by Eva van Loon
I’m offended by those dirty political ads, like the one insinuating there is something wrong with the moral fiber of a certain leader because he once likened our flag to a beer-can label.
Our flag does rather resemble a beer-can label. Or, maybe beer cans resemble our flag? Didn’t the flag come first, anyway? The ad-writer is probably too young to remember the horsing around that went into the choice of that flag. Why wouldn’t patriotism go with a great Canadian beer, anyway?
These ads must have sprung up sometime during my decade in the US. The stinkiest aspect of ‘Murrican politics has somehow slimed its way through the border and is furring over our political system like black mold.
If you aren’t frightened by the infestation of personality cults in our politics, you haven’t seen how different the American legal system is from ours, or how law depends on how politics works.
The difference between Canada’s system and a monarchy is that our queen is a figurehead, there mostly to show us what graciousness means. The difference between America’s system and a monarchy is, they don’t call it that, and they dethrone their king every four years—or shoot him if they can’t wait that long—so that the corporatocracy can install another member of American royal families as its puppet. (Sometimes that doesn’t quite work, as when the people voted in that upstart Obama—no wonder he’s graying so fast.)
by Eva van Loon
Oh, I’d so love to go to the salsa club tonight! And tomorrow is my friend’s birthday, at our favorite restaurant—if anybody dares to come these days, given BC’s new DUI rules.
I’ll take some bedding and sleep in the car, then, since it’s too far to walk. Thank heaven for reclining seats and a reading light!
It’s too dangerous to drive at night in BC anymore, whether you’ve imbibed or not. Until some brilliant lawyer knocks this stupid, heinous, unconstitutional. anti-productive “warning” law down, IT IS NOT HEALTHY TO DRIVE HOME AT NIGHT! The stomach-turning anxiety of what can happen to you, whether you’ve had an alcoholic drink or not, simply isn’t worth it.
Unless, of course, you enjoy being pulled over, treated like a criminal without the benefit of due process, forced to blow without getting disclosure of the results, robbed of your method of transport, stripped of your license, and fined into poverty.
It can cost a driver about $4,000 in fees and fines to be “warned” under the new povincial rules—not to mention personal losses like jobs, schooling and relationships.
I’m reminded of the American parents whose child was taken from them because a blood test showed a tinge of opiates—Mom’d had an “everything bagel”, with poppy seeds on it, for breakfast. So, If I drink slightly fermented fruit juice...? Soft cider? 1
Don’t bother getting your car back if it’s worth less than $700. Cheaper to get a new one.
There is no natural justice in this procedure. Not...a...shred.
Used to be, police had to have R&P (reasonable and probable grounds) to stop you, make you blow, etc. Then, if they had or could develop R&P to make a case for your having Over .08 alcohol in your blood, they could charge you with a bona fide crime.
by Eva van Loon
You’ve read the letter from the BCCLA to the City of Powell River, about apologizing for the infamous letters from our City’s big-city lawyers threatening the “Powell River Three” (www.bccla.org)?
Were you also amazed that a law firm described as “acting in local government legal matters throughout the province’ and founded by a lawyer who taught municipal law and even wrote the text on it, would write letters that, the BCCLA thinks, fly in the face of case law and quote a case not even on all fours?
To me, misleading case-law citation always smacks of intimidation. To the BCCLA, the law firm’s action transgresses the Charter of Rights and Freedoms which underlies cherished foundations of our culture, like the freedom to think what you like and say what you want—within reason.
The client of the law firm that threatened the Powell River Three is really you and me, as represented by the City–the very client now being sued by the BCCLA for those letters. Yes, you got that: in effect, we are being sued by the BCCLA for actions of our elected representatives.
That delicious little case (mmmm! Supreme Court of Canada, here we come!) could eat up a lot of precious revenue in legal fees and make Powell River the national poster child for impaired understanding of democratic rights like free speech.
Why are we forced to fight a Charter case? Alternatively, why would the Three have to sue for intimidation? Why not a complaint to the Law Society of British Columbia by the the City about its lawyers (if anybody thinks LSBC would listen)? The City should not have to pay out taxpayers’ money for these letters if they are as dumb as the BCCLA implies they are.
