The Debate Over Sharia Law In Canada

Sharia Law puzzles me at the best of times. To my eyes it seems to be arbitrary, and somewhat ad-hoc in nature. It seems as though the meaning of Sharia is far from unified, with specific meanings being drawn largely on the assumptions of the religious leaders involved.

There has been a debate raging in Canada for quite some time as to whether or not we should allow the Muslim community to practice Sharia law within the context of civil disputes and topics such as divorce. After reading this article in The Globe and Mail today, it occurs to me that this debate is perhaps much more important than it appears at first glance.

Proponents of Sharia argue that several religious traditions have had the right to practice their unique belief systems within the context of civil law in Canada for a long time. For example, Jewish traditions have long been granted the privilege of being legally binding agreements, and there are others as well.

The first thought that goes through my mind is this - to date, we have never had to deal with a situation where the cultural underpinnings of the "alternative" legal system are at such odds with the legal guarantees of our constitution and framework laws.

To "western eyes", Sharia appears to be fundamentally unequal in its rules between genders; it can arguably be held that the woman is relegated to a secondary role within that framework. The rights and control granted to men under some practices of Sharia are troubling when approached from a cultural context that sees men and women as peers in all aspects of life. (I'm not saying that there aren't counter balances in the system, merely that the cultural assumptions under Sharia do not reflect equality in the sense that Canadian law is designed for)

The consideration that needs to come into play affects the application of all "culture-specific" civil law. Should such law be held as "equal to" written law, or should it be subject to review under our legal system. In other words, should an agreement for a divorce be drawn up under the auspices of Sharia law (or other "law" systems) be subject to scrutiny before the courts.

For example, if the man were to walk away from his wife and remarry (as described in the article), would it be reasonable for the wife to agree to hand over all of the family assets to him? (Or should he be charged and tried for bigamy?)

It seems to me that where these pseudo-legal systems are permitted exist under the umbrella of Canadian Law, they should be subject to review or appeal before the courts. While that could result in a lot of cases before the courts, it would provide a safeguard or escape hatch for the participants who may not realize the implications of what is happening during the process. For example, during a divorce, it is easy to lose track entirely of one's personal needs and stake in the defunct marriage. A woman looking to escape a dangerous or abusive situation may agree to just about anything simply to "start over". A year or so later, she may start to realize that the other parties involved actually acted in a manner contrary to her best interests. In such a situation, the "cultural law" agreement should be subject to appeal before the courts.

The assumptions that permeate our laws derive from the Judeo-Christian, and Western European traditions. When we encounter cultural norms that are dramatically different, such as Islam, or many of the Asian cultures, we need a legal system in place that provides relief for situations where those traditions may actually conflict with our laws, and the parties have "agreed" to something under pressure.

You can't have it both ways

I see that Canada's equivalent of the RIAA, the CRIA, wants Canada to overhaul its copyright laws to make internet file sharing illegal.

Hmmm. Lessee I already pay a "tax" of sorts on every blank CD/DVD I purchase for my computer systems, regardless of what I put on them. Those dollars are funnelled back to CRIA on the presupposition that I am using those CDs for bootleg copies of music.

About the only thing I will agree with them on is the notion that our current copyright / patent law system is dangerously antiquated and is terminally unable to deal with the issues that digital media and the internet present.

Any such overhaul of the copyright system needs to also revoke or acknowledge the reality of the taxes being levied on CRIA's behalf. Put simply, if I'm already paying the fine, then the copying of files is not a crime. If CRIA wants their precious little cash cow as well as the right to sue every person who downloads a file, then we have a serious problem. It's sort of like a prepaid speeding ticket. If I had to prepay a certain amount in speeding tickets based on the car I drove, or some other arbitrary measurement, then I would feel perfectly in my rights to get caught speeding a few times a year.

You can't punish me for the crime (the tax) pre-emptively, and prosecute me for the same thing. That isn't just. I respect the rights of artists to be paid for their work - I don't have any respect for CRIA's latest attempt to imitate the RIAA's bully tactics. Frankly, the RIAA seems to think that suing their customers is good business practice (hmmm - anyone else thinking of the SCO Lawsuit currently rippling around the computer industry?). Newsflash - suing the people that pay your bills is called bad for business.

What the CRIA, along with other industry groups of one sort or another (the BSAA for example) continue to miss is the reality that digital theft has been around for as long as computers. Making punitive laws against it isn't going to make it go away. Further, these groups estimate their respective industry losses using rulers so elastic that even M.C. Escher would shudder.

