“activity that undermines the security of Canada” means any activity, including any of the following activities, if it undermines the sovereignty, security or territorial integrity of Canada or the lives or the security of the people of Canada:
(a) interference with the capability of the Government of Canada in relation to intelligence, defence, border operations, public safety, the administration of justice, diplomatic or consular relations, or the economic or financial stability of Canada;”
“Territorial integrity of Canada”? Could that mean a separatist movement? “Public safety” is incredibly broad. Terrorist activities are ALREADY covered. Why these additional definitions.
Here is the legalese that allows CSIS “disruption” of these additional but apparently not terrorist threats to “national security”: “Part 4 amends the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act to permit the Canadian Security Intelligence Service to take, within and outside Canada, measures to reduce threats to the security of Canada, including measures that are authorized by the Federal Court.”
Now, C-51 says: ”
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Monthly Archives: March 2015
Now Some Posties Want to Get into the Censorship Business
Now Some Posties Want to Get into the Censorship Business
Political correctness is a poison practised by meddlers. The latest effort by the pure of twisted of heart and empty of head to silence views they don’t like is a protest by some members of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) against a populist local newspaper in the East End of Toronto called Your Ward News. The content that got the wannabe censors in a lather was a flyer for a new political party The New Constitution Party started by local personality James Sears.
‘We started getting calls from carriers as soon as it showed up,’ said Mark Brown with the Canadian Union of Postal Workers
A community newspaper called Your Ward News has created a conflict between the postal workers’ union and Canada Post management. ‘We believe that it could be hate mail,” said Mark Brown, national president of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers. ‘Our members are very concerned about delivering this type of mail.’
Flipping through the paper’s March issue, Brown takes exception to several images. A ‘Name That Nazi’ trivia game that edits a picture of late former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to put him in a Nazi uniform is one. He also points out another image, comparing John Tory to Olivia Chow, which superimposes the Mayor’s face onto his former competitor’s body.
The paper was formerly delivered by the paper’s own carriers, but a contract took effect this month leaving it in the hands of Canada Post. The union has asked that its members not be forced to carry it if they object to it. Brown says one carrier that expressed his opposition was given fewer issues to deliver, but told he wouldn’t be allowed to stop carrying them altogether.
‘We believe that our members should not be disciplined for raising legitimate concerns as it relates to hate mail,’ says Brown. A spokesperson for Canada Post told Global News in an email the magazine doesn’t fall within the corporation’s non-mailable matter guidelines.
‘We do not have the right to refuse a mail item because we or our employees object to its content,’ the statement read. ‘The content is the sole responsibility of the publisher, who is clearly identified in the newsletter. Anyone who has concerns about the content should either contact the publisher or simply dispose of it.’ In response to that, CUPW has asked Canada Post to cover the papers in non-transparent wrap, like they do for adult magazines.
The newsletter’s editor-in-chief, Leroy St. Germain, said critics are just upset about their political stance. ‘The unions are all friends with the NDP. I’ve been going after NDP candidates…It just seems to me like they’re all out of line,’ he said.
St. Germain says Your Ward News deals with opinion, and a bit of satire, not discrimination. He compares it to Charlie Hebdo overseas and says any Toronto mail carriers that refuse to carry it should be charged. ‘A postman has no right to be judging what’s in my mail or anybody else’s mail.” The paper is produced as a community flyer by the New Constitution Party of Canada, an unregistered party, led by James Sears; a former city council candidate who has said he will run in the next federal election as an independent. …
Canada Post is paid to distribute the paper to all addresses in a specific area whether people want it or not. The union says it has received at least one complaint about it from a customer.”
Donate & Help Us Preserve Free Speech and Property Rights in Canada
Donate & Help Us Preserve Free Speech and Property Rights in Canada
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https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/m…-ap/x/10233466
The McCorkill Legacy: Can Bequests be Overturned for Ideological Reasons?
Can you bequeath your money to whomever you like? Until last May, that might have seemed a silly question.
However, the enemies of free speech are nothing if not determined and we are living, it seems, in Absurdistan. Last May, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a well-funded rabidly anti-free speech group in the U.S., learned that a retired New Brunswick Professor Robert McCorkill had left his estate to the U.S.-based National Alliance. The SPLC raised the usual howls about “neo-Nazis” and “White supremacists”. Richard Warman, a pal of the SPLC, fumed that such a bequest was contrary to “public policy.” Although the will had been probated, a long estranged sister emerged and obtained an injunction until an application to overturn the will could be heard. Almost overnight, three more parties piled into the fray to try to hijack the will – the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (successor to the Canadian Jewish Congress), the League for Human Rights of B’nai Brith, and the Attorney General of New Brunswick. All sang the same tune: the NA was “racist”; Canada’s public policy is against “racism” (well, except for its 110% support of Israel as a Jewish state) and, therefore, the NA shouldn’t receive the bequest.
