The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), who have been embroiled in other sometimes lethal controversies regarding the use of tasers, last weekend subdued an 82-year-old bedridden man, Frank Lasser, by tasering him at the Royal Inland Hospital in Kamloops, BC. Lasser, who’s had heart bypass surgery and must use oxygen at all times, was hospitalized with pneumonia. In a CBC interview, Lasser said that he can become delusional when not breathing properly. Hospital nurses called the RCMP after a delirious Lasser displayed a knife. Lasser doesn’t know why he wouldn’t relinquish his knife, even after the RCMP arrived.

Foleyet , Ontario, Canada | May 9

BBC - A train in Canada with about 280 people on board has been put under quarantine, after one passenger died and several others reported flu-like symptoms.

The authorities say they do not believe there is a connection between the death and the illnesses.

The train was travelling from Vancouver to Toronto when a woman in her 60s fell ill and died on Friday morning.

The authorities say they are keeping passengers and crew on the train while they await the results of tests.

The train was stopped in the tiny hamlet of Foleyet in northern Ontario and surrounded by emergency services, who evacuated the local station.

CBC/CP | May 3

CBC - The federal Conservatives have quietly killed an access to information registry used by journalists, experts and the public that users say helped hold the government accountable.

The Coordination of Access to Information Requests System, or CAIRS, is an electronic list of nearly every access to information request filed to federal departments and agencies.

Originally created in 1989, it was used as an internal tool to keep track of requests and co-ordinate the government's response between agencies to potentially sensitive information released.

Now, users mine the database to do statistical studies, fine tune phrasing on new requests and discover obscure documents — often using the information against the government.

The Regina Leader-Post has written a piece on Richard Warman's libel suit against various bloggers in Canada.

Warman is a human rights lawyer who has used Canada's Human Rights legislation to pursue for damages authors of racist material online.

The Leader-Post piece deals with one blogger in particular, who, unlike the others named in the suit, is being pursued as publisher of a post and comments she claims (with some credibility) she did not author nor approve. The blogger, Kate McMillan, runs Small Dead Animals which is one of Canada's busiest (some say it is the busiest) blogs.

The other defendants seem to have placed themselves in an untenable position: They have claimed, falsely it appears, that Warman is the author of a racist screed against Canadian Senator Cools. Some have gone so far as to claim that Warman didn't do the post to attract potential defendants (Warman and others at the HRC posted under pseudonyms during their online investigations), but that he was actually a closet racist -- a highly defamatory claim to make against anyone, let alone a human rights lawyer.

(Warman not only claims that he didn't author the post, but that nothing he wrote under a pseudonym violated Human Rights legislation.)

Despite being warned to retract the alleged libel, the defendants instead continued to attack Warman in this way.

Even in America with its First Amendment, such actions are clearly actionable under libel law.

Of all the defendants, only McMillan's seems defensible: She was absent while another defendant was posting to her blog. The post was later removed.

McMillan has been successful raising funds from across the Internet, with appeals for donations being made by the likes of Michelle Malkin and Glenn Reynolds.

As much as McMillan's case is legally interesting in Canada (Canada's libel law remains dangerously archaic, still tailored for aristocrats), there are other cases in Canadian courts raising the same issues, which are farther along in process, and are in far more pressing need of money.

These are the Crookes cases, of which I am one of many defendants.

Unfortunately, the Leader-Post piece has mistakenly claimed that the Crookes cases have been dismissed.

Being a defendant, that's news to me!

I have responded with the short letter below.

José Can You See? Bush’s Trojan Taco
By Greg Palast
Monday, April 21, 2008
(For TomPaine.com)
(Listen to the Podcast here)

Psst! George Bush has a secret

While you Democrats are pounding each other to a pulp in Pennsylvania, the President has snuck back down to New Orleans for a meeting of the NAFTA Three: the Prime Minister of Canada and the President of Mexico.

You’re not supposed to know that – for two reasons:
First, the summit planned for the N.O. two years back was meant to showcase the rebuilt Big Easy, a monument to can-do Bush-o-nomics. Well, it is a monument to Bush’s leadership: The city still looks like Dresden 1946, with over half the original residents living in toxic trailers or wandering lost and broke in America.

Ever criticize a politician in writing? How about a backroom political operator? A CEO? Or even a company's shoddy products? Canada stands alone in the Western democratic world in that it still allows public persons and corporations to use libel law to silence their fair critics. The result is often libel chill, as the CBC piece that ran last night on The National, featuring among others myself and Kate Holloway, details.

