Category: Courts

For the benefit of anybody who was wondering just why the CCP had to go under the axe, the National Post had the answer on page A16 of their September 8th edition in an article by Lorne Gunter. Despite all the howling that will arise from the left at the news of its demise, the fact remains that the CCP was more like the CCCP than Canada…

Kill the Court Challenges Program
National Post
Fri 08 Sep 2006
Page: A16
Section: Editorials
Byline: Lorne Gunter

The Conservative government is considering axing the Court Challenges Program (CCP). Good. The sooner the better.

Most Canadians have probably never heard of the CCP. And it’s budget is only a little under $3-million a year. Yet no other federal program or law has done more damage to Canadian democracy. No other has so fundamentally altered Canadian society without recourse to Parliament.

The CCP has since 1985 funded dozens of high-profile court cases challenging the validity of federal and provincial laws in the name of feminism, gay rights, visible minorities, refugees, prisoners and the criminally accused.

Although its funding comes entirely from taxpayers, the CCP was hijacked early on by leftist cause-pleaders at odds with the broad Canadian public on such issues as gay marriage, prisoner voting, detention of criminals and a Criminal Code prohibition on spanking children, abortion on demand, rape shield, immigration rights, prohibitions on free speech in the name of protecting minority sensibilities and the entire grab bag of fashionable causes that fall under the heading of “political correctness.”

CCP-funded groups have achieved through the courts new rights and laws they would never have been able to win democratically.

In that way, the CCP is fundamentally anti-democratic.

Ian Brodie — who is now Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Chief of Staff and part of the decision-making on CCP’s budget — was once a political science professor at the University of Western Ontario. He specialized in political influence on the courts.

In a book he wrote during this earlier career, called Friends of the Court, Mr. Brodie outlined how CCP administrators had aggressively “created networks of interest groups and encouraged new groups to pursue public interest legislation.” They doled out millions to radical organizations and urged them to start Charter challenges that targeted traditional Canadian values and laws.

“Over time,” Brodie reported, CCP managers and their interest group friends became so chummy that “these networks of groups became increasingly involved in running the program.” In effect, the organizations that stood to benefit most from the program — both in terms of funding and court decisions that sided with their causes — gained inordinate control over it.

After 1993, when the Liberals returned to power, special interests were put in charge, and their funding decisions made secret.

Not only did left-leaning interest groups want to keep CCP cash flowing into their legal departments, they understood that if they controlled the CCP granting process, they could keep groups opposed to their viewpoints from receiving equal funding, thereby giving their own causes an unfair advantage in court.

Over time, the CCP and its fundees have become a very cozy, close-knit little clan. The program almost never funds cases brought by individuals, only those supported by powerful rights-seeking lobbies, and almost always the same dozen or so lobbies.

Upwards of 15% of the program’s budget goes to finding litigants who are willing to launch cases against federal and provincial government statutes opposed by the interest groups whose directors effectively run the CCP.

One Toronto feminist lawyer, a founder of LEAF, the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund — which is CCP’s largest recipient — is frequently funded by CCP to represent other beneficiaries, such as the Canadian Abortion Rights Action League. She has also used herself as a test case. In the early 1990s, she went to court to overturn Canadian tax laws on childcare expenses and was represented by another LEAF lawyer who was paid in part by the CCP.

Ted Morton and Rainer Knopff, two University of Calgary political scientists, wrote in their book The Charter Revolution, that the CCP also “played a lead role” in the formation of the Canadian Prisoners’ Rights Network, the Charter Committee on Poverty Issues, the Working Group on Aboriginal and Treaty Rights, and the Equality Rights Committee of the Canadian Ethno-cultural Council.

The CCP was even the principal funder in 1992’s Schacter case, in which CCP-paid intervenors convinced Supreme Court judges to grant themselves “reading in” powers to create new rights in Canadian law where none were approved by Parliament or the legislatures. Not coincidentally, it is special interest litigators whose cases are underwritten by CCP who have been the principal beneficiaries of this new judicial muscle to create rights out of thin air.