The estate’s lawyer, John Hughes of Moncton, who once worked with the late Doug Christie, felt overwhelmed. The right of a person to support the causes he deems fit in his will would seem to be sacrosanct, CAFÉ felt. First, we had to find an attorney in New Brunswick. We were fortunate to find a young, aggressive litigator, Andy Lodge of St. John.
CAFÉ was granted intervener status. CAFÉ filed a motion to strike large sections of the affidavits of the other parties. Many of these affidavits contained rants and opinion, rather than FACTS. The judge ruled in our favour for many of the passages cited.
On June 15, Judge William T. Grant of the Court of Queen’s Bench fired a double-barrelled blast into the guts of freedom of belief, freedom of speech and the right of a man to bequeath his property to a group supportive of his beliefs.
With the swipe of a pen, he overturned a bequest to the White nationalist National Alliance in the will of the late professor of chemistry Robert McCorkill, who died in St. John in 2004. After the will had been probated in May, 2013, the anti-free speech Southern Poverty Law Centre objected and insisted the will should be voided as contrary to the public interest. The SPLC had no standing in Canada, but a long-estranged sister Isabelle McCorkell, although claiming poverty, found a pricey Moncton law firm that made an application on her behalf to nullify the bequest, variously estimated as between $250,000 and $1-million. She was joined by the Attorney General of New Brunswick, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Studies (CIJA), and the League for Human Rights of B’nai Brith as interveners.
The application was heard in St. John in late January.
His judgement puts in peril any bequest to a group or maybe even a person whose views are deemed to be “contrary to public policy.”
Judge Grant found: “The purposes of the National Alliance and the activities and communication which it undertakes to promote its purposes are both illegal in Canada and New Brunswick. Consequently, I declare the residual bequest to it in the will of Harry McCorkill to be void.”
Judge Grant noted: “The respondent also submits that the writings of the NA were not in violation of any laws of the United States when they were published. However, they clearly violate the Criminal Code of Canada and this Court takes judicial notice of the fact that in this age of the Internet national boundaries are meaningless for the purposes of spreading hate propaganda such as that disseminated by the NA.”
The ruling is breathtaking in its finding of guilt (of illegality and “hate propaganda”) where no charges have ever been laid. The National Alliance operated in Canada for about a year in the early 2000s. It distributed literature and held small meetings. Yet, it was never charged much less convicted under Canada’s notorious “hate law” or any other law.
Has a New Brunswick court taken us into Alice and Wonderland and the Court of the Red Queen: The verdict is “guilty”; no need for a trial; now on to the sentence!
The judge rejected arguments by CAFE’s lawyer Andy Lodge that overturning the McCorkill bequest would lead to a flood of other such challenges to bequests to any group whose views might seem to be opposed to present government policy: “I, therefore, find that the voiding of a bequest based on the character of the beneficiary is, and will continue to be, an unusual remedy, where, as here, the beneficiary’s raison d’etre is contrary to public policy, it is the appropriate remedy.”
Despite the breezy assurance that voiding the will is only meant to get bad people — the judge found the National Alliance’s publications to be “racist, White supremacist and hate inspired, … disgusting, repugnant and revolting” — one wonders. Canada has abortion on the demand. That’s public policy. Right to Life groups exist to enact laws to control or limit abortion. That’s contrary to public policy. Would a bequest to them be voided? On a larger level, today’s Green, NDP and Liberal Parties, to say nothing of the separatist Bloc Quebecois, advocate positions clearly contrary to many of the ruling government’s public policies. Could bequests to them be ruled similarly illegal?
Indeed, isn’t any political dissent over laws or legislation an expression “contrary to public policy?”
The ruling will significantly diminish the assets of the bequest. Most of the lawyers, however, will do handsomely: “Ms McCorkell is entitled to her costs on a solicitor and client basis from the Estate [and she will get whatever is left of the bequest.] Mr. Streed [the executor] is also entitled to his costs on a solicitor and client basis from the Estate. The Province has not requested costs and CAFE was not successful in its intervention. While the submissions of CIJA and B’nai Brith have both been helpful, their own purposes were also served by intervening. So, I will award them each a lump sum of $3,000 including disbursements to be paid out of the Estate.”
