Jay Currie

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.