If we are going to address the challenges and issues that digital media have introduced for our patent and copyright schemes, we must act positively and decisively:

1. Strike down the laws that give pre-emptive punititive damages to these organizations.
2. Restructure our copyright and patent systems so that they usefully reflect the reality of modern media and intellectual property.
3. Reflect the reality that there are more players than just corporations in the IP game.
4. Recognize that theft exists, and should be punished. However, there must also be a counter balancing "fair use" doctrine in place. Like a photocopy of a chapter of a book, possession of a copy of a piece of IP doesn't necessarily constitute an offense on the part of the possessor.
5. What about reverse engineering techniques? (A common, and legitimate practice in software)
6. Independently derived, commonly held, solutions. In software, there are a myriad of ways to arrive at logically equivalent answers. (For that matter, Alonzo Church and Alan Turing did the same thing in mathematics in the 1930s) The "first to file" shouldn't own the exclusive rights to such a solution. Further, many algorithms in common use in industry are "commonly held" (for example Quicksort), and extensively reused on a daily basis.
7. What about digitally published books? How should those be handled?
8. How are we to define the notion of public domain?

There are many interesting, and potentially valuable examples that we could consider - for example the LGPL, the Creative Commons notion (which applies to prose and other "freely accessible" creative arts. These are intriguing, and constructive, structures that we should evaluate carefully as part of any review and restructure of the copyright/patent law structures of our nation. It would be folly indeed to allow our patent laws to be rewritten by such hostile and pugilistic forces as the RIAA and its offspring.

The Future of New Orleans

Driving home today, it dawned on me that New Orleans could very easily become the first time in modern history that a major urban city is effectively abandoned by its residents.

Consider this - in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the city has been evacuated in order to allow cleanup efforts to take place. A few diehard souls remain in the city, but for the most part, the population of the city probably only numbers a few thousand right now - most of them existing in little pockets, forming small tribal societies.

The real question is how many of New Orleans' evacuees will return to the city once it starts to be habitable again. Consider the trauma that they have experienced - their homes literally blown or washed away; a breakdown of urban infrastructure in the wake of the storm; social collapse; and finally evacuation to other cities. Those that stayed the longest saw the worst side of things - bodies floating in the streets, gangs of thugs and rapists, starvation, desperation and the very human survival response to those pressures.

How many of those people will want to return to New Orleans? It is now a city of buildings, but with no soul. Even though the port and oil refinery facilities can be restarted easily, the supporting economy in the city is gone. The myriad small businesses that coexist and support the larger economic engines are all gone. Either destroyed by the storm, or a lack of cash flow in the storm's wake. Few businesses can weather a complete shutdown that will be months in duration. Retail shops will be the first victims, but there will be many others who return to find their businesses effectively dead - either because the business itself has been destroyed, or their clientele have fled the region.

Few but those who see opportunity in trying to restore New Orleans, or those with deep emotional roots in the place will have much desire to return. Even those who will return will find a city very different from what they left. Consider your home town with 30% - 50% of the population missing. It would be eerie, disconcerting to say the least.

I expect New Orleans will be revived, but it will not be anything like its former self.

Crrrrack!

You could probably count the number of times I've agreed with Paul Jackson of the Calgary Sun on one hand - with most of the digits amputated.

Of course, one should never say never - strange things happen in this world. In this week's column, I'm surprised to see Paul Jackson actually taking Ralph Klein's government to task for its inept handling of our government's finances lately.

The Alberta Government is rolling money right now - so much so that other provinces are beginning to eye up our wealth and are wondering where "their cut" is.

Jackson winds up arguing for the following:

1. Rollbacks of assorted taxes and user fees.
2. Reduction or cancellation of medicare "premiums"

Okay - tax reductions are often a fictitious creature at the best of times, but certainly rolling back some of the user fees that the government imposed in the heyday of Ralph's "team" cutting everything in sight is a good idea. Along with Medicare premiums, these are essentially head taxes that should have been chopped out and restructured out of existence years ago.

I'm not in the least bit sure I would agree with Jackson's use of economic theorists as the basis for his arguments - much less the mish-mash of Keynes, Freidman and Laffer (the latter two having much to do with what became Reaganomics in the 1980s). Generally speaking, the only thing I agree with most economic theorists on is that the economy is a measurable system. What constitutes a successful economic policy is a matter of interpretation, and few of them seem to have the foggiest notion of how to account for the human side of their equations. (Anyone else remember just how ugly things got during the 1980s, as Reagan's government, and Thatcher in the UK, devolved to a wierd combination of Supply Side economics and "trickle down" theory in their policy?)

