July 31, 2008 | In Politics | 5 Comments
B.C. Marijuana Party activist, Marc Emery, declared his candidacy for Mayor of Vancouver yesterday, as well as his intent to run in an upcoming provincial by-election in the city.
Often referred to as the “Prince of Pot,” Emery has frequently made headlines since 2005, when his mail-order marijuana seed business was raided and shut down by Vancouver police, at the request of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) – apparently, many of Emery’s customers were Americans.
Emery remains locked in a hard-fought battle to avoid extradition to the U.S., where he faces the possibility of lifelong imprisonment. If his seed business had operated exclusively within Canada, his sentence here probably wouldn’t have exceeded a month.
It’s easy enough to dismiss a man like Emery as a childish shit disturber, who barely deserves our pity, let alone our votes. But looking at his history, I can say at least one thing for Mr. Emery – he bases his ideas on solid principles which do deserve, at the very least, our consideration. He has involved himself in libertarian political activism for decades (running for office as far back as 1980), espousing a consistent and intelligent message of enhanced personal and economic freedom.
In 1984, Emery even went so far as co-founding a political party, the Freedom Party of Ontario, alongside Robert Metz, host of the London, Ontario-based radio program, Just Right, and in my opinion, one of the most sensible voices in Canadian politics.
Whether or not you agree with Emery’s pot-smoking lifestyle, I think it’s pretty clear that he isn’t motivated purely by the desire to “get high” or generate a profit (the earnings from his seed business were donated to various political advocacy groups, after all). Emery has dedicated the last several years of his life to a risky campaign of civil disobedience in an effort to do away with a law that he (and apparently most Canadians, myself included) feel is unjust. In the spirit of liberty, I have to respect him for that.
But would Marc Emery make a good Mayor of Vancouver (or provincial MLA)?
His proposed policies are soundly fiscally conservative – he advocates phasing out the provincial income tax, implementing massive spending cuts, and making up for any shortfall with a single tax on consumption. Locally, he wants to keep residential property taxes as low as possible, while reigning in spending by the Vancouver police, whose staffing levels have increased a whopping 18.6% since 2005.
In the spirit of civil liberties, Emery hopes to end Taser use in B.C., ban warrantless property searches, and of course, legalize marijuana (which would contribute to provincial consumption tax revenues in much the same way as alcohol and tobacco sales).
One area where I strongly disagree with Emery (and fear that he has taken a statist turn) is his advocacy of “safe injection sites,” particularly his proposal that the government “start free distribution … of heroin or oxycontin to addicts.” Although I tend to oppose laws targeting simple possession of controlled substances (I may elaborate on this in a later post), I feel that people who make stupid decisions with regard to substance abuse should have to put up with the consequences of their behaviour.
Although well intentioned, most “harm reduction” strategies serve to further reduce the personal responsibility of addicts, and prevent them from hitting “rock bottom,” which in many cases, is the only turning point. Sadly, addiction is a social problem that will always be with us, and one which most addicts (including those who undergo “treatment”) never permanently recover from. I am convinced that government action which shields addicts from the natural consequences of their behaviour ultimately does more harm than good.
Despite his flaws, Emery will at the very least be an entertaining presence in the upcoming elections. He’s unlikely to win either race, but with plenty of built-in publicity and a dedicated fan base of west coast weed smokers (assuming he can actually mobilize them 
), he could at the very least tip the races away from less principled left-leaning candidates.
July 10, 2008 | In Law | No Comments
The Victoria Police, and other local police departments, are facing a complaint from the BC Civil Liberties Association, over their search and seizure policy on Canada Day (July 1).
Zelda Sun, a 35-year-old woman from Sooke (an outlying suburb of Victoria, BC) who brought this issue to the BCCLA’s attention, says that she was arbitrarily searched three times during her journey into downtown Victoria. Although she was not carrying alcohol or any other regulated substance, Sun observed police officers forcing people off buses, dumping out backpacks, and confiscating sealed liquor containers.
“That was a little bit excessive, and considering that it’s right in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that everyone has the right to be secure against unreasonable search-and-seizure, I found it really ironic that this was happening on Canada Day,” Ms. Sun commented.
Police are defending their actions, claiming that the BC Liquor Control and Licensing Act permits them to search citizens and seize alcohol, upon mere suspicion of improper conduct.
Section 67 of the Act says that officers “who, on reasonable and probable grounds, believes that liquor is, anywhere or on anyone, unlawfully possessed or kept, or possessed or kept for unlawful purposes may … enter or search, or both, for the liquor where the peace officer suspects it to be, and may seize and remove liquor found and the packages in which it is kept.”
Victoria police Constable, Derek Tolmie, says that evidence from past years provided police with the “reasonable ground” necessary to assume that anyone carrying liquor in the downtown core was likely to consume it in public.
In making such a feeble excuse, however, police are denying the reality that the legal rights enshrined in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (ss. 7-14), are intended to apply to individuals, and can only be limited by the actions of said individuals.
An individual’s right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure (s. 8 ), and even to carry a closed alcohol container in a public place, cannot be arbitrarily limited on the basis that other individuals possessed alcohol “for illegal purposes” in the same place a year earlier.
Individual rights do not depend on the time, date, or location of the alleged offense. Legal rights in particular cannot legitimately be infringed except when officers reasonably believe that an individual is about to commit an offense (see Willie v. The City of Vancouver, in which Provincial Court Judge, N. N. Phillips, states that “although the notorious problems of (Vancouver’s) Downtown Eastside may require the police to use extra-ordinary efforts to tackle the problems which exist, they must always do so within the scope of applicable law”).
In suggesting that “the right to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure” is subject to arbitrary suspicion, however, the Victoria Police Department is trying to take advantage of a dangerous collectivist tendency within Canadian jurisprudence. The police, like other special interest groups, feel that Constitutional rights are not inalienable, but rather, conditional upon external details and circumstances
They are hoping for another collectivist decision along the lines of R. v. Keegstra (the infamous Supreme Court of Canada ruling which used the Holocaust as an excuse to limit freedom of speech in Canada), or R. v. Kapp (a recent Supreme Court of Canada ruling affirming race-based rights for Indian fishermen, on the grounds that Indians have historically been discriminated against).
Granting police officers the ability to violate our Charter rights on the grounds of other people’s past actions would be yet another blow to freedom.
July 3, 2008 | In Technology | No Comments
It’s official. Mozilla Corporation scored a Guinness World Record last month when 8,002,530 people downloaded its latest web browser, Firefox 3.0, in its first 24 hours of availability.
Launching more strongly than any other software in history is no small achievement, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the past few years of wall-to-wall success for Firefox. The open source browser, developed and maintained by volunteers around the world, has carved a significant niche in the global web browsing market, and is now favoured by almost 20% of internet users.
The strength of Firefox is a great example of how a free market of ordinary people really can make a difference. A few years ago, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was thought to be an impenetrable monopoly, and it still has a strong hold on the browser market. But Firefox has shown us that serious competition can come from grassroots cooperation of like-minded individuals.
Firefox has shown us that cooperation fuels competition and competition fuels cooperation.
The only truly unassailable monopoly is a monopoly over free minds and human ingenuity. But in a free market of minds and resources, such abuses are not possible. The internet represents such a market, where both free competition and voluntary cooperation are encouraged as natural and productive.
Congratulations to Mozilla Firefox (and all its supporters) for achieving a victory for internet users everywhere.
