In politics and in drafting legislation there is one law that is often overlooked. It is the law of unintended consequences. Simply stated if you draft a law with the intention to do or prevent one thing, the actual effect of the law will be to encourage or discourage something entirely different.

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The British Columbia Attorney General has referred the question of the constitutionality of the Criminal Code of Canada’s offence of Polygamy, to the British Columbia Court of Appeal. It has taken this action because the lower Supreme Court of British Columbia seems likely to strike down the law prohibiting polygamy. The province had appointed two different special prosecutors to determine if causes could be brought against polygamists. B.C has a community of fundamentalist Mormans who practice polygamy.

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The answer, is six months and counting, as evidenced by the workman in the middle of Dufferin from Steeles to the north intersection of Glen Shields.

Every day for the past year I have crawled along Dufferin to and from work while traffic has been held hostage by a minor road upgrade and the most extensive and extravagant flowerpot proposed by man. Not only does this monstrosity consume what ought to be an additional lane of traffic but it must contain more money than dirt. Why is this giant flower pot barrier being built down the center of the roadway and who are the idiots who thought that we would like to pay 10’s of millions of dollars and almost as many hours watching construction workers saunter down the middle of the road setting up forms for concrete that took 3 months to build and pour, when the job should have taken 3 days, if it really had to be done.

The thought that the infamous Vaughan City Council must be at the center of this corrupted and useless expense pounds in my head, like my fists on the steering wheel.
Twice each day I along with thousands of others are held captive by incompetence, while being reminded that we are being robbed, fleeced and shaken down for the sake of a magnificent container planting, and one less lane on an overburdened street. Maybe they think that if they make traffic so congested then people will find some other route to and from work. But then again maybe they don’t think at all. Does anyone know if the people that own the construction company are related to any of the folks on council? Just wondering. Do you think that they will spend any time picking the weeds out of the planter once it is completed?

I do not drink. I do not drink because the penalty for drinking and driving is out of all proportion to the offense. I reason that by never drinking, there is no possibility that I would be convicted of impaired driving or driving while having over 80 mg of alcohol in my blood. I have however still been pulled over in Ride programs. The police pull over a lane of traffic and force me to wait until they are able to able to come and ask me questions, like “Have you had anything to drink tonight?” The answer “no” together with an absence of the odour of alcohol and no bottles or beverages in the car will get me on my way. It is a waste of my time and it is a waste of the officers time; who ought to be out detecting reasonable and probable cause to stop or search or demand samples from someone who likely did something wrong. While the police are harassing law abiding citizens, someone is committing a crime and getting away with it undetected.
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Plea Bargaining

The government just does not build enough courts to deal with of the cases that the police lay at the doors of the justice system. The solution to this perpetual lack of resources has been the plea bargain. Plea bargaining has become a time honoured practice, and it has benefits to the prosecutors, to the defence, the complainant or victim and to the system and public, as a whole. The prosecutors get a sure thing conviction, rather than the nothing if the jury or the judge decide that they haven’t proved the case beyond a reasonable doubt. The complainant is spared the trauma, (and it usually is a traumatic experience) of reliving something that they would rather forget, and then being cross-examined, and made to feel responsible, negligent, stupid or immoral. The accused person avoids the worse case scenario, he gets to limit the damage and time he might have to spend I jail. The government and the public avoid the expense of additional courtsand personnel necessary to staff them.

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Cocaine Seized From Trucker Thru A Warrantless Police Search

There will be outrage among the law and order set and maybe among the regular guy crowd, now that Ontario Superior Court, Justice Michael Quigley ruled that cocaine found, during an illegal search, would be excluded, as evidence, at the trial, of truck driver, Avtar Singh Sandhu. A Ministry of Transportation official started chasing Sandhu after deciding that he had acted suspiciously. Halton police officers were called in and stopped the truck. They then decided to open it up and search the cargo. Hidden among the load of carrots was found a multi million dollar stash of cocaine.

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I wonder what former Attorney General Michael Bryant thought after he had been arrested following the death of Darcy Allan Sheppard.

I wonder if he put any thought to all of those crazy laws that he helped push through the Ontario Provincial Parliament: nutty things like suspending a persons license without a trial and seizing his car even if there is another qualified driver in the vehicle. The “stunt driving” law seems to affect a lot of people trying to get to and from their cottage, or from one place to another on a 400 hundred class highway designed to carry traffic in the 150km per hour range. I guess this sort of thing comes under the heading of “tough on crime, although highway traffic offences are not crimes. And the province doesn’t have jurisdiction over crimes, still it has no problem imposing penalties when penalties have already been imposed by the courts for crimes. If the court prohibits you from driving for a year, the province may say 2 more years for you, without ever hearing a word about what happened or why.

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Boggs Levin is a Law Firm that practices exclusively Criminal Law in Toronto. We do criminal defence work only. We do not prosecute. We do not sue anyone. We do not do corporate, commercial, contracts or real estate work.

At Boggs Levin, our criminal defence lawyers have the staff and resources to attend to your case in the detail and care necessary to not only achieve an excellent result but also put you at ease with regard to your case. We are able to keep you informed, so that you know what is happening and what will happen with your case.

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