Category Archives: social justice

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

social justice

From today’s Globe And Mail:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper took a page out of tough U.S. justice legislation yesterday by announcing that his government will introduce a three-strikes law to force repeat violent and sexual offenders to justify why they should not be locked away indefinitely.

Ah, so this is what Harper meant by “get tough on crime.” Let’s take a look at what this would mean.

First, it’s a strike against that whole “innocent until proven guilty” thing we like to value. The accused would be responsible for proving that they’re not a danger to society, instead of leaving that responsibility with the crown to prove that they are. Call me old-fashioned, but I like the presumption of innocence. (Just so everyone knows what a radical I am, I’m also a fan of habeas corpus.)

Some of you may not be convinced that that’s a big problem, since we are talking about third-time offenders of violent and sexual crimes. Fine. So then, this plan would at least reduce crime, right?

Wrong. From the same article:

[The announcement] was resoundingly panned by justice experts who say similar measures south of the border have proved ineffective in reducing crime…The California law caused an increase in the state prison population of 17.7 per cent between 1993 and 2002 while the crime rate dropped more slowly than that of other states, such as New York, where there was no three-strikes law.

Oh, ok. So we’ll have a bigger prison population, more crime than we would otherwise, and fewer liberties.

Also, according to both Harper and my rudimentary understanding of the fact that jails cost money, it’ll cost more.

One other quote from the article really struck me, “Mr. Harper said his government is answering a call from Canadians who believe the country is not as safe as it once was.” The key word there, of course, is believe, since crime is actually on the decline in Canada.

There was a telling moment in a recent Toronto municipal campaign town hall broadcast on CBC, when a reporter asked the council candidates to explain why they thought Canadians felt less safe, when in fact they were more safe. The candidates’ answers were regrettably predictable; they didn’t even understand the question. They just went on and on about how we have to get tough on crime, whatever that means, as politicians tend to do.

I think I’ve figured out where we got the idea that we shouldn’t feel safe. And I think I know who benefits.

Against Bottled Water

social justice, water

The United Church of Canada‘s General Council is meeting in Thunder Bay this week. That meeting happens once every three years, when democratically elected commissioners vote on various policy and directive resolutions affecting the church. It is the highest governing body of the church.

I’ve been at the last three General Councils, so I’m a little sad to not be at this one. (I’m going to the Green Party of Canada’s National Convention next weekend instead.) Three years ago, at the General Council meeting in Wolfville Nova Scotia, I met Alexa Mcdonough. We only spoke briefly, but were both able to agree that if parliament worked more like a General Council meeting it would be much more productive. For example, everyone sits at randomized round tables (instead of in the automatically adversarial arrangement of our parliament) and decisions are made by consensus (instead of by….um….how does our parliament make decisions again?).

And for those of you who would say that can’t work in a large group, there are around 600 people at a General Council meeting, with over 400 voting commissioners. Parliament has 308 MPs.

The past two General Councils have generated media attention for the United Church’s support of same sex marriage. I was proud to be a part of that. This year’s meeting is getting attention for a vote scheduled for tomorrow, where the GC will vote on a resolution opposing the commodification and privatization of water, including bottled water. I’m proud again (this time in absentia).

There are a number of reasons. For one, I do believe that water should be public, and that access to clean water is a human right (even though the government of Canada disagrees). That on its own may not be enough to avoid bottled water, but there’s more. The bottling process drains aquifers and reduces the flow of streams and lakes, which causes stress on ecosystems. And of course, the bottle itself is an unnecessary piece of waste.

What do we get for those sacrifices? Not much. Bottled water isn’t even regulated under Ontario’s Safe Drinking Water Act, is regulated less strictly than tap water, and is often just treated tap water anyway (as is the case with Coke’s Dasani and Pepsi’s Aquafina, which I’ve read is mostly tap water from Detroit — yum).

Check out Now magazine for more details about bottled water and water politics in general. We can’t take this stuff for granted. We’re even more addicted to it than oil, and we’ve seen what those wars are like.

ps. What will those wars have to do with us? Well, we’ve got the world’s largest fresh water reserves, and we’re right in-between the US and China. Might be hard to stay out of this one.

Priorities and Leadership

conservative party, democracy and good government, economy, foreign affairs, health, social justice

I saw Stephen Lewis speak last night, and was not disappointed. One of the things that really impressed me was his ability to juggle despair with hope, death with life, dire statistics with practical solutions.

Stephen was of course speaking on the topic of HIV/AIDS, along with Mary Ash, filmmaker Norman Jewison, and others at an event organized by ICA Canada.

