Which leads one to wonder if perhaps individuals like Francis believe that individuals like Jaffer aren't entitled to enjoy the benefits of their Charter rights:
Unfortunately, Mark isn't answering any such questions.
One shouldn't confuse the matter for approval or excuse for Jaffer's apparent actions. But the law is the the law, and that doesn't change when applying the highest law in the land to a conservative -- no matter how much individuals like Mark Francis may want it to.
When it comes to being soft on crime, few manage to be softer than the NDP.
But the Conservative Party is being accused of being selectively soft on crime by an NDP Member of Parliament. Oddly enough, that MP is being fairly selective himself.
The NDP, many may recall, tend to be rather big fans of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms -- and for good reason. Among some of the unfortunate (however necessary) effects of the charter is that many criminals who have their Charter rights violated can often walk free on a charge.
As it turns out, that's what happened recently for former Conservative MP Rahim Jaffer. Many may recall that Jaffer was recently arrested for reckless driving, impaired driving, and drug possession.
More recently, Jaffer was cut a plea bargain by an Ontario court, which let him walk free after paying a $500 fine.
For his own part, NDP MP Joe Comartin doesn't like it.
“I’m wearing my lenses as a defence lawyer and thinking, ‘Boy, it would be great if I could get my client a deal like that,’” Comartin recently remarked. "I’m inclined to think that there is no reason to be suspicious that there was political interference or anything of that sort but I think it behooves the prosecutor ... or Ontario’s Attorney-General to tell the Canadian people why this happened.”
The Star learned that a rookie officer with the Ontario Provincial Police followed improper procedure while strip searching Jaffer. Therefore, the matter was dropped in order to avoid a challenge due to a Charter rights violation.
Of course, with 27 years experience as a trial lawyer, one expects that Comartin likely turned down very few opportunities to have a case tossed due to a Charter violation.
And while one certainly doesn't have to like Jaffer's good fortune -- which was recognized by the Judge in the case -- one has to respect civil rights.
Moreover, respecting Jaffer's civil rights is not the same as approving of his conduct (which is, to say the least, extremely disappointing, to put it mildly), nor does it equate to political interference.
Charter rights apply to former Conservative MPs as much as they apply to anyone else. No one has to like what Rahim Jaffer did in order to respect that. Joe Comartin could stand to learn that.
One of Canada's underrated political giants is out of work today, as the NDP's Linda Duncan has managed to unseat Rahim Jaffer in Edmonton-Strathcona.
"Every corner of this community tonight said they wanted a different voice for Alberta and I'm ready to give it," Duncan announced. "There will be a real load on me to speak for the alternative voice in Alberta."
At one point, Jaffer had actually delivered a victory speech while enjoying a 1,000 vote lead. Duncan closed the gap, however, and managed to emerge victorious by 400 votes.
Duncan, an environmental lawyer, will face numerous challenges in the new Parliament.
Perhaps most paramount among them will be finding a way to make the government responsive to her environmental concerns. Not only will she be dealing with a government whose views on environmental regulation her party has utterly dismissed, she'll also have to face what she has acknowledged as a jurisdictional deficit on the part of the federal government.
Perhaps the biggest obstacle is one that all pro-environment federal MPs and candidates share -- that of the Canada-wide Harmonization Accord on the Environment, in which provincial governments have been ceded the bulk of jurisdiction over environmental affairs.
The argument, in essence, is that the provincial governments are best-situated to deal with environmental concerns.
This, naturally, significantly complicates efforts to do things such as living up to Canada's Kyoto obligations.
This confronts many pro-environment candidates, as as Duncan, with a key dilemma: their efforts may bear the most productive fruit at the provincial level, yet the most logical way to institute nation-wide standards for environmental protection is through the federal Parliament.
If Linda Duncan's persuasive voice can find traction within the House of Commons, she may be able to lead the charge in renegotiating the Harmonization accord and reasserting federal leadership and jurisdiction over the environment.
If she can't, Canada's bloc of pro-environment MPs may be fighting an uphill battle.
The following post is being offered as an unofficial part of an election day blogburst. As such, it's a good deal more personal than most of the posts offered here at The Nexus.
Enjoy.
One of the unique challenges for many Post Secondary Students in this country is living away from home.
For myself, since my journey in acquiring a University Education began in 2004 -- which will likely be remembered as a long year without NHL hockey -- the one thing that has remained more or less constant in my life is the presence of politics.
For those in the know, The Nexus was launched during that year in 2004 as a side project to self-publish views that may have been judged too pragmatically extreme for the University of Alberta Gateway. Over time, of course, things have changed dramatically. The Nexus has become a full-time enterprise, and stands as a testament to the omnipresence of politics in my life.
Some people have come to understand precisely what it is The Nexus stands for. Others, comically, have not.
But even before the Nexus became a semi-daily publishing blog, politics was largely inseparable from my life.
Nearly any time I spent not studying, working or sleeping was spent in the company of a close friend of mine who had moved up to Edmonton at about the same time that I had.
Our purposes in doing so were actually quite different: I was seeking a University education. My friend, however, had moved to the city in order to live on the street. By choice. As a self-avowed anarchist, he'd sworn he could never willingly pay taxes to "the system" he so vociferously opposed.
The topic of conversation, which more often than not unfolded in a Second Cup coffee shop on Whyte Avenue, almost always debated the virtues of mainstream politics -- as embodied by "the system" -- against the radical fringe politics my friend so passionately espoused.
The topics of conversation ranged numerous topics, including but not limited to: anarchism, veganism, straight edge ideology, identity politics of varying degrees, democracy, communism and punk rock.