The City could sue the lawyers for writing those letters. Malpractice cases are a lot more fun than intimidation cases—easier, too. Already one hapless victim has surrendered in public–what greater proof of damage to public process and trust is needed? Read more »
By Eva van Loon
Colossal blunder.
That’s the kindest phrase that comes to mind about the City’s having a Victoria law firm send nasty letters to three citizens about alleged libels of Council.
It’s not simply the prospect of good classic defenses to defamation: truth, privilege, or fair comment.
It’s not the damn-the-torpedoes-full-steam-ahead attitude of those letters, which ignore the issue of whether municipalities can sue citizens with their own money.
It’s not even the prospect of enriching lawyers, at the expense of the defendants and citizens.
It’s much worse.
Six weeks after that wonderful community meeting over a sustainability charter-what I called a “phoenix conversation” for Powell River-when City reps declared Council prepared for a new public openness, this threatening act by Council confirms the worst fears and suspicions of many. It hints at a quasi-military mindset prepared to wage legal battle to preserve what the public perceives as allegiance to corporatism and outside interests, rather than till the soil of community fairly and squarely alongside the citizenry.
Those we’ll-sue-you-for-saying-that letters were an exertion of raw power. Mr. Brown’s apology, wrung from him as surely as if he’d been physically threatened, sends tears of humiliation down our public face. We are exposed as naked, weak, stripped of the civic power we had assumed to be our birthright. It doesn’t take much fear-mongering to destroy free speech.
Litigation seldom, if ever, serves as a tool for growth. It often serves as a poison-tipped weapon-or at the least, a klaxon herald of war. Litigation is not good for children and other living things and should be relegated to weapons of last resort, like nuclear bombs and depleted uranium. Virtually any settlement does less damage than a lawsuit. Read more »
by Paul Schachter
Scratch a Powell Riverite and you’ll find someone who loves the outdoors. Even if we haven’t headed into the bush in years, we consider the right to do so part of our heritage—witness the torrent of protest unleashed by a power-development company’s recent threat to deactivate the Goat 2 forest road. Whatever the legal niceties of title, we consider the lands granted to the mill and to the forest companies as our lands.
We have a right to feel so proprietary. The lands were to be used to secure the prosperity of Powell River. When they are being sold for corporate profit, we feel betrayed. We are left to protest the injustices, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.
Fighting back is important, but there is also a new way to preserve at least some of our heritage—through Malaspina Land Conservancy Society. MLCS is a non-profit, registered charity which facilitates any landowner’s desire to protect important pieces of land from destructive development.
Plenty of individuals in our area want to preserve the unique natural features of their property and can’t abide the thought of having their lands clear-cut or fragmented.
Unfortunately, that is what landowners usually face because of taxes and inheritance laws. Now they can preserve the pristine beauty of their lands by donating all or part of them to a land conservancy, either by gift or in their wills. They can continue to enjoy the property in its natural state while it is protected forever from division, development and destruction. The habitat of thousands of species, including our own, is protected and helps maintain the diversity of life. While this is a reward in itself, a donation of property to a registered charitable land conservancy can return a substantial tax benefit. Read more »
by Eva van Loon
It has finally happened: Englese has corrupted Legalese so far that an American judge is burned up over lawyers’ having their way with poor old English.
U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert Kressel pronounces his orders in perfectly good English in his courtroom—only, apparently, to have dumb lawyers write ‘em up all wrong. So His Honor sent a memo to the whole bankruptcy bar to straighten up and fly right, grammatically as well as legally. Some of this stuff, he thinks, they should have learned in grade school.
You wouldn’t think it would be necessary to tell lawyers “to use regular grammatical English as much as possible’ since English is still officially the language of the land down there He also wants lawyers to stop paraphrasing the statutes, the actual laws, because they risk changing the meaning (because obviously they don’t know what the hell they’re doing with the language, get it?). Then he gets down to the nitty gritty.
