My Facebook feed is full of links to a news article on “UnicornBooty.com” titled “Canadian Gov’t Dissolves Thousands of Same-Sex Marriages (Including Dan Savage’s)“. I am disappointed but not surprised how my progressive friends uncritically accept news that fits their worldview. At the very least, it would be nice to see them link to a Canadian news source with a bit more reputation than UnicornBooty – every major mainstream news source carried the story yesterday.

The actual issue is that two women who were married in Canada but live in the UK and the US applied for a divorce under Canada’s Divorce Act. Section 3 of the Act specifies that a Canadian province only has jurisdiction over a divorce if one of the spouses has lived there for a year. As Reddit commenters sagely explained, the purpose of this is to prevent hostile spouses from cherry-picking whichever jurisdiction’s laws will suit them better – the same way that corporations do for their legal disputes. This should be extended internationally to prevent, in particular, husbands from divorcing their wives in misogynist countries.

Presumably what actually happened in court was that a lawyer for the Department of Justice argued that Canada should not foot the bill for this couple’s legal dispute because it’s as if they weren’t married as far as any country’s divorce laws are concerned. I am disappointed but not surprised that every major mainstream news source in Canada uncritically accepted whatever their original source for this story was without reading the legislation or thinking about what actually happened.

The larger issue here is that getting married in another country can have unintended consequences and you really should talk to a lawyer first. This couple should have signed a prenuptial agreement that had some divorce mechanism specified. In order to protect Canada’s same-sex marriage tourism industry, the government have said they’re going to come up with some way to hold divorce proceedings for couples in this circumstance.

I also have a beef with the way that foreign commentators like Dan Savage criticise Canada when things like this happen. Dan: Your country wouldn’t even let you get married, and yet you choose to continue to live there; you chose to come here and get married without doing your due diligence; why does my country owe you anything?

Section 47.1 of the Canadian Wheat Board Act says:

The Minister shall not cause to be introduced in Parliament a bill that would exclude any [grain]…unless:

1. the Minister has consulted with the board about the exclusion or extension; and
2. the producers of the grain have voted in favour of the exclusion or extension, the voting process having been determined by the Minister.

The Federal Court (a special federal court that rules on civil suits against the government) ruled that the introduction of Bill C-18, An Act to Reorganize the Canadian Wheat Board, violated the rules of “manner and form” introduced by the Wheat Board Act. I’d say the Speaker should have refused to allow the reading of the Bill. But given that the Bill has been passed by both Houses, what should the Governor General do?

This interesting article about British Parliament explains that it is reasonable that Parliament be bound by “manner and form”: whenever the sovereign is an entity other than an actual person, there must be rules to determine the sovereign’s will. Parliament is sovereign, and so must follow manner and form rules; and because Parliament is sovereign, they can pass manner and form rules to define their own will.

The Clarity Act is a similar piece of manner and form legislation.

If the manner and form rules have not been followed, Parliament has not actually passed an Act, they’ve just made vacuous statements. So the Governor General has no act to sign. The Governor General does not have the power to pass Acts on his own, so if he decides to sign some piece of paper that resembles an Act, the courts should ignore that piece of paper.

The government should have amended the Canadian Wheat Board Act as a separate piece of legislation and there would have been no problem.

Christopher Parsons, a polisci grad student at UVic, has come up with better arguments to back up the unease that some of us are feeling about citizen surveillance in the Vancouver riot: besides the purely technical problem of it being sloppy police work, social media users are acting as a mob:

The social media users processing riot photos are acting as a lynch mob just as mindless and violent as the rioters themselves. In particular, like past cases of Internet vigilantism, they are circumventing the justice system to get accused rioters fired from their jobs and expelled from school. As Parsons points out, our justice system protects people from this kind of “justice” using libel suits, although they may be difficult to pursue online.

But the police probably don’t even need this wetware (human) facial recognition system, because the government has ordered ICBC to make their drivers license photo database and facial recognition system available. The drivers license database has always been a tool of law enforcement and we’ve always had to accept that the cost of driving is access to the police. But to date ICBC’s facial recognition system has only been used to prevent identity theft – I feel like this is a concerning expansion of police ability. The slippery slope is obviously hooking the facial recognition system up to closed-circuit cameras, as is gradually being done in Britain and the US.