Worse, our courts are still unclear how to apply libel law to the Internet.

As I've written about before, (see here) I'm being sued by Green Party of Canada creditor and former campaign manager Wayne Crookes over links and articles other people wrote which I had the misfortune of reposting in a Yahoo Group forum. During the Green Party of Canada's 2006 internal election I kept a wiki which had a link to a candidate's web page, which had on it somewhere a link to a wiki which had on it somewhere some content Crookes objects too (I still don't know what!). For this, he is also suing me, though, to date, he's not sued the candidate.

If Wayne Crookes (the plaintiff) gets his way, entire sites could be forced offline simply for linking to another site which somewhere on it has content someone claims is libelous.

Crookes is also using Wikipedia and (ironically) the OpenPolitics.ca wiki. For a great piece about the OpenPolitics case, see fellow ProgBlogger Chris Tindal's excellent The Silliness of Suing a Wiki which is a piece explaining why suing a wiki is ridiculous.

Crookes responded by suing that author as well. Read it and see if you can figure out what is libelous.

Done? According to Crookes, nothing written in that piece is libelous -- except it has some links he doesn't want published.

And now, for linking to it, he can sue me (again!) as well. And if you link to this post, you can now get sued.

Or so he argues.

read more after the jump

I think I often write better comments on other people's blogs, than posts on my own.

As you may know, I am being sued by Wayne Crookes for defamation. (See I am being sued by Wayne Crookes for some background.)

Here's an edited version of what I posted on Michael Geist's blog in further response (see what I posted earlier today) to his column:

Law professor Michael Geist has penned a column concerning some of the lawsuits recently launched by Wayne Crookes. I am a defendant in one of them -- see I am being sued by Wayne Crookes for more details. Geist does not concern himself with any merits of the defamation claims; rather, he concentrates on the really large issues raised, which, if the suits are successful, will affect us all:

The lawsuits could prove to be critically important to the Internet in Canada, ... because they cast the net of liability far wider than just the initial posters. Indeed, the lawsuits seek to hold accountable sites and services that host the articles, feature comments about the articles, include hyperlinks to the articles, fail to actively monitor their content to ensure that allegedly defamatory articles are not reposted after being removed, and even those that implement the domain name registrations of sites that host the articles.

Some of you may have heard that Google and Wikipedia are being sued for libel. The person doing so is Wayne Crookes, a former Green Party campaign manager (among other roles) and once a major lender of funds to that party.

I am also named as a defendant in another suit he launched last month (March 2007).

To date, Crookes has something like five lawsuits ongoing, all of them related to commentary on the net regarding the key roles he played in the Party from 2004-2005. The history is too complex to discuss quickly here, and linking to where it appears elsewhere is dangerous as he freely claims linking to sites which he says contains libel is a form of republishing. Indeed, in my case, he has argued that a wiki I helped run during the Green Party of Canada internal elections last summer had a link which linked to a website which had on it one link among many which linked to a site that has content he objects to. (As an aside, when he notified me of this late last November the link had been dead for months, and he did not tell me what material he objected to.)

Greg Quinn | Ottawa | April 17

Bloomberg - The poorest province in Canada is getting off the dole.

The province of Newfoundland and Labrador is being transformed by oil, and by the willingness of Premier Danny Williams to fight Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp. for a bigger slice of the revenue. Oil is raising the standard of living for the province's 508,000 people while bringing lower taxes, smoother roads and cheaper education.

Oil income probably created a record budget surplus for the year ended March 31, provincial documents show. The benefit has magnified since oil pushed past $100 a barrel in February. Newfoundland soon may be too flush to qualify under Canada's equalization program, which redistributes federal money so less affluent provinces can provide comparable services.

Bruce Campion-Smith | Ottowa | April 10

Toronto Star - Canadian actors are speaking out against the "censorship" posed by new legislation that could deny tax credits for controversial film projects.

"If there is something that artists fear it is censorship," actor and director Sarah Polley told a Parliament Hill news conference this morning.

Polley said it was the job of artists to "provoke and to challenge.

"Part of the responsibility of being an artist is to create work that will inspire dialogue, suggest that people examine their long-held positions and yes, occasionally offend in order to do so," she said.

