Ontario Court Rulings Impede Justice for Rape Victims (Survivors)

 

ONTARIO COURT RULINGS IMPEDE JUSTICE FOR RAPE VICTIMS

(People's Voice)

Two back-to-back Ontario court decisions have benefited rapists and made it even more difficult for survivors to get justice. The Ontario Superior Court has overturned a provincial law that prevented accused rapists from claiming intoxication as a defense, under the argument that it violates Charter rights as decided by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1994.

This follows weeks after an Ontario court acquitted four young Niagara men of raping a young woman who was drunk, because the judge held the prosecution had to meet a very high bar to show her incapacity for consent.

These cases come only one year after a Nova Scotia judge acquitted a man of raping a woman who was so drunk she was found unconscious, on the grounds that it was unknown when she passed out, prompting Dalhousie University law professor Elaine Craig to declare that it’s “open season on incapacitated women”.

Earlier this year, Prof. Craig launched a new book on this issue, Putting Trials on Trial: Sexual Assault and the Failure of the Legal Profession. The chance that a sexual assaults in Canada will result in legal punishment is less than one percent, which leads to justified distrust and fear by assault survivors of a justice system which so often re-victimizes them.

A 1994 Supreme Court of Canada case, R. v. Daviault, ruled that holding a rapist responsible if they are drunk would violate their Charter right to a defense. Ontario passed a law shortly afterwards abolishing self-intoxication as a defense against assault accusations. This law was challenged in R. v. McCaw, where Ontario Superior Court Justice Nancy Spies overturned it, calling it a violation of Charter rights. Activists in Ontario have started mobilizing against this ruling, including launching a change.org petition “Intoxication is not a valid defence for sexual assault” signed by over 25,000 people in just a few weeks.

English common law under the Leary rule holds that if someone is drunk they are still responsible for their actions, because they chose to become drunk, as people are accountable to drink responsibly. Driving while drunk is still a crime, but raping someone while drunk may no longer be a crime in Ontario.

This is especially perverse given that a young woman who survived a gang rape in Niagara was held to a different standard. Although she was very drunk when raped by those who were supposed to be giving her a “designated driver” ride from a party, the judge ruled the prosecution had not met the high bar to show she could not give consent, as that requires a “low level of cognition”, despite agreeing the Crown’s case was more compelling than the defense’s (R. v. N.B.).

It is difficult to see how such a high bar could be met. Even more perverse were the defense’s arguments, including that the survivor was driven by “alcohol, estrogen, and adrenaline,” as if estrogen can be partly responsible for rape. Even the judge recognized the defense was ignoring the survivor’s trauma.

How high is such a bar for proof of incapacity for consent? The previous year a Nova Scotia man was acquitted of raping his taxi passenger, who was so drunk that she was found unconscious. Judge Gregory Lenehan ruled that she could still appear to give consent even though actually unable to. The judge even commented that he would not want his daughter or any other woman to be driven by the accused, while at the same time acquitting him.

Nova Scotians were so outraged they marched against the judge, launched a petition signed by over 37,000 people, and filed 121 misconduct complaints, prompting the judge to change his phone number. The judge was cleared earlier this year on the grounds that his decision was accurate within the law, and the review committee cited a previous ruling that they needed to be “watchdogs against mob justice”, without mentioning who would be watchdogs for rape survivors.

The legal system and laws, both the rulings as well as the high barrier to prove incapacity to give consent, are part of rape culture which give impunity to rapists and punishes survivors with gross injustice. No one has challenged drunkenness as a defense for driving under the influence of alcohol, but not only has rape been challenged as something men should be held accountable for when they are drunk, judges have agreed with the challenge and granted near impunity to terrorizing women.

Why Marx Said Raising the Minimum Wage Won't Just Boost Prices

(slightly edited from article published in the People’s Voice August 1, 2018 issue http://peoplesvoice.ca/2018/07/31/why-marx-said-raising-the-minimum-wage-wont-just-boost-prices/) by Saleh Waziruddin

A major objection I ran into about protecting minimum wage increases when I was canvassing as a candidate in the Ontario election was that it's just going to raise prices, we won't be better off. Marx ran into these points even from labour leaders, and here are some of his answers to them in a live debate printed as Value, Price, and Profit.

