Justice
Quebec’s highest court upholds law banning public servants from wearing religious symbols
Quebec Premier François Legault
From LifeSiteNews
The new ruling overrides the Quebec Superior Court’s 2021 ruling which exempted the Montreal English school board from the province’s secularism law which prohibits public servants from wearing cross or other religious symbols.
Quebec’s highest court has upheld the province’s secularism law which bans civil servants from wearing religious symbols while at work.
On February 29, the Quebec Court of Appeals ruled that that the province’s secularism law, Bill 21, is constitutional and overturned a previous decision which exempted English schools from the law.
“The Act does not offend the unwritten principles or the architecture of the Canadian Constitution, nor does it offend any pre-Confederation statute or principle having constitutional status,” Appeal Court justices, Manon Savard, Yves-Marie Morrissette et Marie-France Bich wrote in their decision.
Bill 21, passed in 2019, bans all public servants, including public school teachers, police officers, government lawyers, and wildlife officials, from wearing any religious symbols while at work.
However, citing its commitment to “diversity, acceptance, tolerance and respect for individual rights and religious freedoms,” the Montreal English School Board indicated that it would not comply with the new law.
While the Quebec Superior Court exempted English schools from the secularism law in April 2021, the new 290-page ruling overrides the lower court’s decision.
The Superior Court decision was challenged in November 2022 by various civil liberties groups in addition to the Quebec government, which argued it created an unfair distinction between English and French schools.
The new decision relies on the province’s use of the notwithstanding clause, which allows the province to override most challenges to the legislation.
The notwithstanding clause, embedded in section 33 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, allows provinces to temporarily override sections of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to protect new laws from being scrapped by the courts.
“The court has confirmed Quebec’s right to make its own decisions,” Premier François Legault told reporters in Montreal Thursday. “Secularism is a collective choice that is part of our history, in continuity with the Quiet Revolution. Secularism is a principle that unites us as a nation in Quebec.”
Legault confirmed that the province will continue using notwithstanding clause for “as long as it is necessary for Canada to recognize the societal choice of the Quebec nation.”
He added that the law is “non-negotiable” as the province recently tabled legislation to renew the application of the clause to Bill 21 for another five years.
While the decision was celebrated by the Quebec premier, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) called the ruling a “painful setback.”
“This is a heart-wrenching day and highlights the urgent need for people across Quebec who have stood up for the values of equality, justice and freedom to continue to raise their voices,” CCLA Executive Director and General Counsel Noa Mendelsohn Aviv said in a press release.
“These values are the ones that fuel our legal challenge and that lie at the heart of our collective struggle against Bill 21,” Aviv declared.
Similarly, Quebec Life Coalition President Georges Buscemi told LifeSiteNews, “This decision is completely consistent with the recent historical trend in Quebec, which is one of rejecting its Catholic heritage in favor of a liberal ‘enlightened’ worldview, which considers religion to be a purely private matter.”
“This decision confirms the ‘legality’ of Quebec’s secularism law, which purports to make the state ‘neutral’ with respect to religions,” he continued. “Whatever the intentions of this law, its effect is to extirpate all signs of religion from the public square, from Knights of Columbus meetings in community centers to prayer in daycares. So called state-neutrality is quickly becoming state atheism in practice.”
Crime
Biden’s ‘preemptive pardons’ would set ‘dangerous’ precedent, constitutional scholar warns
From LifeSiteNews
By Bob Unruh
Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley warned that preemptive pardons ‘would do precisely what Biden suggests that he is deterring: create a dangerous immunity for presidents and their allies in committing criminal abuses.’
An expert who not only has testified before Congress on the U.S. Constitution but has represented members in court cases is warning about Joe Biden’s speculated agenda to deliver to his friend and supporters preemptive pardons.
It is Jonathan Turley, the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University and author of The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage, who wrote, “After years of lying to the American people about the influence-peddling scandal and promising not to consider a pardon for his son, Biden would end his legacy with the ultimate dishonesty: converting pardons into virtual party favors.”
There has been much speculation about those preemptive pardons from Biden, who lied about allowing juries and courts to determine the outcomes of son Hunter’s criminal gun and tax cases, flip-flopped and pardoned him.
Hunter Biden could have been ordered to jail for years for his felony gun convictions and his guilty pleas to felony tax charges.