My good friend introduced me to a dark side of Edmonton's premiere entertainment district that few people see. I was, and remain to this day, outraged by the presence of homeless teenagers -- homeless children, sometimes no older than 14 years old -- on the street. Some caught up in various drug cultures, others brave enough to resist it. Some engaging in property crime, some finding just enough to get by via (mostly) legal means.
As it turns out, more often than not, these kids were running away from abusive home environments.
But the most enraging situations dealt with kids who had been kicked out of their homes by parents unwilling to care for them. Then, to heap on a little extra abuse afterward, telling social workers their children -- whom they had cast out of their homes -- were runaways.
It was -- and remains -- an issue sufficient to offend my sense of social justice while also offending my conservative sense of family values.
After about a year of living on the Edmonton city streets, my good friend moved to Victoria, BC to try to advance his anarchist cause there. A few years ago he moved off the streets and started promoting punk rock concerts and anarchist book fairs.
It's in this regard that it seems rather ironic that my political life has developed to a point of electoral and partisan homelessness. In the past three years I've lived in three different ridings (two federally and one provincially) and voted for three different candidates from two different parties.
During the 2005/06 election, I lived in the riding of Edmonton Centre. Public outrage over the Sponsorship Scandal had given conservative-minded voters across the country an opportunity to finally ouster the Liberal party from government. I cast my ballot in support of Laurie Hawn, and helped unseat a Deputy Prime Minister from public office.
I had disliked Anne McLellan tremendously before election day. Her calls for strategic voting in the lead-up to that election came off as purely disingenuous -- merely an attempt by a desperate candidate whose party had been caught with their hands in the cookie jar to hold on to office.
When the final tally was taken, McLellan lost to Hawn by 7% of the vote in the riding.
Two years later I had moved out of my downtown apartment and into a house on the north side of Edmonton. Aside from the 45-minute bus rides to campus everyday -- only to be inevitably followed by a 45-minute bus ride home again -- I was fairly satisfied with it.
But when the 2008 provincial election was called, I found myself in a unique quandry. Faced by two parties -- the Kevin Taft-led provincial Liberals and Gary Mason-led NDP -- wholly unsuitable to actually govern, it wasn't hard to decide who I favoured as the government.
That being said, with my choice of government virtually guaranteed, I found myself voting for an opposition instead.
Considering the nature of the opposition so needed in Alberta, the choice wasn't difficult: I cast my ballot in favour of Ali Haymour, the NDP candidate in the riding.
Tom Lukaszuk, the Conservative candidate in the riding, wound up winning with a resounding 51% of the vote. Haymour managed to amass less than 10% of the vote.
It was the first time I had ever voted for a losing candidate. I was disappointed, but certainly don't regret it. A much stronger opposition very much remains on my personal provincial wish list in Alberta.
Now, later in 2008, I'm living in a house located just along the periphery of the University. My riding is now Edmonton-Strathcona, and I spent most of this election as an undecided voter. Again, while favouring the Conservative party federally, the local NDP candidate, Linda Duncan, remained a strong candidate.
In the end, it was ironically Duncan's expertise -- actually better suited to the provincial Legislature than the federal House of Commons -- that swayed my decision. Earlier today, I cast my ballot in favour of Rahim Jaffer. He may not win, but I don't expect to regret it if he doesn't.
In the end, the source of my electoral and partisan homelessness may be best described by the words of the late John Diefenbaker:
"I am a Canadian, a free Canadian, free to worship God in my own way, free to stand for what I think right, free to oppose what I believe wrong, free to choose those who shall govern my country. This heritage of freedom I pledege to uphold for myself and for all mankind."
I am a Canadian. A free Canadian. Free to live where I choose, to believe as I will and support any political candidate who supports the values I judge to be most important.
I have the right to support what I believe is right, and oppose what I believe is wrong. More often than not, this requires supporting candidates from more than one political party.
This is a heritage of freedom that must be upheld for myself, for my fellow Canadian citizens, and for all mankind.
But this freedom, when exercised to its fullest, does not come cheaply. It entails embracing partisan homelessness in order to ensure that one has the freedom to do what is right.
Those unwilling to embrace that freedom need not have it held against them. After all, our system remains a party system, and may not be able to function without political parties, no matter how stifling to individual political freedom they may be.
But for the rest of us that freedom will forever remain necessary -- necessary to ensure the right thing is done, and necessary to keep the partisans honest.
A Charlottetown hotel lobby became the scene of an absurd spectacle today, as RCMP officers, allegedly operating under orders from the Prime Minister's office, removed journalists waiting to speak to Conservative party MPs convening for their summer caucus meeting.
"Obviously, much of what we're doing is confidential," said Rahim Jaffer, the party's caucus chairperson explained.
So confidential that the Prime Minister's office has RCMP officers performing duties that should rightly be performed by hotel security? Not bloody likely.
If the Prime Minister's office did indeed issue the orders to have the media hustled out of the hotel lobby, this could--and probably should--be construed as an abuse of power. If the party had hired off-duty RCMP officers to work as security (with the hotel's permission, naturally), and paid them from party funds, this would be an entirely different issue. At persent, however, the picture being presented to the Canadian public is very different.
Managing the party's media coverage by defining boundaries around which it can be covered is one thing. Using the RCMP to enforce those boundaries is another entirely.
Frankly, it's wrong.
To be entirely fair, at least this abuse of the PMO's power didn't involve the use of pepper spray, as did Jean Chretien's 1998 abuse. However, a "kinder, gentler" abuse of Prime Ministerial power is still an abuse of Prime Ministerial power.
Unfortunately, Jean Chretien escaped responsibility for his abuse of power, even despite the fact that the APEC pepper spray incident involved several incidents that easily qualify as criminal assault.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper rightfully shouldn't have the same luck. Fortunately, the offense and necessary penalty are much less severe.