Personally, after living through the disaster of the 1980s, and the ham-handed policies of Klein in the 1990s, I'd like to see our governments take a turn at actually dealing with the people side of governance for a change. In my view, good government has to account for people's lives and such vague intangibles as quality of life. People are about much more than the blind dollar figures on the balance sheet.

This coming winter, we look to be staring down the business end of a lot of really ugly energy costs - last I looked on the NYMEX, natural gas is running up around $11/US. Yikes - that's several times higher than it peaked at in the depths of last winter. What are we doing as a society to protect the poor and those on fixed incomes? What are the effects of these out of control prices on society's vulnerable? Will we have people turning off their furnaces because they can't pay the bills?

For once, I will give Jackson credit for at least taking the Klein government to task for their handling of the massive surpluses they currently enjoy. What we really need in this province is a government that has a clue about the people, and much more than the merely passing familiarity achieved during an election campaign. (Such as there is any campaigning in Alberta)

Guns, Anarchy and New Orleans

Some slightly less than brilliant arguments are being put forward lately arguing that the situation in New Orleans (which is slowly descending into a "Lord of the Flies" anarchy in the wake of Hurricane Katrina) is a reason that Canada's gun laws are bad.

Apparently New Orleans has begun to collapse into a state where roving bands of armed thugs have control, and are exercising it in brutal ways. This ranges from muggings and rapes to emptying shops out of their goods. A few shopkeepers are armed and using their weapons to deter the looters.

The argument being bandied around is that Canada's gun laws don't allow you to own guns, therefore, it puts all of the control in the hands of criminals who do have guns. (I mean gun in the personal firearms sense, not the military munitions sense of the term) Apparently, if you don't object to the gun laws in Canada, you must be some kind of cowardly, weak-kneed liberal with no spine - or so the gun lobby in Canada would like to believe.

Let's examine the logic these clowns use. First - Canada's gun laws do not prohibit the ownership of firearms. There are specific classes of weapon which are prohibited from private ownership, but the average law-abiding citizen certainly has the right to own firearms. Acquiring the necessary licenses is little more difficult than getting a drivers license.

The next argument raised is that the gun registry is an invasion of privacy, and gives the government "too much control". Again, this is patently false. In my view, registering a gun is little different from registering a car. Yes, it obliges one to secure the weapon where it is difficult to access; to report its theft immediately, should it be stolen, and to keep it in a "not readily usable" state. I have to insure myself and my car as a driver, and I am obliged to ensure my car is in reasonable repair - otherwise I can be charged - especially if an accident occurs. These laws are little more than ensuring that due diligence is taken on the part of firearms owners in much the same way that registration brings a certain accountability with respect to my car.

Ah, argues the gun lobby, but the criminals still have guns and will use them in the commission of crimes. So what? Criminals use guns, knives, rocks, stolen cars and other things in the commission of crimes - that's why they are criminals. You walking down the street with a .45 stuffed in your pants isn't going to change that, nor is it going to change how a criminal sees you. You remain a target. Possibly a bigger one if the criminal wants your gun. Relaxing the gun laws is like removing speed limits because people speed. True enough, people still drive beyond the road and their abilities, even with speed limits. That doesn't make speed limits a bad idea per se.

As for the notion that one is a coward or otherwise weak of character because they do not have - or want - guns, that's just silly. Bravery, or cowardice has nothing to do with the ownership of firearms - those are character traits. Frankly, most of the people whose idea of bravery is being able to point a gun at someone else is likely to be sufficiently cowardly that they wouldn't know when to use a gun in the first place.

For the most part, Canada's gun laws are about trying to prevent the use of firearms in household arguments; to protect children from their parents' more dangerous hobbies, etc. With a little luck, when someone "goes over the edge" and starts to think about using a gun, the process of preparing the gun for use will cool them off. If it doesn't then they have just become the very kind of criminal that should be behind bars.

Criminal use of weapons is just that - criminal. I have no illusions that a gun registry, or other restrictions on firearms stops criminals. On the other hand, I have few problems with insisting that those who choose to own firearms take responsibility for the weapon, and its use.