This judgment MUST be appealed. Both the Estate and CAFÉ filed Notice of Appeal in July.This will cost us at least $30,000 and, not to be too coy about it, we need this money now! We must win this case or the right to bequeath your property to whom you will may have to pass the litmus test of political correctness. Because of the malignant role of the SPLC in orchestrating this assault on property rights and freedom of belief, this case could have major implications both in Canada and the U.S.A.
Will you help?
The Canadian Association for Free Expression, founded in 1983, is Canada’s leading free speech advocacy group and has intervened on behalf of victims of censorship from coast to coast.
Make donations to CAFÉ, P.O. Box 332, Rexdale, ON., M9W 5L3, CANADA.[Checks, VISA or Mastercard accepted.]
CRITICIZE IMMIGRATION & THE COPS OPEN A “HATE” INVESTIGATION INTO YOU
CRITICIZE IMMIGRATION & THE COPS OPEN A “HATE” INVESTIGATION INTO YOU
Long-time resident and immigration reformer Nick Champani commented: “Judging from the alleged content on this flyer, citing statistics on demographics from the government’s own Stats Canada and using suggestive language as an interpretation tool is not a “hate crime”. Using Police to deter people in their attempts to expose the negative effects of government-inflicted policies that have been undemocratically imposed on our society, is a typical police-state scare tactic. In the article, it states “Peel Regional Police’s 22 Division Criminal Investigation Unit and its Diversity Relations Unit have initiated a joint inquiry to investigate the distribution as a possible hate crime.” Notice they say “POSSIBLE hate crime”, and not “IS a hate crime”? Also, I advise anyone to see Section 319 in the Criminal Code themselves and provide input.
McCorkill Appeal Delayed as Judge Recuses Herself for Having Accepted Leonard Foundation Scholarship 40 Years Ago
McCorkill Appeal Delayed as Judge Recuses Herself for Having Accepted Leonard Foundation Scholarship 40 Years Ago
Just 48 hours before the New Brunswick Court of Appeals was to hear CAFE’s appeal against the decision of Justice William Grant, one of the three member panel Madame Justice Margaret E. Larlee recused herself. Her reason was that some 40 years ago she’d received a scholarship from the Leonard Foundation which offered assistance to White Protestant applicants.
The appeal is crucial as Justice Grant of New Brunswick’s Court of Queen’s Bench overturned the will of Robert McCorkill who willed the bulk of his estate of old coins ans artefacts to the National Alliance in the U.S. The appeal is vital to freedom of belief and property rights.
CAFE intervened on behalf of the executor of the estate, “This is a vital freedom of speech, freedom of belief and property rights issue,” says CAFE Director Paul Fromm,.
CAFE appealed.
This morning (March 17) the parties were advised: ” The Honourable Madame Justice Larlee has decided to recuse herself from the panel for the Appeal, which is scheduled in the above-noted matter on Thursday March 19, 2015. The matter will therefore need to be rescheduled by the New Brunswick Court of Appeal.”
CAFE’s lawyer received no notice of any objection.
Wikipedia explains: “Under the Leonard Foundation terms, bursaries were made available to students who were white, British subjects, andProtestant and no more than one-quarter of the moneys could be awarded to females. The goal was to provide financial assistance to needy students who showed the promise of becoming leading citizens of the British Empire. A complaint filed against the Leonard Foundation under the Ontario Human Rights Code in 1986 prompted litigation. The Ontario Court of Appeal held in 1990, that the trust’s exclusionary terms relating to race, religion, nationality, and gender were contrary to law.”
GIVE UP FREEDOM TO GAIN PERPETUAL WAR? NO THANK YOU!
Give Up Freedom To Gain Perpetual War? No Thank You!
This long-standing traditional consensus served us well down through the ages but in the last century it was torn apart by attacks coming from two different directions. While there have always been those who have defected from their society’s collective efforts in wartime in post-World War II conflicts these have occurred on a much larger scale as part of organized movements that have been driven by ideologies such as pacifism. From this direction the tradition that tells us to come together in unity when our country is at war has come under attack. The attack from the other direction is upon the tradition that tells us to make the conditions of peace the norm and it is this attack, and especially one particular form of this attack, that I wish to discuss here.
