While we are on the subject of a system in decay, check out the following article titled "A System in Decay. Two trials in one court. The BC Rail Scandal"

http://bctrialofbasi-virk.blogspot.com/2009/09/system-in-decay-two-trials-in-one-court.html

Some tens of millions of dollars worth of semi-useless recent inquiries come to mind when the subject of *a system in decay* is brought up:

The RCMP tasering fatality at Vancouver Airport inquiry and the Mulroney-Schreiber affair inquiry.

At the first one the parameters were set so as to not allow any blame/charges to be laid and at the second one severe restrictions were put in place as to limit which questions could be asked and which questions were disallowed.

No blame, no responsibility, no guilt, no accountability, no justice...

"In Freedom Under the Law Denning defined English personal freedom as a privilege and responsibility endowed with common-law protection."

I think we have moved in the last century from the notion of privilege enjoyed by the so-called "privileged classes", especially the privileged classes of the British to the notion of "right", a freedom which should be enjoyed by all (but is not) who come into this world.

The articel goes on with these words: "Out of this 1960s tinderbox a patchwork counterculture emerged, challenging the existing social order and its expectation of lifelong virtue. Old-fashioned personal responsibility was swept aside .."

There is no discussion of the reason for the tinderbox in the USA. Even though the North had won the Civil War some 100 years earlier, the privileged classes continued to subvert the rights and fredoms of many. The way I see it, many of those with the freedom had the privilege but did not exercise their duty or repsonsibility to all, just to their own class.

So, there was a social revolution and, as in most revolutions, thngs swing from one extreme to another.

Are these words extreme?

7. Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.

8. Everyone has the right to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure.

9. Everyone has the right not to be arbitrarily detained or imprisoned.

10. Everyone has the right on arrest or detention

(a) to be informed promptly of the reasons therefor;

(b) to retain and instruct counsel without delay and to be informed of that right; and

(c) to have the validity of the detention determined by way of habeas corpus and to be released if the detention is not lawful.

11. Any person charged with an offence has the right

(a) to be informed without unreasonable delay of the specific offence;

(b) to be tried within a reasonable time;

(c) not to be compelled to be a witness in proceedings against that person in respect of the offence;

(d) to be presumed innocent until proven guilty according to law in a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal;

(e) not to be denied reasonable bail without just cause;

(f) except in the case of an offence under military law tried before a military tribunal, to the benefit of trial by jury where the maximum punishment for the offence is imprisonment for five years or a more severe punishment;

(g) not to be found guilty on account of any act or omission unless, at the time of the act or omission, it constituted an offence under Canadian or international law or was criminal according to the general principles of law recognized by the community of nations;

(h) if finally acquitted of the offence, not to be tried for it again and, if finally found guilty and punished for the offence, not to be tried or punished for it again; and

(i) if found guilty of the offence and if the punishment for the offence has been varied between the time of commission and the time of sentencing, to the benefit of the lesser punishment.

12. Everyone has the right not to be subjected to any cruel and unusual treatment or punishment.

13. A witness who testifies in any proceedings has the right not to have any incriminating evidence so given used to incriminate that witness in any other proceedings, except in a prosecution for perjury or for the giving of contradictory evidence.

14. A party or witness in any proceedings who does not understand or speak the language in which the proceedings are conducted or who is deaf has the right to the assistance of an interpreter.

It is too bad that the so called "learned judge" differs with the words of those sections of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. I guess he still lives in the days when he was a member of the privileged class and his lack of duties to the general population were not questioned.

Law is only a perception in your mind. I guess it depends who fills your mind during yer formative years and with what.

The following By Frederic Bastiat

Here I encounter the most popular fallacy of our times. It is not considered sufficient that the law should be just; it must be philanthropic. Nor is it sufficient that the law should guarantee to every citizen the free and inoffensive use of his faculties for physical, intellectual, and moral self-improvement. Instead, it is demanded that the law should directly extend welfare, education, and morality throughout the nation.

