JuridicsCanada: Supreme Court: Quebec's totalitarian educational bureaucracy under provincial Liberal govt seeks religious formative control over children, alienates parents from their authority, responsiblity and r+ts

Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (May19,2k11)

The Supreme Court of Canada heard a vitally important case, the Drummondville Case, that pits the atheism-driven Quebec educational establishment -- with its entrenched bureaucracy, tax revenues, and provincial Liberal govt backup, ultimately the police power -- against numerous Quebec families, both francophone and anglophone, both Catholic Christians and Protestant Christians (perhaps some Jews too, perhaps some Muslims),  who want sufficient religious freedom to determine the spiritual quality of their children's teachers,  schools convenient to their homes and guided by the same norms of integral faith, life, and education for their children.  A curriculum appropriate to the children of such parents, not the normless secularist dehumanization proferred by the one-religion-serves-all, the statist-religion without God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which clone-factory approach of the educational bureaucrats the govt ministry has put in place.  An integral philosophy of education to articulate an alternative option to pseudo-democratic state-sponsored thawt which is a monopoly in Quebec's teacher training institutions.

In Quebec, the main historical religious background has been Roman Catholicism, but Catholics are divided and many of them extensively secularistic in that sociocultural environment so that, for some, God matters very little to life and well-being, and other Catholics stand for a better lifeview and approach to the education of their children -- as a r+t !.

Canada: Free Press: Supreme Court welcomes bloggers under protection of free speech

Globe & Mail's justice reporter Kirk Makin reports a very important decision of Canada's Supreme Court regarding journalism and the media, a judgment that eases the burdens of defense against overbearing libel accusations aimed at a reporter, or a team of reporters "on assignment."

Top court transforms press freedom with new libel defence

Updated law extends defence to new media

The Supreme Court of Canada transformed the country's libel laws yesterday with a pair of decisions that proponents say will expand the boundaries of free speech. The court ruled that libel lawsuits will rarely succeed against journalists who act responsibly in reporting their stories when those stories are in the public interest.

It also updated the laws for the Internet age, extending the same defence to bloggers and other new-media practitioners.

Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin [God bless her! and her colleagues who voted 9-0 for this protection of bloggers when they function as reporters!] said that Canada needs to keep in step with several other Western democracies that have provided greater protection to the media.

The point around which future libel-accusers are liable to gravitate are the words "when those stories are in the public interest" (this may not be the actual wording in the Court's ruling, as the reporter has the task of selecting quotes and summarizing the text -- possibly dense with legalese). In any case, in future judges of libel cases are alerted to be fair to both accuser and the reporter/s accused.

Dean Jobb, a journalism professor at University of King's College in Halifax, said that a revamping of the libel laws was long overdue.

"The court has recognized that the definition of 'journalist' is expanding in our online world," Prof. Jobb said. "Bloggers and anyone else publishing information on matters of public interest can claim the defence, provided the way they gather and present the news conforms with the ethical standards of journalists.

The vocation of journalist is definitely enhanced (what is termed "updated"), enabled to function more effectively in today's advanced-technical world with Internet, widespread blogging, and the use of other media. This reality is part of the washback problem of info-saturation that some experience in pursuing the tasks of blogging and reporting.

At the moment in the USA, an exposé-film maker, who outed the "community organizer" nationwide group, ACORN: the movie producer secretly filmed and hit a wall of govt indifference when they presented their evidence, then after being stonewalled govt, they released to national television the recorded evidence they had of the Obama-orbit org's officials counselling prostitution (this was only at one of the ACORN locations they infiltrated for the purposes of their sting opertation. The govt has the film documentation, but instead of going after ACORN's B-porn propensity and other legally-dubious actions, the bureaucrats at the FBI or some attorney general in some state capital or wherever -- instead have announced they will prosecute the whistle-blowing movie folks. Mum's the guvt's word about the sordid Obamites of ACORN. Of course, the President himself had nothing to do with the patterns of criminality that seem to plague ACORN across the country. It's a case of supporters having their own agenda, and dragging their "hero" into the mud of their own mischief.

Too bad something like Canada's recent decision hasn't already squelched the ploy of the criminal practices of ACORN in the USA, that the whistle-blowers uncovered for the whole nation to see. Many observers seem to feel that ACORN is just too big to be taken down by any functionary of the Obama administration, or even state attorneys general in that camp.

-- Lawt

Juridics: Abusive taxation: Redeemer University College subjected to tax abuse by bureaucrats

Hamilton Spectator (Hamilton, Ontario, May11,2k7) carries an unsigned report that, all said and done, works in a defamatory way (I'm not criticizing the newspaper or the Christian institution subject to this de facto defamation), defamation targetting Redeemer University College, Ancaster, Ontario. The headline: "Top court to hear Redeemer case."

The Supreme Court of Canada ruled yesterday that it will hear a case affecting the tax returns of 250 area residents.

They are facing tax reassessments after making donations to support students at Redeemer University College.

During a routine audit of Redeemer Foundation, the fundraising wing of the Ancaster-based Christian school [a liberal-arts college full of PhDs], the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) asked for and received a list of names of donors to the school's Forgivable Loans Program.

The CRA used the list of names to launch tax reassessments of individual donors. When Redeemer went to bat for its donors, it discovered that the Income Tax Act stipulates donor information can only be secured by auditors with a court order.

[In other words, some bureaucrats to whom were assigned the Redeemer file, proceeded to break the law, to purloin records to which they were not entitled, and to persecute the donors to the program to aid indebted students and thus persecute the excellent liberal-arts college of Christian confession, in Ancaster. - Lawt]

Redeemer sought a court declaration that the request for the donor list was improper, that the CRA be ordered to return the information and that the CRA be prevented from acting on the information to reassess its donors. There has been one ruling in favour of Redeemer and one against [by lower courts].

I would find it very difficult to believe there was no motive on the part of active bureaucrats to persecute this sterling Christian institution. This is the only institution in North America that houses a center where the works of the philosophy of law by the great Dutch juridical scholar are being translated and published. Among other things potentially of interest to the malicious bureaucrats, the contents of the magnum opus of jurisprudence by Herman Dooyeweerd place into question the entire leftliberal takeover of the Canadian law-sphere, without "viewpoint pluralism" in the courts or law-philosophy research at the universities and their law schools (all of them, unlike Redeemer College's Dooyeweerd Centre, funded by various levels of government thru the entire Dark Ages of Liberal Party rule and court-packing on the Federal level). All funded, but Redeemer College, it would seem.

What's more, Dooyeweerd's Encyclopedia of the Science of Law is part of an outlook which requires a far better system of worker representation than is available in Canada's civil service (including the bureaucrats of the Canadian Revenue Agency), which is severely backward in these regards. The civil-service organization to which the abusing bureaucrats belong and by which they are protected even when they violate the law governing their work, is itself radically criticizible on the basis of that organization's lack of viewpoint-pluralist workers-representation (whereas in much of Europe there is no closed shop, and the civil r+t to freedom of association is recognized in regard to workers representation).

In other words, regarding the present case, those bureaucrats who broke the law to persecute the Redeemer College donors, the donors having given to a fund to remit student loans charitably (since Redeemer doesn't get help with its general funding as do all other colleges in Ontario), those bureaucrats are thereby working to prevent the emergence of legal-scholarship critique that would show what a nest of vipers is mono-unionism and mono-professional groupings that falsely claim to represent all workers, without viewpoint pluralism provided in the representational structures.

The persecuting bureaucrats have plenty of nefarious motive to destroy Redeemer College, and it is all ideological in the worst sense of the word.