News

Legal expert, Jewish group say Quebec judge should recognize Nazism led to Holocaust

Published

2 years ago

July 13, 2022

MONTREAL — Prominent Jewish group B’nai Brith Canada and a legal expert are questioning a Quebec judge’s claim that it is not a widely accepted fact that Nazi ideology led to the murder of Jews.

The link between Nazism and the Holocaust is so well-known that prosecutors don’t need to establish that fact in a courtroom, they say, in response to an unusual drama that played out in a Montreal courtroom last week.

“Any reasonable person would take as an undisputable fact that Nazi ideology led to the Holocaust,” Lisa Dufraimont, a professor at York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School, said in an interview Tuesday. “Entertaining arguments to the contrary is a kind of hairsplitting that goes beyond what is reasonable, it seems to me.”

Dufraimont’s comments were in reaction to the latest developments in a trial involving a Montreal man accused of wilfully promoting hatred against Jews. Gabriel Sohier Chaput, 35, was charged in connection with an article he has admitted to writing that was published in 2017 on the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer.

The blog post included racist images and comments about Jews throughout, and the website displayed photos of Hitler and other images associated with Nazism. The accused testified during the trial that the Daily Stormer was a “parody site.”

During the prosecution’s final arguments on Friday, Quebec court Judge Manlio Del Negro admonished the Crown for not submitting evidence, such as expert testimony, that Nazi ideology led to the Holocaust — the genocide of European Jews during the Second World War.

Prosecutor Patrick Lafrenière said he expected that the link between Nazism and the Holocaust would be accepted by the judge as judicial notice — a rule that evidence presented in court is not in dispute.

That link, however, was indeed disputed by Sohier Chaput’s defence lawyer, Hélène Poussard, who told the court that while the Nazis did kill millions of Jews, the Nazis’ murderous antisemitism was not ideological.

Dufraimont said it’s appropriate for judges to take judicial notice of facts that are generally accepted and not debated by reasonable people, as well as facts that easily verifiable.

While the Nazi ideology includes other elements, such as totalitarian government, Dufraimont said it’s widely understood that Nazism is “centrally about racial superiority of Germanic people and racial inferiority of others, especially Jewish people. That’s what the ideology is and I don’t think any reasonable person could really deny that .… It falls into the category of a notorious or well-known fact … that’s not the subject of debate among reasonable persons.”

On Monday, B’nai Brith Canada called for the federal government and provincial governments to ensure that judges have training on the Holocaust and antisemitism.

“Every Canadian should be appalled,” Sam Goldstein, B’nai Brith’s director of legal services, said in a news release. “We don’t expect Holocaust denial and distortion from our courts. The prosecutor does not need to establish that the Holocaust happened. No expert witness is needed. The Jewish community is outraged.”

Dufraimont said the issue of judicial notice has come up in other cases involving allegations of hate speech. In 2005, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that a judge should have taken judicial notice in a case involving four Ontario men and two youths accused of wilful promotion of hatred toward Roma people during a protest.

The defence argued successfully during the trial that the men had promoted hatred toward “Gypsies” but that the Crown didn’t prove that the term — which is considered derogatory — refers to Roma people.

The Supreme Court disagreed with the trial judge, ruling that the judge should have known “the fact that the Roma people had been persecuted by the Nazis while a Nazi theme was apparent at the demonstration …. As well, the trial judge should have taken judicial notice of dictionary definitions showing that ‘Gypsy’ can refer to ‘Roma.’”

In 1987, the Ontario Court of Appeal found that a trial court judge properly exercised his “discretion in refusing to take judicial notice of the existence of the Holocaust” during Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel’s first trial for spreading false news.

During a second trial in 1988 on the same charge, the judge did take judicial notice of “the mass murder and extermination of Jews in Europe by the Nazi regime during the Second World War” though not of specific details of the Holocaust. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled that the section of the Criminal Code under which Zündel was charged was unconstitutional.

Dufraimont said that one of the reasons that arguments about judicial notice arise in hate speech trials is because the courts want to ensure that everyone accused of a crime has the opportunity to defend themselves, adding that part of that defence, for example, might be questioning the hatefulness of the Nazis.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 13, 2022.

Jacob Serebrin, The Canadian Press

News

Two youths arrested after emergency alert issued in New Brunswick

Published

9 hours ago

September 17, 2024

Anne Joseph

MONCTON, N.B. – New Brunswick RCMP say two youths have been arrested after an emergency alert was issued Monday evening about someone carrying a gun in the province’s southeast.

Caledonia Region Mounties say they were first called out to Main Street in the community of Salisbury around 7 p.m. on reports of a shooting.

A 48-year-old man was found at the scene suffering from gunshot wounds and he was rushed to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

Police say in the interest of public safety, they issued an Alert Ready message at 8:15 p.m. for someone driving a silver Ford F-150 pickup truck and reportedly carrying a firearm with dangerous intent in the Salisbury and Moncton area.

Two youths were arrested without incident later in the evening in Salisbury, and the alert was cancelled just after midnight Tuesday.

Police are still looking for the silver pickup truck, covered in mud, with possible Nova Scotia licence plate HDC 958. They now confirm the truck was stolen from Central Blissville.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.

Source link

News

World Junior Girls Golf Championship coming to Toronto-area golf course

Published

10 hours ago

September 16, 2024

Anne Joseph

MISSISSAUGA, Ont. – Golf Canada has set an impressive stretch goal of having 30 professional golfers at the highest levels of the sport by 2032.

The World Junior Girls Golf Championship is a huge part of that target.

Credit Valley Golf and Country Club will host the international tournament from Sept. 30 to Oct. 5, with 24 teams representing 23 nations — Canada gets two squads — competing. Lindsay McGrath, a 17-year-old golfer from Oakville, Ont., said she’s excited to be representing Canada and continue to develop her game.

