ;)
That may be true, but I'll eat my hat if the Mounties and CCRA don't track it all the way to your door and make sure you do have your PALs.
:)
It would probably be "lost in the mail" if I ordered it...I only have an expired FAC.
At least, that's how it would go down in a civilized nation. Don't know how it would go down in Canada.
:)
Need I remind you that last year the capital of your "civilized nation" alone has a murder rate nearly 48 times that of my entire nation -> Washington DC, 48.5 murders per 100 000 people, compared to the entire country of Canada, 1.78 murders per 100 000 people. Also of note from Stats Canada on murders involving guns:
"Of the 171 firearm-related homicides, 110 were committed with a handgun, 46 with a rifle or shotgun, 7 with a sawed-off rifle or shotgun, 3 with a fully automatic firearm, and 5 with another type of firearm.
Handguns were used in 65% of all firearm homicides. This proportion has risen from 46% in 1998 as a result of the continuing decline in the number of homicides involving rifles or shotguns."
That's out of 554 total murders in the entire country of 32 million during 2001. Compare that to Los Angeles, with 658 murders in the same time, but with 1/3 the population.
In the "civilized nation" 65.6%of all the murders were committed with a firearm during the same time.
Hmmmm, perhaps there are some people who are "too stupid to have a gun".
Say what you will about "mummy government", I am quite safe from gun violence here as are my children. That is, after all, why I elected my governement - to ensure my life, liberty and security of the person.
If all you have protecting you from sending ammo clips through the mail is a minimum wage postal clerk, then you have the country you deserve...
Well then, remove the FBI from my list.
I can tell you for sure, Canada Customs wouldn't let this into my country because owning automatic weapons is illegal unless you can prove that you need it for your work (that means only cops and certain members of the military).
While a very good site, not me...I'm a different JC..
:)
Oh well..
Read the nic, brother...
:)
I'm Canadian, not American (and thank god for that!)
Airport?
:)
Hey man, good luck even getting this in the first place. If it comes through the regular mail, it's likely to be delivered in person by FBI/RCMP/Federale/MI5/(your national police force here) officers...;)
If it's couriered, it's likely to be inspected by their internal security and then reported to the above just the same...
Even if you get it, how long can you use it before your shot by a state trooper of you lodal police service when they see it and decide not to question you as to the location of the rest of the Kalashnikov...
Gotta love the Patriot Act...
You know, that's brilliant. I agree. Somebody mod this guy up
I believe under California law, the death of an unborn child is murder if it occurs in during an assault on the mother. So the mother does not have to die for the death to be considered murder (though we know that this is not true in the Laci Peterson case). By the same token, an doctor performing an abortion is protected because assault is usually defined legally as non-consensual contact with another person. Since during an abortion, the patient is consenting to the doctors contact, the doctor cannot be charged with murder (no matter what the pro-lifer's would like) even though s/he causes the death of the baby.
Quite a clever law actually...no need to define the unborn child as a "person" at all. the whole law revolves around the mother being a person, of whcih there is no debate.
Why would I buy or use an html/web page editor form a company or organization with quite possibly one of the most ugly and ametuerish web sites I have seen in a long time?
I don't mean to be rude (or to sound like Simon Cowell!) but after the excellent web page designs we saw here and most especially here, how could I take any tool seriously when created by people who clearly can't do good web design.
I personally would like to know what Radu used...;)
And for the record, I don't pretend to be a web designer extrodinaire, but I'm quite sure ANYONE could do a better job than that. If I had created an HTML editor, I'd make damn sure the web page I "sold" or "promoted" it on looked a little better than one created by a grade 9 student...