The CCP, with its biases and secret agendas, has no place in a pluralistic society. Ottawa should turn off its tap.

No sooner had one judge, Superior Court Justice David Marshall, finally done something right (ie, actually enforcing the law instead of trying to make it), along come another bunch of magesterial marsupials to bugger it right back up again. And they wonder why people have lost faith in the country’s courts.

More on this as it develops.

Proving yet again that they know where their priorities are, the McWimpy government is waging a desperate battle to get back to the business of doing nothing. Attorney General Michael Bryant is going to court to argue that endless chinwagging is better than actually doing something to resolve the situation in Caledonia. Being typically Grit, Bryant seems to think that the law just doesn’t apply to everybody.

On Tuesday, Ontario Superior Court Justice David Marshall knocked the wheels off this little bullshit bandwagon by ordering that there will be no talks between the protestors rioters and anyone until the law of the land is followed and a previous court order to vacate is obeyed. Let’s face a nasty truth here, boys and girls. No matter what some of the lefty-lovers try to say, everybody with a brain in their head knows damn well that if these were white people pulling a stunt like this, they’d have been dragged off to the pokey long ago, using any force necessary.

This puts the provincial Grits in one hell of a bind. No longer able to hide behind the “but we’re doing all we can; we’re talking to them” BS, they are still going to be expected to do something about the problem. Grits hate having to solve problems. Problems keep people distracted from Liberal incompetence and malfeasance so, obviously, it is in the Liberals’ best interest to drag every “crisis” out for as long as possible. Without any looming politically correct disaster to dazzle the masses, they start asking hard questions that Grits, with their wishy-washy, mealy-mouthed absence of guiding principles, are utterly unable to deal with. Conservatives (both big and little C), on the other hand, seek out such challenges and meet them head on; hence all the lib-left media fearmongering about us.

Got that? For Liberals, the logic is: problems good, solutions bad. Come to think about it, it’s kind of like a scaled down version of the way that Mideastern despots rail against Israel lest their people realise that it is their own leadership that is the author of most of their miseries. Hmm.

The natives, meanwhile, have been taking every opportunity to drop not-so-subtle insinuations that, without talks ongoing, the only alternative is mayhem. More proof of their thuggery.

Hazel Hill, a spokeswoman for the group, calls the ruling “an act of aggression.” What bullshit. Attacking an elderly couple in their car and trying to run over a cop are acts of aggression.

Rioter mouthpiece Janie Jamieson even has the nerve to imply that it’s up to the townspeople to keep cool heads. “There is a constant push from some (residents) to see bloodshed and they’re going to keep on creating situations until it happens,” she barfed.

When will this hypocrisy end?

Well, that didn’t take forever, did it? Only about six months, right? And hey, what’s six months of crass lawlessness compared to the warm, fuzzy feeling that we all get from being nice and politically correct? After all, it’s not as if the “non-native” residents of Caledonia can actually expect the same rights and security as everyone else now, is it?

In case you haven’t heard, Superior Court Justice David Marshall has pulled the plug on the appeasement tactics of the McWimpy government and ordered that ALL talks with the rioters protesters be called off until they get the hell out of Caledonia. Saying that “It is common knowledge that the people of Caledonia, after five months of occupation, have seen security in their town replaced by lawlessness, protesters in battle fatigues, police officers in riot gear,” Marshall displayed a rare convulsion of judicial common sense and made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that ignoring the law of the land is not going to get you what you want. It also shows the Ontario Grits that they’re not going to get away with jerking off a bunch of home grown Robert Mugabe wannabes, pretending that they’re actually doing something. The Grits, however, don’t seem to be getting the message.

Many, including a lot of Caledonia residents, are worried that this is just going to throw gas on an already smoldering woodpile. Guess what, kids? The fire is already lit. These thugs have clearly gotten in into their heads that bullying is the way to get what you want. If this isn’t stopped dead in its tracks, you can all bet your arses that we will be seeing one hell of a lot more of this in the future.