If the tradition under attack says that the conditions of peace in which the public are not overly burdened with rules and taxes and their customary rights and freedoms are not abridged are to be the norm then to attack this tradition is to say that the conditions appropriate for wartime are to be the norm instead. One way in which this occurred in the last century was that liberalism, the ideology that started in the so-called “Enlightenment” and came to dominate the Western world in the period known as the Modern Age, changed, at least in North America, in the period between the two World Wars. Until the First World War the ideas of John Locke, in which the need to protect the rights and liberties of the individual from the state was stressed, formed the most prominent strain in liberal thought. After the war the ideas of Jeremy Bentham, in which the role of the modern democratic state as the agent and instrument of utilitarian progress was emphasized, eclipsed those of Locke. The basis of this shift in liberal thought was the reasoning on the part of many liberals who served in administrative positions in the First World War that if the government can mobilize and organize society for the sake of the war effort in times of war then surely it can mobilize and organize society to achieve a better, more just, society in times of peace. This has certainly taken the liberty out of liberalism.
Another way in which governments, addicted to wartime powers, have resisted the tradition of reverting to the conditions of peace as the norm, has been to make conflict the norm rather than peace. About the time that liberalism underwent the shift described in the preceding paragraph liberals of the older type, including American historians such as Charles Beard and Harry Elmer Barnes, began to see a tendency in the foreign policy of the liberal American Presidents of the ‘30s and ‘40s towards holding up “freedom”, “democracy”, and “peace” as ideals while constantly mobilizing the country for war on behalf of those ideals. “Perpetual war for perpetual peace” was how Beard described this policy to Barnes, who borrowed the title for a anthology of essays he edited in 1953 that took a hard, critical, look at the policies of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. (1) Another of these older type liberals, who now called themselves libertarians, Murray N. Rothbard, observed that a “welfare-warfare state” had developed that both practiced the policy of perpetual war for perpetual peace and employed high levels of taxation, spending, and regulation for non-belligerent, progressive purposes in the Benthamite manner we have discussed. That a policy of perpetual war for perpetual peace could be used as a cover for collusion between military leaders and arms manufacturers for the sake of war profiteering on a whole new level made possible by the advent of mass production was a danger against which American President Dwight Eisenhower warned in his Farewell Address.
In the last decade and a half events have transpired that our governments have exploited to take the policy of perpetual war for perpetual peace to a whole new level.
Since the end of the Second World War the acknowledged leading country of the Western world has, for better or worse, been the United States of America. After the Cold War came to an end America and the West have become increasingly entangled in the conflicts of the Middle East. When, on September 11, 2001, the United States found herself the victim of a terrorist attack the American President at the time declared a “War on Terror”. As part of this “War on Terror” the American government created a powerful new agency, the Department of Homeland Security, charged with the task of preventing terrorist attacks on American soil, and the USA PATRIOT Act, which enhanced the investigatory powers of law enforcement and security agencies by removing such impediments as the need for a court order to search records, was rushed through Congress. Here in Canada Jean Chretien’s Liberals rushed similar legislation through Parliament in the form of the Anti-Terrorism Act of the fall of 2001.
The supporters of bills like these argued that they were necessary to remove obstructions that got in the way of security agencies and hindered them from doing their job of protecting us from the violence of terrorism. Critics and opponents of the same bills argued that these so-called obstructions were actually safeguards that protected Canadians and Americans against the misuse of government power and that to get rid of these safeguards is to abandon centuries of tradition, stretching back to before the founding of either the United States or Canada, in which these safeguards evolved to protect our rights and liberties, lives and persons. These critics were, of course, right. If we were to interpret every crisis that occurs as indicating a need for either enhanced government powers or a loosening of constitutional, prescriptive, and legal restraints on the use of government powers, very soon we would have an omnipotent state and no rights and freedoms worth speaking of.
Nobody made this case better than the late paleoconservative columnist Sam Francis, who in column after column took the administration of George W. Bush to task for such things as trying terrorism suspects before military tribunals rather than real courts, eavesdropping on confidential communications and issuing national id cards, creating the Department of Homeland Security, and putting police surveillance cameras throughout federal buildings in Washington D. C., as creating a slippery slope, whereby Americans would become accustomed to less rights, liberties, and constitutional protections and to being spied on by their government. Noting that the powers granted to the American government by the Patriot Act “are far larger than the government of any free people should have and that whatever powers this administration doesn’t use could still be used by future ones”, he pointed out that this “is how free peoples typically lose their freedom—not by a dictator like Saddam Hussein suddenly grabbing power in the night and seizing all the library records but by the slow erosion of the habits and mentality that enables freedom to exist at all” and concluded that the Bush administration was writing the last chapters in the story of American liberty.