For a start, Marx points out that though increasing the minimum wage increases the demand for things workers buy, these are only a small part of what the economy produces, since a lot more is produced for the rich and their businesses. “What an immense amount of the necessaries themselves must be wasted upon flunkeys, horses, cats, and so forth” of the rich compared to the basic needs of workers (and their cats!). So while at first the goods and services we buy might see price increases, pretty soon capitalists who produce other goods and services (who took a cut in profits because they have to pay their workers more) will start producing more of what workers buy since they can make a higher profit there, bringing prices back down from competition. Overall prices would go back to where they were. The main difference would be workers have a bigger share in the profits from their labour, and the economy would be producing more things workers buy than what the rich buy.

This is backed up by study after study showing quick rises in the minimum wage don't lead to net price increases or job losses. In 2006 over six hundred economists, including five Nobel Prize winners, publicly said so in an open letter.

Prices aren't based on wages anyway. Wages are just another price, for labour power (hiring someone to work), which is based on the prices of commodities needed to live. Elsewhere, in Wage Labour and Capital, Marx explains that wages are the cost to keep workers going to work another day, but for workers in general, not for any particular worker. Marx said “...indeed millions of workers, do not receive enough to be able to exist and propagate themselves” but wages for workers as a class fluctuate based on the minimum. Saying prices depend on wages, which depend on prices, doesn't tell us anything because it's circular logic. 

It's also perverse to say that wages, like a commodity, should take a cut in the bad times, but they shouldn't be raised during the good times. You can't treat a wage like a commodity when it suits the rich but not when it costs the rich. This would make a worker worse than a slave because they “would share in all the miseries of the slave, without the security of the slave.” Slaves in Marx's time were forced to work by “calibrated torture” as Edward Baptist says in his book The Half Has Never Been Told, but Marx was writing about the economic position of ancient slaves vs modern workers who are “free” (and forced) to sell their labour power just to survive.

Marx points out in most cases campaigns for raising the minimum wage come only after big gains to the capitalists from increases in labour productivity, technology, demand and supply, and inflation, and so it's wrong to look at raising the minimum wage without looking at what this demand “follows only in the track” of. Raising the minimum wage is only the working class's response to changes by the capitalists themselves, to ignore this is to “proceed from a false premise in order to arrive at a false conclusion.” As Marx said in his conclusion “the general tendency of capitalism is not to raise but to sink the standard average wages”.

If we look at inflation and the poverty in Canada compared to provincial minimum wages, minimum wages have fallen far behind prices and are well below the poverty line while corporate profits have skyrocketed. The Low-Income Cut Off (LICO) for a family of four in a city of 100-500,000 is still above the increased minimum wages, which is why we need wages that are not just minimum but liveable.

Marx pointed out ultimately the labour movement provides good “centres for resistance” against capitalism but will fall short if it sticks only to “guerrilla war against the effects”, instead of simultaneously using its organization as a weapon to overthrow capitalism and the wage system forever.

St. Catharines Standard Profile of me as the St. Catharines Communist Party Candidate in the Ontario Provincial Election

The St Catharines Standard profile by Grant LaFleche for Saleh Waziruddin, Communist candidate in the St Catharines riding

https://www.stcatharinesstandard.ca/news-story/8653287-st-catharines-riding-profile/

Saleh Waziruddin, Communist

Age: 40

Occupation: Unemployed

Family: Parents and two adult sisters

Previous political experience: Two years' management experience in a small municipal government, ran twice before, provincially and federally

Community work: Activist in $15 minimum wage and Cuba, Indigenous and Palestine solidarity groups. Past volunteer English teacher to seasonal farmworkers.

Top issue: Defending and extending the new minimum wage and labour standards, e.g. bring back part-timers' holiday pay gains.

Why are you running: To represent those conscripted into poverty and unemployment, defending and extended new labour rights.