No one wants another Ipperwash or another Oka. We may not want it, but it may be what’s needed.

Hey, Judgie. Yeah, you; the one in the funny dress.

What’s that? Robe? Yeah, okay; whatever.

Lookie here, yer Hoitytoityness, the only reason I’m even bothering to talk to you is because you’ve been up to some pretty stupid stuff and I think it’s time somebody smacked you with a brainstick. Or something.

Why is it that every time you get some alleged pedophile child-molesting sack of shit in front of you, whatever passes for your brain suddenly heads south for the winter? You start mumbling on about “rehabilitation” and the “rights of the accused” and all the other warm, fuzzy bafflegab that the social worker types are always tossing around like a cranky caged ape flinging poop at rubberneckers. Dudley the Diddler looks up at you with a long face and yurps up some hairball about getting treatment and you get so open minded that your brain falls right the fuck out.

Now look what you did. You went and made me say fuck in my blog. Thanks a lot, scramblehead.

Can it really be that you just don’t get it? Are you really that dense? Everybody else knows that child molestors can’t be fixed, so I find the idea that you don’t know too kind of hard to swallow. It’s not rocket science. Michele Mandel gets it; so does Linda Williamson. And these two come from the politically correct la-la land of TO. People in Brandon get it, so do people in Hamilton, Edmonton, Halifax and Montreal. Even the damned Globe and Mail seems to have clued in. Vic Toews definitely gets it. So why don’t you?

And don’t go giving me any of that “I’m limited by the law” bullcrap, either. We both know that guys like you bugger about with the law all the time when it suits you, and then say that the Charter gives you the authority to do it. But when it comes to actually protecting our society’s children, buttheads like you are always missing in action. Why is that, I wonder?

With apologies to Winnepeg Sun columnist Tom Brodbeck, I’m afraid that I have to horn in on his racket for a minute here. I’m not big on screwing off with other people’s ideas, but I think that I can make an exception here. Just what the hell am I up to? Well, it’s simple: I want to hand out an Eight-Ball Award.

That’s right. As many of you probably already know, Tom created the Eight-Ball Awards after Manitoba provincial court Judge Ronald Meyers gave a murdering little bastard young offender a sentence of one day (yes, you read that right: ONE DAY) for putting a billiard ball in a sock and smashing a man over the head with it until he was dead. Ever since then, Tom has been handing out Eight-Ball Awards in his Winnepeg Sun column to highlight some of the worst perversions of justice in our legal system.

I’m sorry to say that he’s been a very busy boy. So, with that in mind and considering that Tom likely has a lot of other stuff to do, let me fill in for him just this once.

This Eight-Ball Award goes to Ontario Court Justice Gregory Pockele. Yesterday, Pockle handed down a sentence of just a year of house arrest and a year of probation to 26-year-old Katherine Peckham of London, Ontario for killing her own newborn baby.

Yes, you read that right and no, I’m not making it up. Kill a baby and get sent to your room. Peckham had kept her pregnancy a secret from everyone around her, and not for the first time. She had concealed another pregnancy several years ago, but her family caught her the day of the birth before she could dispose of her problematic little bundle.

This time, however, there was no cavalry to ride to the rescue of the little baby boy who was born, full term and healthy, sometime between April 9 and 18.

In the early hours of the morning, while everyone else was asleep, she went to the bathroom and quietly gave birth. She cut the umbilical cord with scissors and bundled the child up before shoving him into a cardboard box in the basement . . . and leaving him there to die. She even admitted that he was alive at the time. She looked in on him again the next day after walking her (lucky to be alive) daughter to school, but couldn’t tell if he was still alive or not. She never looked again.

A couple of weeks later, on May 2, the family dog was caught scratching at the box in the basement and the ghastly secret was out.

So now you know what a baby’s life is worth in Justice Pockele’s courtroom. How pathetic.