blogcutter

Most of us have heard of child abuse, spousal abuse and elder abuse, although sadly we haven't solved those problems yet. But what about abuse by (and sometimes OF) public officials? I'm thinking here of police officers, bylaw enforcement people, OC Transpo special constables taking power trips on the transitway or the LRT... and I'm sure there are others as well.

Most of us are law-abiding citizens who genuinely want to do the right thing. We care about our families, our friends, our fellow human beings. We do unto others as we would have them do unto us and we assume that by and large, we ourselves will also be treated with respect and courtesy as we go about our day to day lives. Sometimes we are even surprised by random acts of kindness.

But sometimes those random acts are not of kindness but of officiousness and heavy-handedness. Maybe you're walking through a public park, alone or with one or two of your kids, enjoying the fresh air and sunshine and birds and squirrels and bunnies, all while steering clear of the playground equipment and maintaining two metres of separation from humans not of your household. Suddenly you find yourself unwittingly cast as Paul Soles the Lawbreaker as a bylaw enforcer steps out of a white van and announces that you've just won the top fine of somewhere over a kilobuck.

You likely have never even thought about what your rights are in such a situation, let alone what you can do to call out injustice when it punches you in the face. Do you have to identify yourself? Or provide some physical form of identification? Can you fight it in some way, even if the courts are closed?

Perhaps you too have been fined, detained or otherwise unfairly treated by a public official. If so, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association would like to hear from you. Check out their portal:

https://ccla.org/coronavirus/

Their blog and live updates make for some interesting but often very disturbing reading. The dad who allowed his autistic son to play on a patch of grass near his home, which may or may not have been part of a public park, and was threatened with a $700 fine. The man walking through Centrepointe Park who moved slightly off the pathway to ensure physical distancing from someone who was also walking through, and somehow earned himself a fine in excess of a thousand dollars.

As for police officers, we have the Gatineau Police and Sureté du Québec screening everyone crossing bridges and other transition points between Ontario and Quebec (and probably Quebec and Labrador and New Brunswick too) and even municipal borders WITHIN Quebec. Moreover, these officers themselves are not provided with adequate personal protective devices that are called for in situations where physical distancing is not feasible.

Meanwhile in Winnipeg's Sage Creek area, 16-year-old Eishia Hudson was shot dead by Winnipeg police for her role in robbing a Liquor Mart:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/teen-dies-police-shooting-family-winnipeg-1.5528957

That certainly sounds like a story of the punishment not fitting the crime. And isn't it ironic that Winnipeg is also the location of our national Human Rights Museum?

In conclusion, I'd like to draw your attention to the educational arm of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the Canadian Civil Liberties Education Trust, or CCLET:

https://ccla.org/education/

You can donate specifically to that if you like. The CCLET offers some excellent educational programs, even during the pandemic, for children and teens and laypeople in general, to educate us about our rights and responsibilities in Canadian society.

Knowledge is power. If we know where we stand with regard to the law, we can help to ensure that we ourselves, as well as generations to come, do not take our freedoms or our democratic society for granted.