Bill C-10, a tax bill amendment, will be debated at the Senate banking and commerce committee starting today after Canada's entertainment industry voiced concern that it would revise criteria to exclude tax breaks for shows that bureaucrats regard as offensive or not in the public interest.

10 Reasons to Look Critically at Dissolving Mexico-U.S.-Canada Borders
By Manuel Pérez Rocha and Sarah Anderson,
AlterNet. Posted April 9, 2008

Hint: Xenophobic right-wing conspiracy theories about a mythical North American Union are not among them.

This month, President Bush will host the leaders of Canada and Mexico to advance the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), a project Lou Dobbs has predicted will "end the United States as we know it."

Lou sounds downright blasé, though, compared to all the online ranting and raving on this subject. And while there are plenty of reasons for progressives to be up in arms over this effort to expand the North American Free Trade Agreement, the xenophobes have clearly cornered the market.

In their paranoid fantasies, the three North American executive powers are secretly plotting to surrender everything they hold dear about the good ol' USA. The U.S. borders, the flag, and even the almighty American dollar would disappear as the country is submerged into a North American Union with Mexico and Canada.

Steven Edwards | New York | April 2

Ottawa Citizen - Terror suspect's lawyer argues federal government 'defending inaction'

The federal government has claimed credit for improving Omar Khadr's Guantanamo Bay detention conditions -- but also made clear it has no intention of seeking the Canadian terror suspect's repatriation before his war crimes trial and any appeals conclude.

"Canadian officials have carried out regular welfare visits with Mr. Khadr resulting in, among other things, a transfer into a minimal security, communal detention facility," Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier said in a response to written questions tabled in Parliament.

Elizabeth Thompson | April 2

Montreal Gazette - Wave of protectionism fuels U.S. push to reopen trade deal

Canada will likely face a bid by the United States to reopen the North America Free Trade Accord and has begun working furiously behind the scenes to counter that prospect, says International Trade Minister David Emerson.

In fact, the federal government is so concerned that the U.S. will move to reopen the free trade accord that Monday it asked provincial cabinet ministers across the country to begin lobbying their U.S. contacts to convince them of the importance of NAFTA.

Mr. Emerson said in an interview yesterday that there is more of a threat to the trade pact now than there was six months or a year ago.

"I think there is a higher probability that somebody will want to reopen NAFTA in some way."

See previous post: NAFTA: evaluating the agreement

Judges in Khadr case to consider arguments on international law and Guantanamo

---------

And about time the Supreme Court of Canada challenged a military tribunal’s ability to give Kahdr a fair trial. Surprise, surprise that the information that someone else was alive that may have thrown the grenade. He's been in Gitmo for five years for something he possibly did not do. The Canadian government literally abandoned him and does not see that it should insist that Kadhr be given an impartial trial.

The decision of the court should clarify what the legal position of the Canadian government should be.

Matt Hartley | March 20

Globe and Mail - Ten years after he took on the multinational Monsanto, Saskatchewan man gets $660 and the right to talk about it

Percy Schmeiser's decade-long legal odyssey has finally come to an end - and he's got a cheque for $660 to prove it.

The 77-year-old Saskatchewan farmer and his wife, Louise, became international folk heroes for their legal struggle with agribusiness giant Monsanto Canada Inc., after the company sued them for violating its patent on genetically engineered canola seeds in 1997.

Although the Schmeisers eventually wound up losing their court battle with the St. Louis-based company in a landmark Supreme Court of Canada decision in 2004, the couple have now earned a moral victory that they hope will encourage others to carry on their cause.

Kathryn May | March 12

Ottawa Citizen - Sponsorship inquiry boss worried about concentration of power in PMO

The judge who headed the sponsorship inquiry that helped usher the Conservatives into power says Canada is heading to "one-man government" unless radical steps are taken to rebalance power concentrated in the hands of the prime minister.

John Gomery, who has since retired from the bench, said he's worried that Canada's once independent, non-partisan public service risks becoming politicized as power has become centralized in the Prime Minister's Office over the past 30 years. He said senior bureaucrats now have a tendency to "look over their shoulders" to see whether it's the deputy minister, minister or PMO calling the shots.

Andrew Mayeda | March 10

Ottawa Citizen - Province enjoys disproportionate amount of economic development money

The Harper government has been channelling a disproportionate amount of economic development money in Quebec into Conservative-held ridings, a Canwest News Service analysis has found.