“I’m really grateful to be here,” said McGrath on Monday after a news conference in Credit Valley’s clubhouse in Mississauga, Ont. “It’s just such an awesome feeling being here and representing our country, wearing all the logos and being on Team Canada.

“I’ve always wanted to play in this tournament, so it’s really special to me.”

McGrath will be joined by Nobelle Park of Oakville, Ont., and Eileen Park of Red Deer, Alta., on Team Canada 2. All three earned their places through a qualifying tournament last month.

“I love my teammates so much,” said McGrath. “I know Nobelle and Eileen very well. I’m just so excited to be with them. We have such a great relationship.”

Shauna Liu of Maple, Ont., Calgary’s Aphrodite Deng and Clairey Lin make up Team Canada 2. Liu earned her exemption following her win at the 2024 Canadian Junior Girls Championship while Deng earned her exemption as being the low eligible Canadian on the world amateur golf ranking as of Aug. 7.

Deng was No. 175 at the time, she has since improved to No. 171 and is Canada’s lowest-ranked player.

“I think it’s a really great opportunity,” said Liu. “We don’t really get that many opportunities to play with people from across the world, so it’s really great to meet new people and play with them.

“It’s great to see maybe how they play and take parts from their game that we might also implement our own games.”

Golf Canada founded the World Junior Girls Golf Championship in 2014 to fill a void in women’s international competition and help grow its own homegrown talent. The hosts won for the first time last year when Vancouver’s Anna Huang, Toronto’s Vanessa Borovilos and Vancouver’s Vanessa Zhang won team gold and Huang earned individual silver.

Medallists who have gone on to win on the LPGA Tour include Brooke Henderson of Smiths Falls, Ont., who was fourth in the individual competition at the inaugural tournament. She was on Canada’s bronze-medal team in 2014 with Selena Costabile of Thornhill, Ont., and Calgary’s Jaclyn Lee.

Other notable competitors who went on to become LPGA Tour winners include Angel Yin and Megan Khang of the United States, as well as Yuka Saso of the Philippines, Sweden’s Linn Grant and Atthaya Thitikul of Thailand.

“It’s not if, it’s when they’re going to be on the LPGA Tour,” said Garrett Ball, Golf Canada’s chief operating officer, of how Canada’s golfers in the World Junior Girls Championship can be part of the organization’s goal to have 30 pros in the LPGA and PGA Tours by 2032.

“Events like this, like the She Plays Golf festival that we launched two years ago, and then the CPKC Women’s Open exemptions that we utilize to bring in our national team athletes and get the experience has been important in that pathway.”

The individual winner of the World Junior Girls Golf Championship will earn a berth in next year’s CPKC Women’s Open at nearby Mississaugua Golf and Country Club.

Both clubs, as well as former RBC Canadian Open host site Glen Abbey Golf Club, were devastated by heavy rains through June and July as the Greater Toronto Area had its wettest summer in recorded history.

Jason Hanna, the chief operating officer of Credit Valley Golf and Country Club, said that he has seen the Credit River flood so badly that it affected the course’s playability a handful of times over his nearly two decades with the club.

Staff and members alike came together to clean up the course after the flooding was over, with hundreds of people coming together to make the club playable again.

“You had to show up, bring your own rake, bring your own shovel, bring your own gloves, and then we’d take them down to the golf course, assign them to areas where they would work, and then we would do a big barbecue down at the halfway house,” said Hanna. “We got guys, like, 80 years old, putting in eight-hour days down there, working away.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.

Source link

News

Purple place: Mets unveil the new Grimace seat at Citi Field

Published

10 hours ago

September 16, 2024

Anne Joseph

NEW YORK (AP) — Fenway Park has the Ted Williams seat. And now Citi Field has the Grimace seat.

The kid-friendly McDonald’s character made another appearance at the ballpark Monday, when the New York Mets unveiled a commemorative purple seat in section 302 to honor “his special connection to Mets fans.”

Wearing his pear-shaped purple costume and a baseball glove on backwards, Grimace threw out a funny-looking first pitch — as best he could with those furry fingers and short arms — before New York beat the Miami Marlins at Citi Field on June 12.

That victory began a seven-game winning streak, and Grimace the Mets’ good-luck charm soon went viral, taking on a life of its own online.

New York is 53-31 since June 12, the best record in the majors during that span. The Mets were tied with rival Atlanta for the last National League playoff spot as they opened their final homestand of the season Monday night against Washington.

The new Grimace seat in the second deck in right field — located in row 6, seat 12 to signify 6/12 on the calendar — was brought into the Shannon Forde press conference room Monday afternoon. The character posed next to the chair and with fans who strolled into the room.

The seat is available for purchase for each of the Mets’ remaining home games.

“It’s been great to see how our fanbase created the Grimace phenomenon following his first pitch in June and in the months since,” Mets senior vice president of partnerships Brenden Mallette said in a news release. “As we explored how to further capture the magic of this moment and celebrate our new celebrity fan, installing a commemorative seat ahead of fan appreciation weekend felt like the perfect way to give something back to the fans in a fun and unique way.”

Up in Boston, the famous Ted Williams seat is painted bright red among rows of green chairs deep in the right-field stands at Fenway Park to mark where a reported 502-foot homer hit by the Hall of Fame slugger landed in June 1946.

So, does this catapult Grimace into Splendid Splinter territory?

“I don’t know if we put him on the same level,” Mets executive vice president and chief marketing officer Andy Goldberg said with a grin.

“It’s just been a fun year, and at the same time, we’ve been playing great ball. Ever since the end of May, we have been crushing it,” he explained. “So I think that added to the mystique.”

___

AP MLB:

Source link