Juno News - August 15, 2025


Veteran fined over $28,000 for daring to step into the woods


Episode Stats

Length

2 minutes

Words per Minute

161.70264

Word Count

447

Sentence Count

26


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 Yeah, so not only putting, essentially creating a situation that would make the fires worse should they happen by removing the towers and banning people with cell phones to be able to report on these fires,
00:00:11.700 but there's another concern, which is a freedom of movement concern, because as far as I understand, the Canadian Charter of Rights does have within it a freedom of movement.
00:00:21.300 People are supposed to be allowed to move freely.
00:00:23.020 Now, there are restrictions. And one of those restrictions was challenged, I believe, in Nova Scotia during the pandemic or around the pandemic time, where that freedom of movement could be limited by things like public health was one of them.
00:00:39.980 But as far as I understand, that case was one for the freedom of movement.
00:00:44.000 So people should have freedom of movement in this country based in charter rights.
00:00:48.460 And so, Jeff, I'll turn it to you. Is that what you're trying to challenge right now?
00:00:53.020 Yes, absolutely. And what you're talking about in terms of limitations, they must be reasonable.
00:00:59.560 They cannot be arbitrary. That is the difference between totalitarianism and our society.
00:01:05.840 So when it comes to any measures that they put in place that interfere with my liberties,
00:01:11.760 they need to be minimally impairing.
00:01:14.560 And there was no effort to make these measures minimally impairing with respect to my liberties whatsoever.
00:01:20.320 They went all the way to a full-scale woods ban of my presence, period, within the woods.
00:01:27.080 Instead of taking any other steps leading up to that, like say, for example, they could ban smoking in the woods.
00:01:33.320 They could ban any source of ignition from the woods if they wanted.
00:01:38.900 But, like I said, there appears to have been no thought given to lesser measures that would be less impairing prior to going straight to a woods ban.
00:01:49.220 So that is the issue with respect to the limitations.
00:01:52.780 And also, those limitations must be logically connected to the goal.
00:01:57.160 In this case, the goal is preventing wildfires.
00:02:00.860 My sneakers are not a fire hazard, so there's no logical connection between my sneakers in the woods and the prevention of wildfires.
00:02:11.400 So that's what I find to be so unconstitutional on its face in terms of the ban itself.
00:02:16.300 And then we get into the fine, which is, like Peter just mentioned, it's a $28,872.50 fine grand total because they put victim fees on top of that, $25,000 initially.
00:02:31.620 And that would be, I think, prohibited under Section 12 of the Charter that prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.
00:02:39.820 So I think we have plenty of grounds, Charter grounds, on which to stand to challenge this ban.