However, Joe Biden handed him a get-out-of-jail free card, then followed up with hundreds and hundreds more commutations and pardons to a long list of those with criminal convictions.
The activity triggered a rash of speculation about those preemptive pardons, and Turley explains what’s going on.
“Democrats are worried about the collapsing narrative that President-elect Donald Trump will destroy democracy, end future elections, and conduct sweeping arrests of everyone from journalists to homosexuals. That narrative, of course, ignores that we have a constitutional system of overlapping protections that has blocked such abuses for over two centuries.”
Thus, the talk of preemptive pardons, but Turley said it wouldn’t work out.
“Ironically, preemptive pardons would do precisely what Biden suggests that he is deterring: create a dangerous immunity for presidents and their allies in committing criminal abuses,” he said.
He noted if Biden delivers those pardons, “he would fundamentally change the use of presidential pardons by granting ‘prospective’ or ‘preemptive’ pardons to political allies. Despite repeated denials of President-elect Donald Trump that he is seeking retaliation against opponents and his statements that he wants ‘success [to be] my revenge,’ Democratic politicians and pundits have called for up to thousands of such pardons.”
He explained there’s politics all over the scheme.
“After many liberals predicted the imminent collapse of democracy and that opponents would be rounded up in mass by the Trump Administration, they are now contemplating the nightmare that democracy might survive and that there will be no mass arrests,” he wrote. “The next best thing to a convenient collapse of democracy is a claim that Biden’s series of preemptive pardons averted it. It is enough to preserve the narrative in the face of a stable constitutional system.”
But there will be a cost to such a “political stunt,” he said.
“Preemptive pardons could become the norm as presidents pardon whole categories of allies and even themselves to foreclose federal prosecutions. … It will give presidents cover to wipe away any threat of prosecution for friends, donors, and associates. This can include self-pardons issued as implied condemnations of their political opponents. It could easily become the final act of every president to pardon himself and all of the members of his Administration.
“We would then have an effective immunity rule for outgoing parties in American politics.”
He noted that in the past, Bill Clinton pardoned both family members and political donors.
“Yet, despite that history, no president has seen fit to go as far as where Biden appears to be heading,” he said. Promoters of the plan, he said, “would prefer to fundamentally change the use of the pardon power to maintain an apocalyptic narrative that was clearly rejected by the public in this election. If you cannot prove the existence of the widely touted Trump enemies list, a Biden pardon list is the next best thing.”
Reprinted with permission from the WND News Center.
Business
‘Source Of Profound Regret’: Firm Pays Half Billion Settlement To Avoid Criminal Prosecution For Fueling Opioid Crisis
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Adam Pack
A consulting giant that helped fuel the United States’ deadly opioid epidemic agreed to pay a massive settlement to avoid criminal prosecution, according to court papers filed Friday.
McKinsey & Company, an international management consulting firm that advised Purdue Pharma to “turbocharge” sales of Oxycontin during the height of the opioid crisis, entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the Department of Justice (DOJ) that will require the firm to pay a $650 million settlement over five years.
A former senior McKinsey employee also pleaded guilty to an obstruction of justice charge for destroying records detailing the consulting giant’s work for Purdue.
The McKinsey settlement is the latest in a string of lawsuits seeking accountability from corporations and consulting firms for contributing to the opioid crisis.
The epidemic, created in part from the work of Purdue and McKinsey to market OxyContin to millions of Americans, has taken more than 500,000 lives and left a trail of devastation in its wake, particularly in parts of rural America.
“McKinsey schemed with Purdue Pharma to ‘turbocharge’ OxyContin sales during a raging opioid epidemic — an epidemic that continues to decimate families and communities across the nation,” U.S. Attorney Joshua Levy for the District of Massachusetts, who sued McKinsey alongside an attorney for the Western District of Virginia over the firm’s consulting work for Purdue, wrote following the settlement. “Consulting firms like McKinsey should get the message: if the advice you give to companies in boardrooms and PowerPoint presentations aids and abets criminal activity, we will come after you and we will expose the truth.”
“We are deeply sorry for our past client service to Purdue Pharma and the actions of a former partner who deleted documents related to his work for that client,” the consulting firm wrote in a statement following the settlement. “We should have appreciated the harm opioids were causing in our society and we should not have undertaken sales and marketing work for Purdue Pharma. This terrible public health crisis and our past work for opioid manufacturers will always be a source of profound regret for our firm.”
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