This is the seductive lure of socialism. And I repeat again: These two uses of the law are in direct contradiction to each other. We must choose between them. A citizen cannot at the same time be free and not free.
The law acts in direct opposition to its own purpose. The law has been used to destroy its own objective: It has been applied to annihilating the justice that it was supposed to maintain; to limiting and destroying rights which its real purpose was to respect. The law has placed the collective force at the disposal of the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, to exploit the person, liberty, and property of others. It has converted plunder into a right, in order to protect plunder. And it has converted lawful defense into a crime, in order to punish lawful defense.

Justice Craig's blanket condemnation of sections 7-12 of the Charter is unjustified and disturbing. Would he really have us believe that we would be better off if we abandoned the prohibition of arbitrary detention, the right to legal counsel, the presumption of innocence, the right to a speedy trial, the prohibition of double jeopardy, the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment or the right to understand and participate in the proceedings against one? These are important rights, and I know of no evidence that they hamper the administration of justice.

The only specific complaint that he makes appears to be against Section 8 "Everyone has the right to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure." and theassociated provisions of Section 24(2) regarding enforcement. As he should know, warrants are not required in exigent circumstances, and even evidence obtained illegally may be admitted after balancing the seriousness of the violation of the defendant's rights and the impact on the administration of justice. While it is possible that the Supreme Court has not put the fulcrum in the right place, it is far from clear that a different balance would have a noticeable impact on the crime rate.

In any case, it is a mistake to associate the Exclusionary Rule with the social changes of the 1960s. The immediate ancestor of Section 8 and the associated jurisprudence is surely the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, which dates to 1789. The use of general writs of assistance, against which this amendment was a reaction, was abolished in Great Britain in 1819. Indeed, in English Common Law, even between 1660 and 1819 when general writs of assistance were in use, the Crown was only permitted to seize property illegally held, that is, fruits or instruments of crime or contraband: a warrant could not be issued for the seizure of an item of purely evidential value. (There is a good discussion of this history in the US Supreme Court decision in Warden v. Hayden, 387 U.S. 294 (1967).) Limitations on search and seizure have a long history in our legal tradition.

I can't believe that this guy was actually a judge, expected to weigh evidence from both sides.

Supertech, I do not quite understand why you would quote thoughts of a man of wealth of over 150 years ago. Frédéric Bastiat is a classical Libertarian. A man who is no doubt a master of the reductio ad absurdum rhetorical technique. A man who was only able to see black and white and failed to understand the fine balance of social compromise.

He is basically a fundamentalist who is one of many who provide, at the extreme end, the justification which nurtures fanaticism.

He considered that law should only be just but not, as he calls it, philanthropic. This was at a time when very few states had “universal” suffrage, public education, public health, etc. In fact, health was not even on the radar screen in those days.

I am not sure that when you quoted "The law has placed the collective force at the disposal of the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, to exploit the person, liberty, and property of others" that he was speaking about the members of the ruling class exploiting the liberty (the extreme of which was owning slaves - pre US civil war) and property (through taxation, expropriation, etc.) of the public at large through the use of laws which allow such intrusion of personal liberty.

When you quoted his words "It has converted plunder into a right, in order to protect plunder", the plunder is not the plunder that the learned judge Craig writes about.

In Bestiat's words: "I do not think that illegal plunder, such as theft, or swindling-which the penal code defines, anticipates, and punishes ..... is the kind of plunder that systematically threatens the foundation of society."

He goes on to write: "Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Thus the beneficiaries are spared the shame, danger, and scruple which their acts would otherwise involve. Sometimes the law places the whole apparatus of judges, police, prisons, and gendarmes at the service of the plunderers, and treats the victim-when he defends himself-as a criminal. In short, there is a legal plunder."

And he then goes on with this:

"But how is the legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.

"Then abolish this law without delay, for it is not only an evil itself, but also it is a fertile source for further evils because it invites reprisals. If such a law-which may be an isolated case-is not abolished immediately, it will spread, multiply, and develop into a system.

