Inquisition 21
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Mechanisms of repression
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Mechanisms of repression
Book burning in Canada given Royal Assent
By The Littleman
And so it came to pass that in July this year the most depressing piece of legislation ever enacted by a democratic (!) government has been given the Royal assent. The bill in question is Bill C-2 in Canada (previously Billy C-12 and prior to that Bill C-20), which sets out to ban the written word, audio tape, school photograph, schoolgirl’s diary in fact anything that contains/describes someone under the age of 18 involved in any sort of ‘sexual’ activity - like a photo of a young girl trying on her mother’s shoes and wrap which, of course, is provocative!) Anyone that is except those with a ‘legitimate purpose’ and where no harm to the child would result (which I don’t suppose includes breaking up a child’s family because Mom or Dad has read a smutty story). In other words, they legislated so that Canadian writers couldn’t write about ‘children’ and Canadian citizens couldn’t read about children but the police could. The immediate problem as I see it is that it will effectively ban any sex education material aimed at under 18s and it would include the Bible where many of the old time patriarchs were always begatting with their teen brides (Abraham was well over a hundred when he started messing with the teenager Miriam, who is reckoned to be the matriarch of all Arabs). I’m pretty sure the Christian right hadn’t got this in mind when they backed this bill.
To encapsulate the bill’s basic premise I can do no better than to quote the children’s author, Mr. Montpetit, who said: "The last time I came to Ottawa was to accept the Governor General's Award for children's literature. This time, I am here because I could be charged with child pornography. That changes my situation considerably. I take this personally."
Now before I get started, I must state that I love the Canadians, the vast majority of whom are great people overshadowed to a large extent by their southern neighbor. But they do have some of the sleaziest politics in the western world and one of the nastiest nit picking bureaucracies I’ve encountered anywhere, I thought African bureaucracy was bad but Canada’s is worse, a lot worse. And as we’ve seen from other western English speaking countries when politicians have something to hide, or things aren’t going well, they trot out yet another sex law to distract the population and to prove what fine upstanding moral citizens their elected representatives are. And so it is with this bill. It does nothing to promote the safety of children and everything to suppress freedom of expression. All I can say is; poor Canadians you deserve better.
This law is a typical knee jerk reaction to the result of one trial (and I thought it was only the UK parliament that acted out such idiotic charades – obviously it’s an infectious disease). The trial in question was that of Regina v Sharpe (and to a lesser extent Regina V Beattie). John Sharpe had been charged with two counts of possession of child pornography under s. 163.1(4) of the Criminal Code and two counts of possession of child pornography for the purposes of distribution or sale under s. 163.1(3). Now if Mr. Sharpe had gone along with the police and meekly accepted his guilt, then everything would have been peachy. They’d have ruined his life and went off congratulating themselves heartily for a job well done. Unfortunately he didn’t: he put up a defense – the bastard!
Basically what had gotten the police so hot under the collar was not so much the pictures of naked boys in his possession (some of whom ‘appeared’ to be under 18) but the fact that Mr. Sharpe was a writer and he had written a number of stories, for his own amusement, which featured under aged children in a variety of sexual (in some cases violently sexual) scenarios. And they could have been disseminated, even though there was no evidence that he had indeed done so, hence the distribution charge.
Mr. Sharpe’s lawyers were on the ball and brought a preliminary motion challenging the constitutionality of s.163.1(4) of the Code, alleging a violation of his constitutional guarantee of freedom of expression. The Crown conceded that s. 163.1(4) infringed s. 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms but argued that the infringement was justifiable under s. 1 of the Charter. The Judge hearing the case stated that the possession of child pornography was not justifiable in a free and democratic society (yes but what about Canada?), but he still acquitted Mr. Sharpe on the basis that the law was too loosely defined.
The Attorney General of British Columbia, having unlimited amounts of money at his disposal, predictably appealed the decision, but, on June 30, 1999, in a ruling by a majority of 2 to 1, the Court of Appeal of British Columbia upheld the lower court decision. Essentially the majority decision of the court stated that the offence of possession of child pornography was defined too broadly in s. 163.1. Specifically, the Court was concerned that the definition captured, for example, material that was created without abusing children, not intended for dissemination or to be published or sold (such as diaries). The court also speculated that, among other things, the definition could cover a young couple where one or both partners are younger than 18 recording their own consensual lawful sexual activities. The judges decided that s. 163.1 (4) impaired the freedom of expression beyond what was necessary to achieve the stated goal of protecting children.