Canada Economic Development for Quebec Regions has a mandate to promote "long-term economic development" in Quebec by issuing grants and loans to businesses, non-profit organizations and communities. According to the agency's governing legislation, it is supposed to give special attention to regions where "slow economic growth is prevalent or where opportunities for productive employment are inadequate."

David Pugliese | March 7

Ottawa Citizen - Outrage greets U.S. bid to buy Canada's largest space firm; sale to include taxpayer-funded $524-million Radarsat-2 satellite

The proposed purchase by a U.S. firm of Canada's largest space company, and with it a $524-million high-tech satellite built mainly with taxpayers' money, is being challenged by a growing number of scientists and engineers.

Lawrence Morley, one of Canada's top geophysicists and the man who pushed the federal government to invest in what eventually became the Radarsat-2 satellite, is calling for the auditor general to probe what he calls a sweetheart deal that allows a private firm to sell off such a valuable spacecraft.

Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball | March 6

Newsweek - The Canadian government is no longer using evidence gained from CIA interrogations of a top Al Qaeda detainee who was waterboarded.

According to documents obtained by NEWSWEEK, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), the country's national-security agency, last month quietly withdrew statements by alleged Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah from public papers outlining the case against two alleged terror "sleeper" operatives in Ottawa and Montreal.

The move, which so far has received no public attention, is the latest sign of potential international fallout from the CIA's recent confirmation that it waterboarded a handful of high-profile Al Qaeda suspects in 2002 and 2003.

The Canadian cases involve two men: Mohammed Harkat, an Algerian native living in Ottawa, and Moroccan-born Adil Charkaoui of Montreal. Both were arrested after the September 11 terror attacks and detained without charges on suspicions of links to Al Qaeda. Unable to develop enough evidence to bring criminal charges against either man, the CSIS sought to deport them on grounds that they had both allegedly spent time in Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan in the 1990s. (Both men now have been released on bail but remain under government scrutiny).

A great musician, immensely talented, the only bright star in the dump that was 'Road House'...

Peter O'Neil | Paris | February 29

Ottawa Citizen - Melting of passageway means countries will vie to control it, former coast guard official says

The fast-warming Arctic's vast economic potential makes it increasingly prone to smuggling, perilous polar tourism, environmental catastrophes and even armed conflict unless Canada and the U.S. lead efforts to bring order to the region, according to a new analysis.

Former U.S. Coast Guard Lt.-Cmdr. Scott Borgerson, in the latest issue of Foreign Policy magazine, argued Washington has to start with a Canada-U.S. agreement on how the Arctic should be regulated as global warming opens northern sea lanes.

Monica Davey | Chicago | Feb 27

NYT - Regional government agencies around the Great Lakes spend some $15 billion a year to protect the lakes from invasive species, contaminated sediment and sewage overflows, a new study shows. But local officials say that still more protection is needed and that the United States and Canadian governments should pay for it.

“They’re saying it’s not a federal problem, but it is,” Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago said of the five lakes, which hold 20 percent of the world’s fresh water. Mr. Daley and other regional leaders say they intend to press for more federal money in light of the study, to be released Wednesday, which for the first time estimates what local governments are devoting to the lakes.

It is uncertain exactly what federal authorities in the United States and Canada now spend on the Great Lakes, in part because so many agencies and programs are tied to the lakes. “That is one of the problems; we can’t find out what’s being spent,” said David Ullrich, executive director of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative.

Unnati Gandhi | February 22

Globe and Mail - One of the world's most respected journals has dealt a strong blow to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Conservative government's "manifest disregard for science."

In a strongly worded editorial, entitled Science in Retreat and published in yesterday's issue, the British journal Nature wrote that while Canada's researchers consistently rank among the world's finest, the same cannot be said for the federal government's position on science and research.

David Pugliese | February 23

Ottawa Citizen - Governments now able to ask for support in times of emergency

Canada and the U.S. have signed an agreement that paves the way for the militaries from either nation to send troops across each other's borders during an emergency, but some are questioning why the Harper government has kept silent on the deal.

Neither the Canadian government nor the Canadian Forces announced the new agreement, which was signed Feb. 14 in Texas.

The U.S. military's Northern Command, however, publicized the agreement with a statement outlining how its top officer, Gen. Gene Renuart, and Canadian Lt.-Gen. Marc Dumais, head of Canada Command, signed the plan.