I won’t attempt to summarize the content of the evening. For one, as Stephen said, the issue is so huge and complex that it’s impossible to hold in your mind all at once, let alone to hold in a blog post. For another, the statistics are difficult to understand in any real way. I have a hard time imagining what it would be like if one in three Torontonians had AIDS, as is the case in too many parts of Africa.

In his closing remarks, Norman Jewison called AIDS the greatest crisis facing humanity, with the possible exception of (or second only to?) nuclear warfare. I would have said global warming in place of nuclear warfare, but either way his comment got me thinking about priorities. Specifically, those of Stephen Harper, who reiterated today that AIDS is not a priority for him.

Instead, his top five priorities upon getting elected were:

  1. An accountability act that does little for accountability.
  2. A GST cut (along with an income tax raise) that most economists think is a bad idea.
  3. “Cracking down” on crime. (Definition of “cracking down” is pending.)
  4. A child care plan that doesn’t create child care.
  5. A health plan that wont keep Canadians healthy.

Notably absent are the three crises above, at least one of which (the climate crisis) is being increasingly cited as a top concern of Canadians. To say nothing of democratic reform, water security, food security, or the inequality of Canada’s aboriginal population (which, by the way, has a higher rate of HIV/AIDS than the rest of Canada), to name but a few. But hey, at least now a can of Coke costs one cent less. (Oh wait, Coke still costs the same. How’d they get away with that?)

When Harper announced his list back in January, he said that “you can’t lead if you can’t focus and determine what really matters.”

I’ll give him that.

The Silliness of Suing A Wiki

democracy and good government, social justice, the internets

I don’t know if any of you have ever been in this position, but two of my friends are currently being sued by a man who I once saw in his underwear. Stranger still, they’re being sued for libel, not because of anything either of them wrote, but rather for something that someone else wrote.

No? That’s never happened to you? Well then, do read on. But first, some basic understanding of both libel law and wiki technology is required. This post is way longer than anyone should be subjected to, but please bear with me. This is important stuff, and I’ll try to insert jokes whenever I think you might be getting bored.

What The Heck Is Libel?

Libel is the written or published version of defamation of character (as opposed to slander, which is verbal and unpublished). Canadian libel law is very old, having evolved from British common law (meaning law that evolves based on the rulings of judges over time, forming legal precedent). One of the most interesting things about libel in Canada is that it reverses the burden of proof, such that the defendant is actually guilty unless they can prove themselves innocent. In other words, the plaintiff does not have to prove that what was said about them was false; instead, the defendant must prove what they said was true.

One of the other interesting things about libel law in Canada is that, according to lawyer Michael Geist, it’s actually treated more seriously in some ways than hate speech, or the undeniably horrendous crime of child pornography. While child pornography and hate speech both require a court order to be removed, websites can be forced to remove allegedly libelous content based on the allegations alone, before anything has been proven.

This has lead to what’s known as “libel chill” or a “chilling effect.” If you happen to be someone who can afford to throw around lawsuits, you can get content about yourself removed simply by threatening legal action. You don’t even need to worry about being right or having evidence. The “chill” is the resulting chill on free speech. If I know someone might sue me for libel, even if I’m telling the truth, I’m less likely to say anything at all. (Especially if I’m not wealthy, and the person threatening to sue is.)

What The Heck’s A Wiki?

I suspect many of you already know this, so let’s just do a quick primer. A wiki is a type of website that lets visitors edit the content of that site, making it particularly useful for collaborative authoring. The most famous wiki is Wikipeida, a free encyclopedia written entirely by volunteers that in just five years has generated over a million articles with an accuracy rating that rivals that of Encyclopedia Britannica. I mention this to demonstrate what a powerful tool wiki is, and how valuable it is for our society.

One feature critical to the success of wiki technology is that each article on a wiki has a “history,” which records every edit ever made, and allows visitors to view every version of the page that has ever existed, as well as the current version. (For example, here’s what my Wikipedia entry looked like on December 13, 2005, here’s what it looked like on December 27th 2005, and here’s what it looks like now, having been merged with another article.) This feature is essential in order for a consensus viewpoint to evolve, as well as to ensure that vandalism can be easily reverted.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that a wiki is unlike any other communications tool we’ve ever known. And that, as we will see, is part of the problem.

Ok, so What About the Dude in the Underwear?

Fair question. Let me back up a few steps.

A friend of mine, Michael Pilling, runs a wiki website called OpenPolitics.ca. It grew out of the Green Party of Canada’s Living Platform, and is a non-partisan forum for Canadians to discuss political issues. Michael was actually the Head of Platform and Research for the Green Party of Canada in 2004, and canvassed for me in 2006. He has a one-year-old daughter.