Camera phones and social media have become powerful tools for holding police accountable. But after the Vancouver riot, Internet vigilantes and the police are collaborating to use these tools to gather evidence and make arrests.* A seemingly lone voice in opposition to this practice is this blog post that identifies it as citizen surveillance in opposition to citizen journalism, where you use mobile devices and social media simply to document.

She points out that, like other cases of Internet vigilantism, it takes on a mob mentality and isn’t necessarily being practiced only in a desire for justice. The personal decision to cooperate with law enforcement rather than critically monitor police could become a public embrace of security values. And there are the slippery slopes, particularly if the surveillance were available to private-sector employers:

• protesters of authoritarian regimes
• people who drive badly
• Pride Parade marchers
• 4/20 Day participants

As this is just a blog post, she doesn’t make the ethical argument explicitly, but I’d like to see a philosophy paper follow this up. Do we want to live in a society where people help the police like this regularly? Do we want this to be a social media norm? And what does it mean if this practice gets exported to countries where people have more to fear from the police.

In the comments, she lays the responsibility for the riots where it belongs:

I think our city needs to rethink the intensity of a sports culture that leads to this kind of extreme reaction.

* Being present in a riot violates the law against unlawful assembly, which means everyone who took a photo is guilty as well.

Both the Canadian and US constitutions divide up issues into provincial/state and federal jurisdictions. Section 91 of the Canadian Constitution Act, 1867 says that any issues it left out are under federal jurisdiction while the 10th Amendment to the US Constitution says any missing issues are under state jurisdiction. Note that there’s nothing inherently nonsensical about a federation of largely independent states collectively organizing only for things like defense. In New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann (1932), Justice Brandeis wrote this famous line in a dissenting ruling:

It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.

The Supreme Court of the US has interpreted the 10th Amendment to be almost meaningless because Article 1 of the constitution says that the federal government can pass any laws necessary to execute its powers. So in practice both countries have similar divisions of power. In particular, the federal governments may tax heavily and then give transfers to the provinces/states with strings attached; eg:

• US highway funding requires a 21-year drinking age
• Canadian health funding requires public healthcare

In the US, the Tenther Movement is part of or connected to the Tea Party. It disagrees with the wide interpretation of the “necessary and proper” clause in Article 1 and calls for enforcement of the 10th Amendment.

A lot of commentators have been looking for Tea Party-like activities in Canada pointing to things like the HST initiative in BC and the Wild Rose Party in Alberta. Well, Maxime Bernier just articulated Canadian Tenthing – it’s not a new ideology, but he’s obviously trying to tap into a trend.

I’ve been looking for apartments in Victoria lately and run into a few property management companies that aren’t following the Residential Tenancy Act. In the hopes of informing other tenants of their rights and punishing bad companies, I’m putting this here so Google picks it up:

• Apartments R Us Property Management Ltd attempted to get me to pay a non-refundable application deposit for 976 Humboldt St. When I explained that was in violation of s. 15 of the Residential Tenancy Act, he “waived” the deposit.
• Cornerstone Properties Ltd refused to process my rental application for 835 View St unless I provided my social insurance number for a credit check. Although I explained that a SIN is not necessary for a credit check and that I cannot be required to provide it, they refused to process my application. Interestingly, the Better Business Bureau refused to accept my complaint on this, despite the fact that the government strongly recommends against collecting SINs.

I didn’t end up renting either of these places, so I’m not going to go through the Residential Tenancy Branch’s official dispute process (although I did email a complain). The fact that property management companies act like this tells me that most tenants don’t know their rights. I think it should be illegal to request a social insurance number for non-employment, non-tax purposes.

Every individual landlord I’ve dealt with in BC knows and follows the law better than the employees of the companies above. I can also recommend Duttons in Victoria.

I’m looking at law office jobs, just to see what I can pick up on the road to school. I’ve also been looking at more jobs at the CBC, etc.

Ever notice how everything requires a field-specific degree and five years experience? Wow, just: Wow. I was almost a Chartered Accountant, I was a software engineer at a billion dollar multinational, and I’m not even qualified to be a fucking secretary.

Completely ridiculous. Looks like I have to get a job bussing tables.

Requires a degree in hospitality or related field and 5 years restaurant experience.

Holy fuck!