“Justice”

A class-action lawsuit has been launched over the now-outlawed and racially skewed Toronto police practice of stopping, questioning and documenting people in non-criminal encounters, also known as “carding.”

While the practice was abandoned in Toronto in 2015 amid intense controversy and has since been reigned in across Ontario, with the introduction of clearer rules around what are also known as “street checks,” Ayaan Farah is an example of how data collected in the past continues to disproportionately haunt racialized Torontonians.

Farah, a 38-year-old Black woman and representative plaintiff in the lawsuit, temporarily lost her job as a worker at Pearson International Airport because of information collected by Toronto police in a 2011 encounter. That information ended up in the hands of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and resulted in the removal of her security clearance.

A secret criminal trial in Ontario in which the identities of the judge, lawyers and accused were all concealed from the public is the latest in a series of undisclosed or confidential court hearings to be revealed in Canada in the past year and a half.

The secrecy extends to where the alleged crimes occurred, what they were and what police agency investigated them. Not only are the files sealed, even the docket number is a secret. The level of court at which the trial was held has not been publicly specified.

John and Nisha Whitehead over at The Rutherford Institute always write compelling essays documenting America’s descent toward tyranny.  “A State of Martial Law: America Is a Military Dictatorship Disguised as a Democracy” is no exception and deserves reading.

In that essay, the legal duo reminded me of something John Lennon once warned: “When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game.  The establishment will irritate you — pull your beard, flick your face — to make you fight.  Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you.”

The body count in recent months has been grim and frightening.

Reported crime on Toronto’s transit system increased to more than 1,000 incidents in 2022, up 60 per cent since 2019, even while ridership has declined 30 per cent.

And this was before 16-year-old Gabriel Magalhaes was stabbed to death at a TTC subway station by an unhoused man with many assault convictions who was on probation. It was the fourth homicide on the transit system in less than a year. Nationally, nine police officers have been killed in the line of duty over the same time period.

May cause a rise in blood pressure.

The federal government is proposing changes to the country’s bail system that would make it harder for those accused of certain offences to be released on bail.

Bill C-48 would amend the Criminal Code so that those charged with a serious violent offence involving a weapon — one with a maximum penalty of ten years’ imprisonment — who were convicted of a similar offence within the last five years will face a reverse onus to get bail.

“Reverse onus” means the accused would have to show why they should be released instead of the prosecution having to prove that they should remain behind bars.