To assert that Canada's gun laws are flawed based on the anarchy currently unfolding in New Orleans is an amazing leap of illogic. The real-life rendition of "Lord of the Flies" we are witnessing is a reminder of how short the distance between civil society and anarchy is. When it becomes a matter of survival, humanity will sink to depths that few can comprehend.

Canada's gun laws are predicated upon the notion of civil society. New Orleans is currently neither civil, nor social. The very infrastructure of cooperation that is part of urban society has been ripped away in a few short hours, rebuilding it will take years. One does not legislate on the basis of anarchy, but on the basis of civil society.

What's Wrong With This Picture?

Tragedy has struck the city of New Orleans (and other Gulf of Mexico state areas) to a degree that we simply could not have imagined. Quite literally, the city of New Orleans is no longer habitable, and it will be months before that changes.

Today, President Bush announced two things:

1. $10 Billion Dollars in emergency funding to pay "expenses"
2. Bill Clinton and George Bush Senior would head up a private relief fund raising effort to aid victims.

Okay, all of that is well and fine. I really can't criticize it, can I? However, I think it underscores several key differentiators between how Canada is structured and the United States.

First of all, the $10 Billion in aid is to pay "expenses" - in this situation, that's cleanup crews, military costs, emergency repairs to get oil platforms and refineries working again, etc. I completely understand the urgency of all this, and the practical realities of it. (or at least as well as I am able to - from the relatively arid Alberta prairies)

It's the second part of Bush Jr's initiative that piques my curiousity. Certainly, involving the last two presidents in a fund raising endeavor will raise the profile of that effort immensely, and should make it much more effective.

However, philosophically, it's rather intriguing. Basically, the government is saying that it isn't in the business of caring about its people, that's their job. Along with other moves that Bush Jr. has made since he came to office, it's quite clear that the Republicans (at least under neo-con control) are all about money and small government (except for the military, of course). The people and their needs don't register on their radar. As long as the people are "fat-dumb-and happy", the Republicans could care less; and with a strong military, it would take a major armed insurrection to catch their interest.

So - where does that leave the elderly grandmother whose pension was minimal at best, and who just had her house levelled by Hurricane Katrina? Stuck - if she has supporting relatives, great; otherwise, she's in for a really rough ride until this public fund raiser starts to deliver funds and rebuilding gets going.

The question going through my head right now is "where's the US government for the individual citizens?" It appears not only to be in absentia, but determined to remain there.

While Canada's government wouldn't fare much better under the circumstances, there are aspects of the picture that are quite different. The prairie provinces experienced a significant amount of abnormal flooding this June. Among other things that kicked in almost immediately after the floods began to subside were programs to assist those whose losses could not - or would not - be covered through private insurance.

The difference is the understanding that there are times that a government can, and should, make investments in its citizens. Whether that is educational, medical or disaster relief doesn't matter. To be seen to be helping the individual citizen as well as the economic engine is not only good PR, but good government.

To assume that the "community will provide" for those that are profoundly disrupted by a disaster is to assume that communities can absorb a disaster of this scale, and that the people affected are still part of a community. Disaster disrupts social structures as much as it does physical structures. People are uprooted with no warning, dispatched to wherever "safe ground" can be had. Their community may or may not be anywhere around them.

To treat the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina like the aftermath of the Tsunami that flattened parts of Indonesia last year shows the Bush government as viewing its own citizens in the same light as disaster victims thousands of miles away. Sad really.

Talk About Clueless

In the wake of the dispute over softwood lumber returning to the forefront of US-Canada politics, it appears that the Conservatives would like us all to start calling the White House to express our displeasure with President Bush.

After the new US Ambassador to Canada opened his flap about softwood lumber and accused Canada of "emotional tirades" for complaining about the fact that the US seems less than interested in actually playing by the very rules they signed up to in the first place. (and are oh-so-interested in imposing on the rest of the world...)

Is the Conservative Party really so clueless as to believe that Bush gives a damn about Canada, or the treaties that he has signed with us? This is the president who has unilaterally walked away from more international agreements than any other president in US history. Calling George Bush directly is going to achieve nothing - less than Cindy Sheehan has achieved. Trust me.

It's not a matter of negotiating with the Americans any more. It's time that Canada grew a spine and started trading with the rest of the world. We should send Washington a shredded copy of NAFTA, and turn our backs for a while. Canada's interests are not served in any meaningful way by pandering to the US Government.

Of course, much of the CPC is so "pro-American" that they forget that they are Canadians regularly.