Legal
By Eva van Loon That’s the kindest phrase that comes to mind about the City’s having a Victoria law firm send nasty letters to three citizens about alleged libels of Council. It’s not simply the prospect of good classic defenses to defamation: truth, privilege, or fair comment. It’s not even the prospect of enriching lawyers, at the expense of the defendants and citizens. Six weeks after that wonderful community meeting over a sustainability charter-what I called a “phoenix conversation” for Powell River-when City reps declared Council prepared for a new public openness, this threatening act by Council confirms the worst fears and suspicions of many. It hints at a quasi-military mindset prepared to wage legal battle to preserve what the public perceives as allegiance to corporatism and outside interests, rather than till the soil of community fairly and squarely alongside the citizenry. Those we’ll-sue-you-for-saying-that letters were an exertion of raw power. Mr. Brown’s apology, wrung from him as surely as if he’d been physically threatened, sends tears of humiliation down our public face. We are exposed as naked, weak, stripped of the civic power we had assumed to be our birthright. It doesn’t take much fear-mongering to destroy free speech. Litigation seldom, if ever, serves as a tool for growth. It often serves as a poison-tipped weapon-or at the least, a klaxon herald of war. Litigation is not good for children and other living things and should be relegated to weapons of last resort, like nuclear bombs and depleted uranium. Virtually any settlement does less damage than a lawsuit. |
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by Paul Schachter Scratch a Powell Riverite and you’ll find someone who loves the outdoors. Even if we haven’t headed into the bush in years, we consider the right to do so part of our heritage—witness the torrent of protest unleashed by a power-development company’s recent threat to deactivate the Goat 2 forest road. Whatever the legal niceties of title, we consider the lands granted to the mill and to the forest companies as our lands. We have a right to feel so proprietary. The lands were to be used to secure the prosperity of Powell River. When they are being sold for corporate profit, we feel betrayed. We are left to protest the injustices, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Fighting back is important, but there is also a new way to preserve at least some of our heritage—through Malaspina Land Conservancy Society. MLCS is a non-profit, registered charity which facilitates any landowner’s desire to protect important pieces of land from destructive development. Plenty of individuals in our area want to preserve the unique natural features of their property and can’t abide the thought of having their lands clear-cut or fragmented. |
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by Eva van Loon It has finally happened: Englese has corrupted Legalese so far that an American judge is burned up over lawyers’ having their way with poor old English. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert Kressel pronounces his orders in perfectly good English in his courtroom—only, apparently, to have dumb lawyers write ‘em up all wrong. So His Honor sent a memo to the whole bankruptcy bar to straighten up and fly right, grammatically as well as legally. Some of this stuff, he thinks, they should have learned in grade school. You wouldn’t think it would be necessary to tell lawyers “to use regular grammatical English as much as possible’ since English is still officially the language of the land down there He also wants lawyers to stop paraphrasing the statutes, the actual laws, because they risk changing the meaning (because obviously they don’t know what the hell they’re doing with the language, get it?). Then he gets down to the nitty gritty. “Guideline No. 6 – Capitalization |
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by Eva van Loon 
Well, it might work as a class-action suit. One of the realisations coming out of the mediation was that neither grizzes nor black bears know diddly squat about running a lawsuit. Turns out the wolves want to be in on the action, too, and there’s a new controversy about that, the wolves pointing out that they also fatten up on salmon every fall, and the bears claiming that wolves merely steal fish from the real fishers, the bears. More work for the mediator!
