Does this deserve three years in prison?
By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, February 14, 2012 - 0 Comments
An Ontario judge rejects a three-year mandatory minimum for a first-time offender as unconstitutional.
Smickle was alone in his cousin’s apartment at 2 a.m. on March 9, 2009, taking pictures of himself to post on his Facebook page. He was wearing boxer shorts, a white tank top and sunglasses and posing with a loaded handgun to look “cool,” Molloy found.
Unbeknownst to him, members of the Toronto police Emergency Task Force were amassing outside to execute a search warrant in relation to Smickle’s cousin, who they believed had illegal firearms.
The minimum in question was introduced by the Harper government in 2008. The McGuinty government stands by its support for mandatory minimums. Roy McMurtry, Edward Greenspan and Anthony Doob lament the incoherence of Conservative crime policy.
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The 'Get Off My Lawn' Tour continues
By Aaron Wherry - Monday, May 11, 2009 at 12:33 AM - 0 Comments
John Turner talks to the Albany Club in Toronto.
Turner sees the problem as having developed over the last forty years, beginning with the Trudeau era and accelerating and broadening steadily ever since. With the former Ontario attorney-general and chief justice Roy McMurtry listening attentively, Turner extolled the virtue of free votes in the House on any matters not pertaining directly to taxation. He called for a reassertion of cabinet power and solidarity and denounced the Tories for insisting that sitting MPs would receive automatic nominations for the forthcoming federal election. Beyond the failings of the contemporary parliamentarians, Turner (who turned 80 this year) lamented the conditions that discourage “young people” from entering politics – namely “materialism,” “marital stress” and, of course, “the prying nature of the press.” On that score Turner’s message had about it somewhat more the feeling of mother’s milk than a call to arms.
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Trust him. He's Bob Rae.
By selley - Friday, November 21, 2008 at 2:27 PM - 13 Comments
Must-reads: …Dan Gardner on the McMurtry/Curling report; Colby Cosh on bailing out the oil
Must-reads: Dan Gardner on the McMurtry/Curling report; Colby Cosh on bailing out the oil patch; Don Martin on Bob Rae.
A long, bumpy ride
And so dawns the new age of economic consensus…“Maybe I should simply be happy no one’s yet suggesting we rekindle inflation and see if it helps,” a predictably outraged John Robson writes in the Ottawa Citizen. “But I’m not.” Indeed, he’s borderline apoplectic at the speed and obtuseness with which governments abandon solid economic principles—balanced budgets, not “picking winners and losers” in the corporate world, etc.—when the economy goes south. In fact, he observes, most people pushing for some kind of Detroit Three bailout on the basis that allowing them to fail would be untenable have abandoned even the “pretence that GM, Ford and Chrysler are winners,” and yet they still want to throw good billions after bad. But alas, Robson laments, we are at these people’s mercy. Just stay the hell away from the stock market until it’s over, he advises.
Colby Cosh returns to the pages of the National Post in fine form, observing that lots of potential jobs are being lost in the Alberta oil patch thanks to “purely temporary business-cycle conditions,” and yet Tony Clement’s nowhere to be seen with a bailout proposal. What gives? Partly, Cosh argues, it’s the old political truth that the visible (i.e., existing jobs at crap Detroit-based automakers) trumps the invisible (i.e., potential jobs at viable but not-yet-built oilsands facilities) no matter how illogically. And partly, he suggests, it’s because Ontarians’ “understanding of the world remains heavily influenced by the opening credits of The Beverly Hillbilies.”
