Juno News - August 15, 2025


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

Mentioned
Peter Jeff
Canadians want more EVIDENCE on unmarked graves + Juno's 6 month anniversary (feat. Keean Bexte) Alberta sovereigntists draw big Edmonton crowd

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

161.7

Word count

447

Sentence count

26


Summary

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

A ban on cell phone use in the woods in order to prevent wildfires is being challenged by the Canadian federal government. In this episode, Peter and Jeff talk about the ban, why it's unconstitutional, and what they're doing to challenge it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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.