“Guideline No. 6 – Capitalization
“Lawyers apparently love to capitalize words. Pleadings, including proposed orders, are commonly full of words that are capitalized, not quite randomly, but certainly with great abandon. Please limit the use of capitalization to proper names. For example, do not capitalize court, motion, movant, debtor, trustee, order, affidavit, stipulation, mortgage, lease or any of the other numerous words that are commonly capitalized. We love this one: “Eliminate superfluous words. They serve no purpose other than to make the document sound more legal, which is exactly the opposite of the goal that I am trying to accomplish. Examples of such words are: hereby, herein, in and for, subject, that certain, now, that, undersigned, immediately, heretofore entered in this case, be, and hereby is–the list goes on and on. Compare the meaning of Now, therefore, it may be and is hereby ordered that: with It is ordered.” Read more »
by Eva van Loon
The news was on the Evening Howl: the grizzlies and black bears have concluded a successful mediation. In view of their common interests—i.e., devouring salmon at spawning season—both groups have decided to stop arguing about who gets the dwindling fish first, in favor of jointly bringing a class-action suit.
Well, it might work as a class-action suit. One of the realisations coming out of the mediation was that neither grizzes nor black bears know diddly squat about running a lawsuit. Turns out the wolves want to be in on the action, too, and there’s a new controversy about that, the wolves pointing out that they also fatten up on salmon every fall, and the bears claiming that wolves merely steal fish from the real fishers, the bears. More work for the mediator!
It was, of course, a courier wolf who alerted the bears to the humans’ plan. Apparently some half wolf sneaked into a meeting his human attended, and was able to get hold of the details—700 coastal rivers to be dug into and re-routed, salmon-spawning beds or no salmon-spawning beds. He promptly leaked those details to the first wild cousin he met, a courier passing through the back alleys of Powell River.
The bears had a lot of trouble with the concept of seven hundred. Counting is not their strong suit. The courier finally got through to them by explaining that seven hundred rivers is pretty well the same as all the rivers the bears know of.
They realised this is a life-or-death issue for bears. Mama Bear wailed, “My cubs will be forced to live on garbage! We don’t want to be welfare bears!”
We didn’t hear a peep from major news services about the Indigenous Peoples’ Summit on Climate Change at Anchorage in late April. A week later, a fellow student at California Institute of Integral Studies sent all of us the fruits of this caucus of indigenous representatives from North and South America, the Pacific, Africa, Russia, Asia, and the Caribbean, the brutally forthright Anchorage Declaration.
If you read nothing else, take a deep breath, pour yourself a stiff one, and visit our website for the full text of the Summit’s consensus on where humanity finds itself, and what must be done. Here’s a couple of bookend quotes:
“Mother Earth is no longer in a period of climate change, but in climate crisis. We therefore insist on an immediate end to the destruction and desecration of the elements of life.
“Through our knowledge, spirituality, sciences, practices, experiences and relationships with our traditional lands, territories, waters, air, forests, oceans, sea ice, other natural resources and all life, Indigenous Peoples have a vital role in defending and healing Mother Earth. The future of Indigenous Peoples lies in the wisdom of our elders, the restoration of the sacred position of women, the youth of today and in the generations of tomorrow....
“We offer to share with humanity our Traditional Knowledge, innovations, and practices relevant to climate change, provided our fundamental rights as intergenerational guardians of this knowledge are fully recognized and respected. We reiterate the urgent need for collective action.”
by Eva van Loon
Last year’s column on the desirability of creating a Civic Forest from Lund to Saltery Bay (“Fish Need TLC, Too”) didn’t exactly rock the corporate boat. “Good idea,” people yawned, and went right back to working on problems they can more or less control. The last thing many of us want to contemplate is setting up yet another public campaign for something government should really figure out for itself. Read more »
by Eva van Loon
The folks at BC Elections will likely be coming to get me when this is published.
If they don’t, they’ll fail to apply uniformly the registration provisions of the Elections Act for “third-party advertisers” during an election period.
All I need to do is criticise the government. Peculiar as it may seem to us ordinary folk, “advertisement” includes criticism. Criticising Candidate A means the speaker supports Candidate B, and that’s advertising, ladies and gentlemen. Read more »