Obviously they were not well versed in the modern witch hunt!
The Court of Appeal of British Columbia's decision was then appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada. And now just about every ‘child protection’ organization came out of the woodwork and acted as ‘interveners’ in the trial (whatever they are). These were:
The Attorney General of Canada,
the Attorney General for Ontario,
the Attorney General of Quebec,
the Attorney General of Nova Scotia,
the Attorney General for New Brunswick,
the Attorney General of Manitoba,
the Attorney General for Alberta,
Canadian Police Association (CPA),
Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police (CACP),
Canadians Against Violence (CAVEAT),
The Criminal Lawyers' Association (think of those lovely fees they’d lose if this law was struck down)
The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (quelle surprise),
Focus on the Family (Canada) Association,
Beyond Borders,
Canadians Addressing Sexual Exploitation (CASE),
End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking in Children for Sexual Purposes (ECPAT) - they realized too late that Child Porn would be such a good money spinner so they hadn’t had time to change their acronym.
and the International Bureau for Children's Rights.
Anyway to cut a long story short, the Supreme Court basically allowed the appeal and so the unfortunate Mr. Sharpe has now got to go through the rigmarole of yet another court appearance. But it acted as a wake up call to the Government who decided that a little thing like people’s constitutional rights couldn’t be allowed to hold up a holy crusade and so they decided to close this ‘loophole’ in the law by bringing out another one that tightened the existing laws up so it now encompassed just about every sort of media known to man including the written word.
For a time it looked like the proposed bill might fail because of the general election but the newly victorious Liberals (you couldn’t make this up could you?) under Paul Martin, who formed a minority government (i.e. they hadn’t actually got a proper democratic mandate to bring in contentious laws like this), decided to bring it back to the top of the political agenda even though Canada has more pressing problems. And so the bandwagon rolled on.
The ‘debate’ if it can be graced with such a term was the usual mishmash of ‘its common sense that anyone who looks/views or reads anything regarding child sex must be a paedophile, therefore…….’ To which I reply what total and utter nonsense and I’d like them to prove it, but of course they can’t. It is not common sense, it is common stupidity by the usual suspects that really love their work in the new child protection industry and would hate to have to get a proper job; plus an assortment of real live fruitcakes that were specially dug out from under their rocks for the occasion.
Like, for instance, the incandescent Mrs. Roseline Grandmaison, who for some strange reason was allowed to address the Justice Committee that were discussing the bill as a private citizen, a privilege not accorded to anyone who was against the bill, who stated that she wanted to bring back the death penalty for anyone with a copy of Lolita or Marquis De Sade’s Juliette in their bookshelf. Go Roseline!
And don’t forget the ditzy Mrs. Marlene Jennings (Parliamentary Secretary to the Solicitor General of Canada, another Liberal!) who said: "I would love to have the age of consent at 25." Well as a woman’s fertility has halved by the time she is 25 that should see an end to population growth in Canada. Which is fine and dandy as far as consuming the Rarth’s resources is concerned, but it does beg the question as to how the pensioners are going to survive. Maybe Mrs. Jennings is aiming to ban them too. And Mr. Christian Jobin (yet another Liberal: they really do need a name change and the ‘bigots’ has a nice ring to it) would like to take the censorship even further by including the banning of news reporting. The voters of Lévis et Chutes de la Chaudière really should start taking an interest in what the revered Mr. Jobin is getting up to that should make him so worried about news reporting that he’d like to go as far as banning it. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation amazingly went along with him with the proviso that only ‘legitimate [e.g. licensed] reporters” would be able to report anything regarding children, which assumed that any journalist not licensed by the CRTC (e.g. the government) wasn’t allowed to report anything (which would make anyone who writes for Inquisition21 a criminal). Am I the only one seeing hidden agendas in here?
Mrs. Sylvie Bourassa-Muise (Unit Manager, National Child Exploitation Centre – damn if they’re not honest with their title) tried to link pedophiles, pornographers, fantasy story writers (who she called “fantasy story generators” – did she get that from George Orwell’s 1984?) with the Mafia and who didn’t feel that children were actually people but some strange sub (or supra given her perspective) species. She, unsurprisingly, is firmly in the ‘ban everything’ camp - she even wanted to ban cartoons in Japan as they featured children. I’m not sure how the Japanese, who after all have one of the lowest incidence of sexual assaults in the world, will take to being lectured by a nutcase from a country that has one of the highest (Canada is 6th in the world) remains to be seen.