Why should voters choose you: If you agree with my platform then voting Communist is the best way to make your vote count, anything else is a wasted vote.

How MPP Jim Bradley’s unexpected 1977 win led to 11 straight terms (Ontario Provincial Election St. Catharines riding)

 

How MPP Jim Bradley’s unexpected 1977 win led to 11 straight terms

Roy MacGregor

St. catharines, ont.

Published June 4, 2018

This article was published more than 4 years ago. Some information may no longer be current.

Jim Bradley, the Liberal MPP for St. Catharines, is photographed after an all candidates meeting organized by the Greater Niagara Chamber of Commerce.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail

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Happy Days was on television as well as at Queen’s Park, at least for Jim Bradley.

Jimmy Carter was the American president, Star Wars was the hot movie, Commodore and Apple were flogging early home computers, Elvis was still with us, barely, and the Toronto Blue Jays were baseball’s newest team.

Mr. Bradley was 32 years old in late spring of 1977, and the newly elected MPP from St. Catharines. It was the only new seat added by the Liberals in that election, and just enough to give the party opposition status over Stephen Lewis’s New Democrats. The Progressive Conservatives under Bill Davis were returned to power, albeit as a minority government, for an astonishing 11th straight term.

Mr. Bradley’s win was unexpected in St. Catharines. Though he was well-known as a sports enthusiast and had sat for several years on city council, the area was regarded as PC territory.

“There were people in my office,” he says, “who had to hide from the media so their parents wouldn’t see that they were supporting a Liberal.”

Graffiti spray-painted on the wall of a building near St. Paul St. in downtown St. Catharines, Ont.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail

Twice before he had failed in an attempt to win a provincial seat, but this time he won by 723 votes and was off to Queen’s Park.

“I was in awe walking into the legislative assembly,” says the former teacher. “I was told ‘Your seat is in the back.’ I fully understood.”

A much older provincial politician, Jack Spence, a farmer who had held the riding of Kent-Elgin, gave him some sage advice: “There are more people who have talked their way out of this place than into it.” Mr. Bradley took the advice, shut up and listened.

“If Stephen Lewis was going to speak,” he says, “I made sure I was going to be there. I’m sure Stephen made up words, because there couldn’t be words like that that we’d never heard.”

Mr. Bradley would never be called a “silver-tongued orator.” He would practise his speeches by first reciting an old line remembered from a grade-school play – “It’s hard to believe, but still it is true/We are the children who live in the shoe.” And he would communicate well enough to serve in several cabinet posts, most prominently as Minister of the Environment, under premiers David Peterson, Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne.

Ontario election guide: What you need to know before you vote

He would come to be considered a diligent constituency man, a member of the provincial legislature who took pride in taking “a pretty non-partisan, non-hard-edge approach” to everything. Election after election, the people of St. Catharines would send him back – 1977, 1981, 1985, 1987, 1990, 1995, 1999, 2003, 2007, 2011, 2014 – at times with more than double the votes of his closest challenger.

“No matter what,” he says, “you always thought you could be gone the next election.”

He says this as the 2018 provincial election enters its final week, with his Liberal Party so down in the polls that his leader, Ms. Wynne, has already conceded defeat. If Mr. Bradley somehow manages to win a 12th election in this pitiful situation, he would then be in a position to become the longest-serving member of the Ontario provincial legislature in history. The standing record, 42 years, is held by Harry Nixon, father of former Liberal leader Bob Nixon. The senior Mr. Nixon came to office in 1919 as a member of the United Farmers of Ontario government, later became a Liberal and very briefly served as premier in 1943, the last Liberal premier before the Progressive Conservatives began what would become a 42-year-long dynasty.

Joshua Gyssels, 23, is photographed busking on James St. in downtown St. Catharines on May 30 2018. Originally from Chatham, Gyssels says St. Catharines was a bigger city but had a small town vibe. He wants to vote in the upcoming provincial election but needs to talk to his friends and get straight answers on politics first.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail

The latest Liberal dynasty, 15 years under Mr. McGuinty and Ms. Wynne, is clearly toast, but will Mr. Bradley – who survived Bob Rae’s NDP rise and Mike Harris’s Common Sense Revolution, and who was a lone voice in 1990 telling then-Liberal leader David Peterson not to call a snap election – somehow survive?

