March 26th, 2008
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So what was actually going on at the Lemire Hearing yesterday? My bet is - along with trying to ferret out some information - Lemire’s people were looking toward the Federal Court in the event that the decision here follows all the rest of the s 13 complaints and goes against the respondent.
As I understand the allegation against Lemire he is supposed to have allowed comments which violated s.13. What he and his lawyers have - to a degree - established is that those comments may have been posted by one or another of the CHRC investigators. Lemire has also, to a degree, established that the investigators operated without much in the way of supervision or record keeping.
As well, Stacy’s flat out refusal to answer one question, the assorted redactions, Riszk’s absent memory, the failure of Commission counsel to bring relevant files or to be properly prepared and the absence of Stacey’s “reader” (who would be very interesting to cross examine in her own right) all suggest that the hearing itself was procedurally flawed. Stacey’s admission that it was a regular practice of the “investigators” to pre-investigate sites against which a complaint might be filed suggests pretty profound process abuses at the CHRC. (And I have to love the now established fact that some Commission investigators went “war driving” to find open Wi-Fi hotspots to post their filth from. I see that as further confirmation that Warman used his home computer until he got nailed on his IP and, realizing that could happen again, the “investigators” took to the road.)
Evidence that the complainant - Lucy - dropped by to use the CHRC facilities to track stuff down, train the investigator on the case and such like suggests a huge bias in the process.
Judicial Review requires errors of law or fact on the face of the record. There is a huge degree of deference from the Court to the Tribunal built right into the HRA. Basically, to have a chance on appeal Lemire has to prove that there were substantive and procedural errors which were significant. I am not sure yesterday’s hearing will have done that; but the overall case has a five day old fish odor.
Again, however, it should not rest on the respondent to take on the entire CHRC; rather there needs to be a judicial investigation of the methods and tactics of the Commission. It needs to happen immediately.
Written by jay on March 26th, 2008 with 21 comments.
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At the end of the session Doug Christie revisits this questioning. He comes across as a bitter and angry blowhard, but they go a long way to establishing what appears to be a very ugly pattern. Someone (let’s call him Lucy for sake of argument), tries to get the police to proceed with hate crime charges. The police use their full powers to investigate, including issuing warrants and seizing evidence. They eventually decide that either no crime has been committed or the burden of proof is just too high, so drop the charges and pass the evidence on to the CHRC where regular rules of evidence and burden of proof don’t apply. Whether or not this is a conscious strategy on their part (and Steacy insisted it was not), it would certainly appear that that is indeed the end result, based on the examples provided today. Jaeger at sda
Relative to the police, CHRC investigators have pretty limited powers. They would, for example, have a hard time getting a warrant to seize and crack a hard drive. But why should that stop them?
The scenario Jaeger outlines above is entirely plausible. Proven? Not yet. But the groundwork has been laid.
It is well past time for a full scale judicial investigation into the methods and tactics of the CHRC. The evidence which came out today is not, in itself, the smoking gun. Rather it is the whiff of cordite which suggests guns are being fired close by.
Time for the spineless CPC to appoint a judge and get on with the task of cleaning up this mess.
And, while we are looking at this, it might be an idea to look a little more closely at the police forces which, apparently, handed over evidence obtained under warrant to “investigators” who a not likely to have been entitled to that evidence. Whether or not there was a Memorandum of Understanding as between a particular police force and the CHRC is irrelevant. If evidence obtained during the course of a criminal investigation is released to a third party a serious abuse of process has occurred.
Written by jay on March 26th, 2008 with 4 comments.
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Dr. Dawg attended the Warman v. Lemire hearing today and has a decent summary of what was, pretty inevitably something of a non-event.
He brooked no nonsense, in his understated way. No, he didn’t discuss any cases with Warman. Yes, his manager knew about his postings. No, he didn’t work on any file with Warman. dr. dawg
“Barbara K reads a long testimony by Richard Warman in a previous hearing into the record. I wasn’t sure where she was going with this at first and we will have to examine the transcript to be sure I have the details right, but it seemed to chronicle a series of events like this:
1.Warman enters a document into evidence that he claims he printed out Friday, December 8. The document is a printout of a posting that starts with “Welcome, Jadewarr”, indicating the user signed on using that account. (Note that Steacy has claimed he never gave Warman the password for that account).
2.Warman “revises” his testimony that the document “originates from the commission”.
3.Pressed further, Warman says he doesn’t know the origin of the document.
Finally, she asks Steacy if he knows where the document came from. He replies that Warman came over to the Commission, searched for the post in question and couldn’t find it, then signed on using the Jadewarr account, found the post and printed it. This was one of a series of incidents that displayed a remarkably cozy dance between Warman registering a complaint and the commission prosecuting it, all the while not being very transparent about how close they work with Warman and later, other police forces. Jaeger at sda
Now for those of us following the Warman antics and the weird relationship between Warman and the CHRC this is interesting. Being the complainant and a staffer (or an ex-staffer) presents more than a few challenges management should have been dealing with. And it poses a bit of a contradiction to Dawg’s, I think correct, summary of Stacey’s evidence as being that he did not work with Warman on any file.
It is these small inconsistencies which add up to the capacity, in argument, to discredit both the complainant and the Commission investigation.
Written by jay on March 26th, 2008 with 10 comments.
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Poor Kady.
As predicted this is going to be long and tedious without, I suspect, anything like a gotcha moment.
It appears that Riszk was in an out in twenty minutes which, if this is the case, is surprising. She was, after all, the investigating officer on the Lemire file.
The point of this hearing is to fill in some details as to how the CHRC’s investigations are conducted. It is not about argument or characterization and so, inevitably, will be a bit dull. But apparently there is a good turn out and people are polite.
No evidence of Nazi uniforms or other bits of gratuitous offensiveness.
Written by jay on March 26th, 2008 with 3 comments.
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