Personally my favorite was by the dungareed, pipe smoking (Ok I made that bit up) Ms. Gwendolyn Landolt (National Vice-President, REAL Women of Canada – are there unreal ones?) who said that this bill will not chill artistic expression, and that's a crying shame because it ought to. You see what I mean about things crawling from under rocks to make their point?
There were those who tried to inject some sanity into the debate, for example Mr. Joe Comartin who said: "…the volume that we've had of child pornography on the Internet is about 10 years old now. Would we not have seen a significant increase in the direct crimes against children if it [child porn] was a significant factor?" after police and scientific witnesses had just gotten through explaining to the committee that despite the exponential increase in availability of child pornography due to the Internet, incidents of actual child abuse were actually declining.
Which of course is a very important point. Child abuse and the making of child porn is on the decrease and what there is around is at least 10 years old. The pornographers have obviously decided that there wasn’t enough mileage is making kiddie porn when the market was drying up and the returns didn’t justify the potential risks. Which is great. We’ve won, time to have a party and dismantle this whole great tottering edifice of the child abuse industry before it crushes us all. That is NOT what the child abuse ‘experts’ want to hear, hence the ratcheting up of what is actually illegal to include anything whatsoever that mentions children (e.g. anyone under the age of 25 if Mrs. Jennings has her way).
The members of the Justice Committee that were hearing this evidence were not impressed with this line of argument, but instead went along with the view that Child Sex Offenders were 100% recidivist so if someone whispered the word Lolita into their ear (yes this bill covers the spoken word too) they would go off on a rampage so we have to keep our guard up. Which of course is total and utter nonsense. Of all crimes the rate of recidivism amongst Child Sex Offenders is the lowest at a little over 5% (source Sosean), and lower still if therapy is provided (witness Vermont which has a less than 3% recidivism amongst its C.S.Os) which is actually good news for most of us of course but not to those whose rent is being paid by hounding those poor sods who have paid their debt to society.
Anyway like in all supposedly serious debates on sexual matters in the English speaking world, science and facts shouldn’t be allowed to have any bearing on matters: it’s rhetorical pronouns like ‘sick’ and ‘perverted’ that sway the legislators. And amazingly the courts go along with it. As one of the judges in Sharpe said: “Parliament is not required to adduce scientific proof based on concrete evidence that the possession of child pornography causes harm to children. Rather, a reasoned apprehension of harm will suffice.”
Really? Well I, for one, cannot call this debate reasoned. It was, as expected, a mish mash of vested interests that need the law to go further and further to justify their salaries and amazingly they were listened to like they were real independent experts. Of course, Canadian legislators are world renowned for their total and utter lack of perspective and their astounding stupidity. For example, they were the only country that actually listened to the late (and totally unlamented) Andrea Dworkin and Catharine McKinnon who said that pornography demeaned women and so rushed out a law that banned porn. Which gave the intensely homophobic police force the excuse it needed to raid just about every gay bookshop in Canada. Ironically Ms Dworkin’s books were also banned. So something idiotic was always expected, but this law takes this insanity to new heights – for example you can now be accused of (and investigated for) voyeurism if you are standing outside the school gates waiting to pick up your grandchild.
My biggest fear is that, like all these things, is that the law is being so vaguely worded that it will suffer from ‘mission creep’ in other words other ‘inappropriate’ descriptions will suddenly find their way into the lexicon of evil. This law itself is an example of just such mission creep in that it was brought about because the police wanted to ban the written word, but were prevented from doing so by the constitutional provision of free speech. Well you can forget free speech in Canada now.
Freedom of thought and expression constitutes one of the essential foundations of a democratic and pluralistic society according to the International Declaration of Human Rights. Yet in Canada free speech is now whatever the Government and Police will allow you to say; which is a ‘freedom’ that is not worth having.
Mechanisms of repression
One click and you’re out - Pervcheck
Free speech in Britain under threat
The US lurches to the right
Sarah’s story
Kafkaesque from the National Crime Squad
More Big Brother building blocks in place
How porn is being used to quash dissent
Book burning in Canada given Royal Assent
And the net draws tighter.
Response to AOL
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