Margaret Beare, director of the Nathanson Centre for the study of organized crime at York, says Ontario casinos are among the world’s hardest to use to cleanse funds, as US authorities suggest two Buffalo terror suspects might have done at Casino Niagara. “What you don’t want when you’re laundering money is a paper trail, an audit,” she told The Spectator in a story Sept. 20. “In Ontario, with the extensive camera surveillance watching you all the time, and the instant flags that go up, and the insistent questions, you could maybe do it once, but never again.”
Coined the phrase
In a still relevant study of the Liberal party published a quarter century ago, former York University political scientist Reg Whitaker coined the phrase “The Government Party” to describe the astonishing ability of the Grits to retain power despite the heavy waves of political change that battered the nation for most of the 20th century, say Barry Cooper and David Bercuson in a commentary on Liberal rule in The Regina Leader Post Sept. 20.
Pot law vs personal rights
Alan Young, law professor, was one of a team of lawyers in a Toronto courtroom yesterday arguing that federal regulations governing the use of medical marijuana violate the constitutional rights of those who use it. “This is about the right to make fundamental personal decisions,” he told Mr. Justice Sidney Lederman of the Ontario Superior Court, reported The Globe and Mail Sept. 20. “Forcing the applicants by threat of criminal sanctions to refrain from using marijuana unless they meet criteria is a profound interference with the right to make personal decisions.” The Toronto Sun, CP Wire and The Toronto Star similarly quoted Young.
The Star also quoted Paul Burstein, law professor and criminal lawyer representing caregivers who supply pot to medical exemptees: “It is not as simple as throwing a few seeds in the ground and watering them. It is simply intolerable to expect that the (medical) exemptees can do it themselves.”
High-flying pets…
In a report Sept. 19, Global News zeroed in on the unhappiness of Jack Ellis, professor emeritus, environmental studies, over Air Canada fees he says are too high to bring his dog with him of on a flight.
Challenge doomed
In a C.D. Howe Institute commentary released this spring, Patrick Monahan, associate dean of Osgoode Hall Law School, and Stanley Hartt, a former federal deputy minister of finance, offered arguments in favour of a Charter challenge of current laws impeding people’s ability to phrcgase medical services, writes George Bragues in an opinion piece Sept. 20 in the National Post. Such a challenge is doomed, he concluded.