My other defendant friend is Hayley Easto, who has only a loose affiliation to OpenPolitics.ca (in that, when it was first created a year ago, she was named as one of the chief editors of the site).

They’re both being sued not for anything they wrote, but rather for something that an anonymous person wrote on OpenPolitics.ca.

The man suing them is Wayne Crookes, who was my roommate at the 2004 Bragg Creak Green Party of Canada convention (thus the underwear thing). We didn’t talk much, but he seemed like a nice enough guy, and we had breakfast together on the last morning of the convention. It’s very strange to know that on both sides of this suit are real, regular people. Until now, lawsuits have always been more abstract than that.

What the Suit’s About, and Why it’s so Strange

As mentioned above, Wayne is suing over comments that were made about him on a page on OpenPolitics.ca. I won’t repeat what was said, because then he could sue me too. Suffice it to say that Wayne felt that the comments could lead a reader to form a negative opinion of him.

By now you should be asking yourself, if these comments were made on a wiki, and a wiki is so easy for anyone to edit, why weren’t they just edited out? Well, they were. Michael moderated the page and also offered to explain to Wayne how to do so himself, and/or to post his side of the story for him. Wayne was uninterested, but Michael changed the page to reflect a more neutral point of view anyway.

So, that should be the end of the story, right? The offending content was removed, and everyone can go home happy. Except for one little problem: the version of the page that Wayne objects to is preserved in that page’s history, just like all edits on a wiki. So there is, and will always be, a version of it that exists. As I understand it, Wayne is actually suing over the content of the history page, not the main article. That’s part of what’s led Michael to observe that “there is currently no legal way to operate Open Politics in Canada.”

So What Do We Do?

You’ll remember that thanks to British common law we have two kinds of defamation, libel and slander (written and spoken). Slander is generally treated more leniently, and evolved back before so many of our conversations took place over wires. As people increasingly communicate with each other over instant message, email, message boards, blogs, and wikis, those conversations (which used to take place in person or over the phone) become the domain of libel law instead of slander. One possible solution suggested by Michael is to make these new forms of electronic discussion subject to slander law instead of libel.

Whether that happens nor not, it seems obvious to me that we need to update our laws to acknowledge the fact that an anonymous (or even attributed) defamation on a wiki today is very different from an attributed defamation in a newspaper a few decades or centuries ago when our laws were formed.

For example, let’s say I jumped in a De Lorean and traveled back in time to 1885. While I’m there, a newspaper publisher prints a bunch of lies about me, namely, say, that I’m “yellow” and “a chicken.” I’d be relatively powerless to respond, given the power and reach of the newspaper. Also, the fact that those lies were being made by someone with perceived authority and reliability would make them even more difficult to refute.

Today, however, if an anonymous person lies about me on a wiki or a blog, I’m able to easily respond with the same reach as that person. Further, I can likely respond with even more authority, since the fact that that person is anonymous (and not backed-up by a professional journalist, as is the case with “anonymous sources”) should lead any reasonable person to question their reliability. Therefore, libel on a wiki or (to a lesser extent) a blog shouldn’t be treated with the same degree of severity as libel in an older type of publication. Not only does the target of the alleged libel have a “right of reply,” they have an impressive and unprecedented ability to do so.

Finally! A Conclusion!

Wayne, of course, still has a right to have his reputation protected from unfounded accusations (if that is in fact what’s happened). But if he were to win this lawsuit, that could mean, at a minimum, that it would be very difficult to legally and safely operate a wiki in Canada. Even if the lawsuit fails, the chill will remain, inhibiting free speech. Another lawsuit threatens the free speech rights of bloggers. (In that suit, p2pnet.net is being sued in part because of something that was posted as a comment to a blog post. So watch what you say when commenting on this post, I don’t have any interest in a lawsuit right now.)

I’ve called this situation “silly” (because it is), but it’s also very serious. I could devote another even longer post (oh yeah, speaking of that, thanks for making it this far) to the priceless value that wikis and blogs contribute to the level of discourse in this country, and therefore to the strength of our democracy. A balance needs to be struck to preserve these tools, and to preserve free speech, while still protecting people like my ex-roomie Wayne from libel. Otherwise, we will have moved backwards on what is a very exciting path towards the democratization of decision making, and of the web itself.

ps. I attended an event on this very topic this past Saturday, at which a lawyer lamented the fact that people now feel the need to preface their online comments with “I’m not a lawyer, but…,” since everyone should feel entitled to express their opinion regardless of their profession or education, and without fear of legal action that could apparently result from their failure to disclose their non-lawyer status. That being said, just in case you were wondering, I’m totally not a lawyer. In fact, it’s only recently that I’ve even learned to spell the word, so there.

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