Last week here, the Greater Niagara Chamber of Commerce staged a candidates debate and invited most who are running. One would expect that the people of an industrial city in the heart of Ontario’s suffering “rust belt” would be prone to voter anger, but precious little was in evidence at St. Catharines Collegiate Institute and Vocational School. In fact, precious few showed much interest, with only 70 of the 400-plus seats taken by engaged voters and supporters.

While debates in other ridings have sparked heated confrontations, this was more like a neighbourhood gathering, with Mr. Bradley whispering encouragement to Communist Party candidate Saleh Waziruddin on his right, and Green Party candidate Colin Ryrie on his left. He had happy birthday greetings for NDP candidate Jennie Stevens and a warm welcome to Progressive Conservative candidate Sandie Bellows, an old family friend. Both Ms. Stevens and Ms. Bellows have challenged Mr. Bradley in previous elections, Ms. Bellows coming closest to unseating him in 2014, when she fell 1,705 votes short.

Public transportation, specifically GO train service, is one service residents in St. Catharines, Ont. would like to see enhanced to lessen their commuting time to Toronto. Currently people need to take a GO bus that picks up passengers outside Fairview Mall, photographed here on May 30, 2018, and drops them off in Burlington where they continue their trip on the train.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail

“The interesting thing about this riding is that all of us are friends,” says Mr. Bradley. “It’s not a nasty race here. We’re all allowed to take shots at the leaders – but not at each other.”

The highlight of a rather dull evening was Jim Fannon of the None of the Above party telling voters: “Don’t vote for the same parties that have all had their turn ruining this province.”

That, however, is not going to happen in St. Catharines, no matter how disappointed and disenchanted the electorate. While there is little to no sympathy at this gathering for Ms. Wynne, there is appreciation for Mr. Bradley as he lists various accomplishments, such as provincial funding for a new hospital and downtown performing arts centre. Whether he can win is a fair question, but there is no doubt that the seat will go to one of the main parties.

An empty lot at the corner of James St. and St. Paul St. in downtown St. Catharines, Ont.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail

“There wouldn’t be a None of the Above party if they’d just put the choice on the ballot,” Mr. Fannon told the gathering.

Mr. Bradley claims that all his elections have been polite and positive. “I’ve run against a lot of good candidates,” he says. “Just about all of them are close friends … some of them are dead, of course.”

When the 73-year-old Queen’s Park veteran looks back on the rookie who took a back seat in 1977 and listened, he marvels at how much has changed.

“There’s not the orators today,” he says, thinking of the likes of the NDP’s Mr. Lewis, Sean Conway of the Liberals and the PCs’ Bob Welch. “Today they all read the government or opposition notes. The cut and thrust is not what it was, nor is there the compelling speech there once was. I enjoyed them so much.”

People and places in St. Catharines, Ont. are photographed on May 30 2018. Liberal MPP Jim Bradley is hoping to voters will return him to Queens Park to continue serving the constituency.Fred Lum

He also despairs at the negativity shown these days toward politicians in general. “I guess politicians bring it on ourselves by being hyper-partisan,” he says. “Social media makes a huge difference. In fact, it prevents people from going into politics. There are a lot of people you can’t recruit because they know what social media will do to them.”

As for the possibility of one day soon becoming the longest-serving member in the provincial government, he says he only thinks about it when people bring it up.

“I have absolutely no feelings about it at all,” he says. “It’s not my goal.

“In fact, I feel a little bit bad about it, because Mr. Nixon’s father was a much more prominent legislator than I will ever be.”