Chretien’s Anti-Terrorism Act was no better. This Act utterly abandoned our country’s traditions of liberty and justice and allowed for people to be arrested and detained without charges, denied basic legal protections, and tried in secret without being guaranteed the opportunity to hear and respond to all the evidence against them, if the government were to determine them to be a threat to national security. This Act expired several years ago – legislation of this nature can only be enacted for five year periods – but, contrary to Kelly McParland’s claim in the National Post on February 2nd of this year, it did not expire without having been used. Among its other provisions was an amendment to the national security certificate provision of the Immigration Act that made possible an incident that was a shameful disgrace to our country.
An elderly man, who immigrated to Canada from Germany in the 1950s, who had never committed any violent crime here or elsewhere although he was the victim of terrorist attacks on the part of the followers of Rabbi Kahane, but who was repeatedly dragged through our courts for the “crime” of trying to spread the idea that accounts of atrocities committed by the other side in the Second World War still need to be revised to less resemble wartime propaganda, moved to the United States in order to escape this persecution. He married a woman there, applied for citizenship, and was arrested by United States Immigration who handed him over to our authorities, who issued a national security certificate against him. He was placed in solitary confinement and tried behind closed doors by a judge who refused to recuse himself, despite his obvious bias, and found guilty on the basis of evidence he was not allowed to hear in full, and was then sent to Germany, with our government knowing full well that the German government would arrest him upon landing, and sentence him to five years in prison for mere words that he said. This man, Ernst Zündel, was a noted admirer of a rather odious historical regime, but that did not make him a terrorist any more than Pierre Trudeau’s admiration for the even more odious Maoist regime in China, which, as was not the case with Zündel, was still around when Trudeau was doing the admiring, made the former Prime Minister a terrorist. It is certainly no excuse for treating the man with such blatant injustice.
Chretien’s Anti-Terrorism Act has, as we have noted, expired but our current Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, wishes to pass another one. Bill C-51, which has passed its second reading and been referred to the Standing Committee in the House, has several parts to it. The first, and the one most emphasized by the bill’s advocates and defenders, is the Security of Canada Information Sharing Act which tells other government agencies to share their information with those charged with protecting national security. This sounds reasonable at first, until you think about why government agencies were prevented from doing this in the first place. The fourth part is the one the bill’s detractors prefer to emphasize because it greatly enhances the powers of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS). The bill’s supporters say this is to reduce threats to Canadian security, its detractors say that it is to enable CSIS to better spy on Canadians. Other parts of the bill include the Secure Air Travel Act, which authorizes the creation of a no-fly list and otherwise ensures that airport security will be even more of an obnoxious pain in the buttocks than it already is, and various amendments to the Criminal Code including one that makes mincemeat out of the traditional right to confront and challenge your accuser in court in the euphemistic name of the “protection of witnesses”.
This bill is an abomination and the vote on it should be a pretty good litmus test as to how much respect for Canadians and their traditional rights and freedoms our Members of Parliament and Senators possess. The present government was elected by supporters who were sick and tired of the way the Liberal Party was overtaxing and overregulating Canadians while showing complete disregard for our traditions, rights, and freedoms. Why then is it determined to establish a surveillance state? It is rather ironic that the most active opposition to this bill in the House seems to be coming from the party whose members can never speak about freedom without sounding like a Cold War era apparatchik spouting off about “the freedom loving people of the Soviet Union”.
The fact of the matter is that the “war on terrorism” is the ultimate form of “perpetual war for perpetual peace”. The enemy in this war is not a foreign government, with its own territory, that can be decisively conquered, defeated, or destroyed. No matter how many Cato the Elders we may find to punctuate their speeches with “terrorismo delenda est”, we will never be able to produce a single Scipio Africanus to conclusively defeat terrorism, or an Aemilianus to raze its stronghold to the ground, and sow its fields with salt, that it may never rise again. It is not that kind of an enemy. Terrorism can pop up anywhere at any time. A war against terrorism is a war that can never end. A government that wishes to constantly retain its wartime powers and abandon the traditional understanding that peace is to be the norm, not war, could find no better means of accomplishing this end, than by declaring a war on terrorism, and passing bills like C-51.
(1) The title was reused by the late, left-libertarian novelist and essayist Gore Vidal, for a collection of essays similarly criticizing the policies of more recent administrations in 2002.
The Legal Grinding of Brad Love
CAFE Appears on Deanna Singola Show
Canadian Association for Free Expression
Box 332,
Rexdale, Ontario, M9W 5L3
Ph: 905-566-4455; FAX: 905-566-4820;
Website http://cafe.nfshost. com
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