"The person who profits from this law will complain bitterly, defending his acquired rights. He will claim that the state is obligated to protect and encourage his particular industry; that this procedure enriches the state because the protected industry is thus able to spend more and to pay higher wages to the poor workingmen.

"Do not listen to this sophistry by vested interests. The acceptance of these arguments will build legal plunder into a whole system. In fact, this has already occurred. The present day delusion is an attempt to enrich everyone at the expense of everyone else; to make plunder universal under the pretense of organizing it.
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Interesting notions that I think would make for good discussion on other topics on this site - the HST, subsidizing industry, subsidizing medical procedures, subsidizing old age homes, subsidizing education, putting money into Olympic games, putting money into public roads, putting money into sports facilities, putting money into theatres, galleries, placing tarrifs on trade products (which was one of his big peeves as a believer in free trade).

The poor man would turn over in his grave and figure the socialist have won.
http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/7006/thelaw.html#anchor9

Good points Gus... you left out the plunder of the nations savers by the inflated monetary supply. Thats the most egregious plunderer of them all... and all by legal means is the biggest most wide spread travesty of justice IMO.

IMO the mass media is far more culpable for the degeneration norms of society than the legal system ever could be... the legal system is reactionary, whereas the mass media is what creates all the new social norms that spread a cycle of degeneracy in societies ability to think for themselves about the proper order of ethics in the decision making process of a sovereign.

Its what happens when a half dozen organizations control 95% of the media content in North America. And of those half dozen they are all owned and controlled by a single political multi-generational collectivist conspiracy (zionism) that is an alien invader of our culture designed to destroy the old order of things to create their own order under their control. No different then what they did in 1917 Russia, but with less violence. The wholly owned medium of mass media is but a tool to shape the minds and culture of succeeding generations into the values that are prescribed for a submissive people as part of a greater hidden (zionist) agenda.

This corporate mass media will feed the degeneracy through reality TV and TMZ style reporting, and then report on the selected related crimes to drive the fear needed to grease the way for new laws that restrict our liberties in the name of protecting us from the external fear that lurks behind every dark corner. Look what they did to get the 'patriot act' passed... or the so called 'hate speech laws'... the soviets after the bolshevic revolution were the first nation in the world to have criminal laws against 'anit-semitism' hate speech as a shield for the crimes that took place under the Cheka and later NKVD (KGB) prosecutors whom where operating on an unlimited bullet supply for any dissenter who's ideas stuck out. Thats the place where Graig Wallace and his system of justice would eventually take us IMO. His aim is to select heinous examples to undermine the liberties of otherwise law abiding citizens and remove their protections under the law from the law itself.

Craig is well aware that there are NO liberal judges in the Provincial Court system. Members of the Defence Bar are NOT appointed to same. And when they are - as in the recent case of David St Pierre - there is always an explanation why they breached the exclusion rule.

Craig would also know that the drug-culture arose long before the Charter, which his class clearly despises. Then again, that Charter allowed our judiciary to extort pensions equal to 67% of their highest wage, during a 10 year period.

Blank cheque wage-taking, nominal protection from interference, tenure, etc, all in the name of "independence." In the name of that non-entity, our robed savages also took impunity. Of over 2400 complaints against federally appointed judges, executed since 1990, in only 6 cases was the paid fact-finder required to explain conduct. But it gets worse, 100% of the handful of followups were the result of complaints from Attorney Generals. Of course there is the Ramsey and Sundhu criminal cases against Craig's colleagues in Provincial Court. Well, justice was delayed in both; Ramsey - convicted of Breach of Trust and sexual offences - benefited from court ordered delays that prolonged the investigation of his conduct. Sandhu - convicted of Public Intoxification - was allowed to take full wages at a desk job in the Chief Justices office, until it was disclosed that the charge followed a similar prior arrest.

Frankly, that Charter has become an instrument of government, for government.