Interview with Tom McConnell as Communist Party candidate in Ontario Provincial Election

 My interview with Tom McConnell of CKTB 610AM as the Communist Party candidate for St. Catharines in the Ontario provincial election

Communist candidate takes another shot at St. Catharines (St. Catharines Standard)

https://www.pressreader.com/canada/the-standard-st-catharines/20180531/282222306437354 

• The Standard (St. Catharines)
• 31 May 2018
• SCOTT ROSTS

Saleh Waziruddin

Saleh Waziruddin will again be carrying the Communist party banner in St. Catharines.

The St. Catharines resident has run twice in the riding, provincially and federally, and continues to be passionate about the party’s platform.

“I am running because we need MPPs who represent the majority of us conscripted into poverty and unemployment, starting with defending and extending the new minimum wage and labour standards. The Liberal government has already taken away holiday pay from part-time workers, saying it’s not fair to full timers, but that’s not true — it doesn’t affect full-timers,” he said.

“If you work you should be paid for the holiday, that’s the point of having stat holidays.”

He is also advocating for the elimination of “deeming” deductions of minimum wage from injured workers’ compensation because they are assumed or “deemed” to be working a minimum-wage job.

Waziruddin has also set his sights on reform to the Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority board. He says the board should be replaced, part of a special resolution the Communist party called for in June 2017.

“They’re supposed to be protecting the environment,” he said, adding they appear more focused on economic development.

Waziruddin encourages residents to familiarize themselves with the party’s plan at communistpartyontario.ca. From electoral reform job creation, to expanding health care to include full coverage of services such as dental care, vision care, pharmacare, mental health care and long-term care, to developing a new funding program for a proposed, single, secular public school system, he said there are many planks that appeal to electors in Ontario.

The party, he said, will finance its platform through doubling the corporate tax rate and restoring the corporate capital tax which was dropped to zero in 2010.

Few attend lackluster St. Catharines riding debate (Ontario Provincial Election St. Catharines Riding)

https://www.stcatharinesstandard.ca/news/niagara-region/2018/05/30/few-attend-lackluster-st-catharines-riding-debate.html

Few attend lackluster St. Catharines riding debate

By Grant LaFlecheSpectator Reporter

Wed., May 30, 2018timer2 min. read

updateArticle was updated Jun. 04, 2020

There were few fireworks during a sparsely attended all candidates debate for the provincial riding of St. Catharines Tuesday evening, with candidates hewing closely to scripted talking points and party platform planks.

About 50 people showed up to the Greater Niagara Chamber of Commerce hosted debate< at the St. Catharines Collegiate to listen to Liberal Jim Bradley, NDP candidate Jennie Stevens, PC hopeful Sandie Bellows, Green Party candidate Colin Ryrie, Communist candidate Saleh Waziruddin and Jim Fannon from the None of the Above Party.

Libertarian candidate Daniel Tisi and Cultural Action Party of Ontario candidate Duke Willis did not attend the debate.

Libertarian candidate Daniel Tisi and Cultural Action Party of Ontario candidate Duke Willis did not attend the debate.

The candidates were asked about the opioid crisis, affordable housing and health care among other issues.

Speaking mostly in generalities and not facing any cross-examination of their answers during the hour-long debate, the candidates rarely mentioned the focus of the provincial campaign - the party leaders. Bradley did not mention Liberal leader Kathleen Wynne, while Bellows and Stevens only referred to PC leader Doug Ford and NDP leader Andrea Horwath twice each and only in passing.

The candidates also largely avoided attacking the platform of their opponent's parties. Bradley, without mentioning the NDP or Tories, warned of the possible deleterious effects deep tax cuts would have on health care while Fannon urged voters to cast a ballot for anyone other than the three major parties.

Waziruddin got the most enthusiastic response from the small audience when he said the Tories' health care plan is like Donald Trump tax returns: "It might never be released."

The only direct interaction between candidates came after a question on health care when Bellows said the Tories had learned from past health care cuts made the last time they were in power and noted the "NDP made cuts too."

"Remember Tommy Douglas? He's the reason you get free hip replacements. We didn't cut," said Stevens, referring to late Saskatchewan premier and federal NDP leader who is considered the father of Canadian universal health care.

Voters to go to the polls on June 7.