Chris Selley: If judges now can't even tell what a 'fact' is, we're really cooked - National Post

Facts? Supporters of the Drug User Liberation Front outside a Vancouver courthouse where the group's founders were having a court appearance on Jan. 16, 2024. Photo by Jason Payne/PNG/PostmediaArticle contentB.C. Supreme Court Justice Catherine Murray added a notable item to Canada’s rich library of addlepated court rulings this week when she ruled in favour of the proprietors of the Drug User Liberation Front (DULF), who are by any dictionary definition — and, police allege, by the criminal definition — drug dealers. They sell cocaine, meth and heroin, only the best! But they do not want to face consequences for dealing drugs, because they’re not that kind of drug dealers. They’re a “compassion club,” you understand. They screen out the riff-raff, apparently.

Murray decided that Section 5(2) of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act — “no person shall, for the purpose of trafficking, possess (a listed prohibited) substance” — violated both “the right to life and security of the person,” i.e., Section 7 of the Charter, and also the right to equality before the law, i.e., Section 15.

Columnist Jesse Kline keeps you up to date with what’s happening in Israel and the effects of antisemitism on life here in Canada. Friday mornings.

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Now, that’s crazy enough on its own. I’m so sympathetic to harm-reduction efforts that I’m furious how much their implementers have buggered it up. But to say the Canadian government effectively cannot ban the distribution for profit of certain substances and be in Charter compliance is … well, something I would expect a group called the Drug User Liberation Front to argue. Not a Canadian court. Murray is a former prosecutor!

It is unreasonable to ask or expect that your average Canadian would read Murray’s 22,000-word court ruling, or any other. John le Carré, they are not. It’s the media’s job to condense those rulings down to a digestible format, and we do a reasonable job, sometimes much better. (Subscribe to National Post!) But if you want to drive lunatics from the bench, which I do, and which I think most Canadians would support as a group endeavour, it’s difficult to really drive home how much truly unhinged thinking goes on in some rulings without reading at least the juiciest parts. And Murray’s ruling is juicy like a ripe pineapple plucked straight from a Polynesian shrub.

The most jaw-dropping elements, from a layman’s standpoint, are some of the things Murray considers “facts.”