Current Affairs (2008) -
Chronological (386 items)
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| Apr 21, 2008 |
MB:
Thousands Celebrate Love of Earth, Weed Winnipeg - Security guards and police officers watched on the sidelines as the Manitoba Legislative Building grounds went up in smoke on Sunday. The grass didn't catch fire but thousands of people lit up marijuana joints or fired up their bongs to protest the criminalization of the drug. |
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| Apr 21, 2008 |
ON:
Pot Lovers Light Up, Party at Festivities in Victoria London - Hundreds of doobie devotees celebrated the most important date on the pothead calendar yesterday by getting lit at London's Victoria Park. A cloud of marijuana smoke wafted into the air at about 4:20 p.m., on the 20th day of the fourth month of the year |
| Apr 21, 2008 |
Hundreds Turn Out For Pro-Pot Rally Niagara Falls - Hundreds who believe Canadians should have the right to smoke up without fear of being charged took to the streets of Niagara Falls Sunday afternoon to draw attention to their cause. |
| Apr 23, 2008 |
Pot Church Fights For Home Defence lawyer Peter Boushy argued it was one thing for the Crown to seek the forfeitures of marijuana grow operations where property owners stood to make hundreds of thousands of dollars in the proceeds of crime. <strong>It was another matter entirely, he said, for the Crown to seize the primary residence of two aging men who had sold $70 worth of pot to an undercover cop.</strong> Total abuse of the system - under these circumstances, millions of Canadians could risk losing their homes... |
| Apr 23, 2008 |
BC:
Lawyer Fights 'Totalitarian' Grow-Op Law His lawyer, Joseph Arvay, is seeking to have the B.C. Supreme Court overturn the provincial government's amendments to the Safety Standards Act, which were designed to allow police officers access to homes where marijuana is suspected of being cultivated without going through the lengthy process of obtaining a search warrant issued under the Criminal Code. Police have complained that the sheer numbers of homes being used to grow marijuana in B.C. make it impossible for them to use the search warrant process to close them down. |
| Apr 24, 2008 |
Prohibition, Pot and Politics There's a certain strong odour a visitor notices when first stepping into the Compassion Club medicinal marijuana distribution centre on Rachel and St-Laurent. It doesn't take any time to figure out what it is. Marijuana activists have called the building home for years, and, if Boris St-Maurice gets his way, the weed will make it back to the forefront of a national dialogue sooner probably than the federal Conservative Party would like. |
| Apr 24, 2008 |
Purring At Puff Party Amazing pot smog hangs hazily in the sunny afternoon during Toronto Hash Mob's second successful smoke-out on Sunday, April 20, better known as 4/20. By 4:20 pm, almost 2,000 stoners fill our makeshift auditorium behind College Park at 420 Yonge. |
| Apr 25, 2008 |
Supreme Court Muzzles Sniffer Dogs The use of drug-sniffing police dogs in the random search of a southwestern Ontario school and a Calgary bus terminal was unconstitutional, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled Friday. In a 6-3 decision, the top court ruled that the actions breached Section 8 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which covers what constitutes reasonable search and seizure. The ruling, which could have an impact on police powers across the country, centred on two cases. |
| Apr 26, 2008 |
Legislation Now Exists To Win War On Drugs On March 14, 2008, Minister of Public Safety, Stockwell Day, announced $8.9 million in funding over two years under the new National Anti-Drug Strategy. This investment is a major step towards a significant crackdown on illegal drugs in our communities. The funds will help the RCMP to combat the production and distribution of illegal drugs as well as work to dismantle criminal organizations. ...I am proud to be part of the government that is bringing this much needed help to the communities of Yellowhead. |
| Apr 27, 2008 |