It was, of course, a courier wolf who alerted the bears to the humans’ plan. Apparently some half wolf sneaked into a meeting his human attended, and was able to get hold of the details—700 coastal rivers to be dug into and re-routed, salmon-spawning beds or no salmon-spawning beds. He promptly leaked those details to the first wild cousin he met, a courier passing through the back alleys of Powell River. The bears had a lot of trouble with the concept of seven hundred. Counting is not their strong suit. The courier finally got through to them by explaining that seven hundred rivers is pretty well the same as all the rivers the bears know of. They realised this is a life-or-death issue for bears. Mama Bear wailed, “My cubs will be forced to live on garbage! We don’t want to be welfare bears!” |
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We didn’t hear a peep from major news services about the Indigenous Peoples’ Summit on Climate Change at Anchorage in late April. A week later, a fellow student at California Institute of Integral Studies sent all of us the fruits of this caucus of indigenous representatives from North and South America, the Pacific, Africa, Russia, Asia, and the Caribbean, the brutally forthright Anchorage Declaration. If you read nothing else, take a deep breath, pour yourself a stiff one, and visit our website for the full text of the Summit’s consensus on where humanity finds itself, and what must be done. Here’s a couple of bookend quotes:
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by Eva van Loon Last year’s column on the desirability of creating a Civic Forest from Lund to Saltery Bay (“Fish Need TLC, Too”) didn’t exactly rock the corporate boat. “Good idea,” people yawned, and went right back to working on problems they can more or less control. The last thing many of us want to contemplate is setting up yet another public campaign for something government should really figure out for itself. |
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by Eva van Loon The folks at BC Elections will likely be coming to get me when this is published. If they don’t, they’ll fail to apply uniformly the registration provisions of the Elections Act for “third-party advertisers” during an election period. All I need to do is criticise the government. Peculiar as it may seem to us ordinary folk, “advertisement” includes criticism. Criticising Candidate A means the speaker supports Candidate B, and that’s advertising, ladies and gentlemen. |
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by Eva van Loon The morning after Powell River’s November hurricane, I stared in disbelief at the brand new laminate floor in my house in Cranberry, as its tenants hopped around in three inches of water. The unprecedented run-off had topped the two-feet-high pony wall on the bottom storey of the house and flooded the place. Since the house is built on flat land, no home designer would have expected this. A lot of water ran around the property, looking for a non-existent streambed. Shortly, hardworking City staff arrived to mess around with the sewers and drainage on the two streets. You’re not the only one, they informed me. It’s happening more and more all over town. What can we do, with all that clear-cutting uphill? You can’t see any lumbering activity from my house; in fact, it’s comfortingly close to big swaths of intact forest. But cutting is planned. The so called Community Forest is just a stone’s throw away, and in other areas trees are wearing ominous ribbons. The City guys suggested home insurance would take care of this loss. But homeowner, beware! The floor was ripped out and tiled, the walls dried out and refinished, and ruined items replaced, on my dime. Why? Because the “nuisance” of flood waters didn’t emanate from my own land, but from other land. My pipes didn’t back up—someone else’s negligence caused the loss. As my law partner used to quip, Insurance companies exist NOT to pay you. |
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by Eva van Loon Last month, Lakota Indians visited Washington to inform the powers that be, politely, that they are seceding from the USA. Seceding. As in leaving. No longer a part of. The Lakota, it appears, want to be themselves. Their aboriginal selves. Imagine Sliammon telling Ottawa politely that they are withdrawing from Confederation? It gives a legally trained mind the willies. In Canada, more so than in the US, many laws and regulations have been specifically designed to address First Nations’ concerns, affecting everything from wills to tax to custody. Would all that be swept away for a First Nation that opted out? If several First Nations opted out, would that defeat the SPP (Security and Prosperity Partnership) with the US? The legal mind boggles. The Lakota are famous resistors. The last Sioux to surrender, they were victims of the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890, and involved in the 71-day stand-off there in the seventies. Courted by Marxists during their fight against uranium mining on their lands in 1980, their best known spokesman, Russell Means, himself a lawyer, analysed Marxism, capitalism, leftism, and all the other isms as but verses of the same cultural song, whose essence is this: “that same old European conflict between being and gaining…. Material gain is an indicator of false status among traditional people, while it is ‘proof that the system works’ to Europeans…. You cannot judge the real nature of a European revolutionary doctrine on the basis of the changes it proposes to make within the European power structure and society. You can only judge it by the effects it will have on non-European peoples. This is because every revolution in European history has served to reinforce Europe’s tendencies and abilities to export destruction to other peoples, other cultures and the environment itself.” |
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by Eva van Loon The bench of the Federal Court is probably not the first place most of us would look for courage in the legal field, but Mr. Justice Michael Phelan’s recent judgment is a sprightly example of Canada having the guts to sing its own tune.  Federal Court, limited to national legal areas like marine law or immigration, seldom sings a solo in the oratorio of Canadian provincial and appeal courts. But if Justice Phelan’s 124-page judgment in a refugee case is not successfully appealed, it will have shattered the “harmonization agreement” Canada signed with the US right after 9-11.
This “safe third country agreement” forces refugees to claim asylum in the country they first enter, US or Canada. Sounds innocent enough? By happenstance, 40% of refugees first set foot on American soil rather than Canadian, but America has a far more restrictive asylum policy. For example, during the 80s, the US sent back refugees from countries whose dictatorships it supported, while Canada tended to grant asylum.
In one way, the harmonization agreement has worked well for Canada, reducing the chorus of applications for refugee status by about 25%. However, it can also be heard as Canada’s acceptance of American standards of conduct in the so called war on terrorism, such as the Maher Arar fiasco.
Justice Phelan took notice of the Arar Report and concluded that the US is not a safe country because it doesn’t respect the Conventions on Torture, notably by returning people to their country of origins in spite of the risk of torture. “Even if the United States did not participate in the acts, it indicated to the commission that it respected Article Three of the Convention against Torture. The facts surrounding the Arar case furnish us with cause to seriously doubt that assertion.”
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