My apologies to Popehat (Ken White)

This is Joseph.

One thing that I often used to say was that Canada's limits on free speech showed how you could have a well organized country in which speech was limited. Some recent examples have made me a bit less enthusiastic. Let us start with the big one.

In 2015, an OPP officer was charged with drug trafficking. In 2018 he was convicted  He is still on the OPP payroll to this day, because of reasons shielded by privacy:

This was initiated on Nov. 14, 2018, but the hearings were “delayed multiple times,” OPP spokesperson Bill Dickson said Friday. The process continued until November 2022 when the adjudicator sided with the OPP and ordered Redmond be dismissed.

Citing privacy concerns, Dickson wouldn’t elaborate on the nature of the delays.

He was then charged with sexual assault on Oct 15, 2021 and even now:

. . . is still facing “17 additional serious criminal charges including assault, aggravated assault, assault with a weapon and others in connection with multiple victims.”

What is chilling is how often these failures have been shielded by press blackouts, which reduced the pressure to do something and failed to bring attention to how the Ontario Provincial Police are completely incapable of pursuing consequences for bad behavior.

Meanwhile, the premier of Alberta is threatening a defamation suit. For accurate reporting on what she actually did. I will outsource this one:

Now the issue is that she may have been speaking poorly, a defense raised by Jen Gerson:

Complicating matters is that Smith at this time had an embarrassing habit of publicly conflating Crown prosecutors — ie; "our prosecutors" — with justice department officials. This point was noted by columnist Lorne Gunter; it's therefore not entirely clear whether Smith is telling Pawlowski that she is poking members of her own justice department (which could be appropriate, if ill-judged) or individual Crown prosecutors overseeing COVID files (which would be entirely out of line.) 

But how can it be helpful for the reporting on an actual recording to be a part of a defamation suit? This could so easily have a chilling effect on legitimate reporting and is clearly a point of public interest. 

So  maybe the first amendment, with all of its flaws, has some benefit for government accountability?