UVic Prof Lectures PM On Tories' Drug Policy University of Victoria professor Susan Boyd's weekly letters to Prime Minister Stephen Harper on drug research haven't garnered a response from the federal government, but others around the world are reading. ...On Feb. 1, Boyd, along with the Beyond Prohibition Coalition of Vancouver, launched a website at <a href="http://www.educatingharper.com" target="_blank">www.educatingharper.com</a> to inform the prime minister and concerned Canadian citizens about drug policy and harm reduction. |
| Apr 28, 2008 |
QU:
McGill Students Arrested on 4/20 Two McGill undergraduate students were arrested on lower campus last Sunday when at least eight Montreal police officers swarmed onto campus to break up a small crowd of marijuana smokers. |
| Apr 28, 2008 |
When Laws Are Held In Contempt, We All Suffer When pro-marijuana advocates gathered in downtown Vancouver recently to smoke pot in defiance of the law, many puzzled citizens wondered why the police took no action against them. ...As John Winter, president of the B.C. Chamber of Commerce, told The Province editorial board: "In a perfect world, the police would have dealt with them with some severity, but the fact is the police don't have the support of the community." |
| Apr 28, 2008 |
Drug Laws Tested This Week In B.C. Supreme Court In another courtroom, the Vancouver Island Compassion Society will continue its assault on the anti-cannabis criminal law with the resumption of testimony from Senator Pierre Claude Nolin, who led the 2002 parliamentary review of drug policy that concluded pot should be legalized. They're interrelated cases with national repercussions that rely on a substantially similar body of jurisprudence. |
| Apr 29, 2008 |
Teens Have Same Rights Random searches of high school lockers by police with drug-sniffing dogs have been routine in Canada for a long time. Not any more. Last week, the Supreme Court of Canada clamped a tight leash on the canine cannabis sniffers, ruling that warrantless searches were "unlawful" and a breach of privacy under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. |
| Apr 29, 2008 |
Tiresome Debate This week's Holy Smoke trial is a waste of time and money, but who is to blame? The Holy Smoke crew are back in the courts this week. They couldn't be happier. They will once again climb up on that pedestal and shout to anyone interested in hearing these two words - legalize it! |
| Apr 30, 2008 |
'There Were Smoky Moments, There Were Non Smoky Moments' t was a lively day at the Nelson courthouse on Monday as the Holy Smoke Culture Shop was once again in the spotlight. Two owners and two associates have been charged with trafficking and they are using the charges to fight the marijuana laws in Canada. Here is some of the banter inside the court and out from the first day of the trial. The trial is expected to resume on Thursday. |
| Apr 30, 2008 |
BC:
Accused Admit Selling Cannabis NELSON - The owners of the Holy Smoke Culture Shop have admitted in provincial court to selling organic cannabis from their downtown premises. However, they are putting forward a "defence of necessity," saying they did more good than harm. |
| May 1, 2008 |
Sniffing Out the Larger Implications of the Dog Sniff Cases Dogs "Search" When they Sniff for Narcotics Most importantly, all nine justices (essentially) agreed that when a police dog trained to sniff out narcotics focuses its olfactory powers on an individual's knapsack or luggage, the target's reasonable privacy expectations are encroached upon. In other words, this constitutes a "search" for s. 8 Charter purposes, a conclusion that triggers the "reasonableness" requirements of the guarantee. |
| May 1, 2008 |
Pump Up The Rebellion Nothing in last week's rulings detracts from this position. But in the rush to keep kids safe from themselves, some of us adults have forgotten what we do want them to take in at school. Critical thinking and questioning authority should be right up there. Certainly, in my time we were explicitly taught the lessons of moral and social panics exploited by authoritarian figures. In history, for example, we learned about Hitler and other fascist leaders mobilizing supporters on this basis, and in English, we studied Arthur Miller's allegory about the 1950s McCarthy hearings, The Crucible. |
| May 1, 2008 |
BC:
Two-Year Sentence For Mail-Order Pot Scheme A Langford man has been sentenced to two years for operating a mail-order marijuana business, part of a vast new criminal enterprise operating in Canada. |