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An Exposition
Concerning the Rights of Canadian Citizens to have
Armes for their Defense
Explaining how the Firearms Act of 1995 violates
the Constitution of Great Britain (the United Kingdom),
English Common Law,
the Constitution of Canada,
the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms,
the common historical heritage of North America,
and our unique Canadian traditions and culture.
The Canadian Right
of
Armes for their Defense
Edward B. Hudson DVM, MS
Canadian Unregistered Firearms Owners Association
402 Skeena Crt Saskatoon
Saskatchewan S7K 4H2
(306) 242-2379 (306) 230-8929
edwardhudson@shaw.ca
www.cufoa.ca
17 September 2007
Summary
Armes for their Defense
I. The Issue:
The licensing of firearms owners turns a Right into a mere privilege.
In 1995 Parliament passed the Firearms Act which declared that the
possession of a firearm without a licence would henceforth be a crime.
This new licensing mandate went far beyond the 1977 Firearms Acquisition
Certificate (FAC) requirement to obtain a police background check before
purchasing a firearm.
More ominously, the government now claimed the authority to “prescribe”
for responsible citizens “the circumstances in which an individual
does or does not need firearms to protect the life of that individual.”
This is the same legal language that the British government used to
destroy the ownership of firearms in Great Britain.
II. Our Beliefs
We believe that Armes for their Defense is a God-given, innate, Natural
Right.
We believe we have the Right to acquire, own, and possess firearms
for self-protection free from government “let or hindrance.”
We believe that a law that presumes the authority to tell responsible
citizens if they may possess firearms and when they may use those firearms
for self-protection is not just and cannot claim our obedience.
We believe that the Firearms Act violates the Constitution of Canada,
the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Canadian Common Law, the
mandates of God, Natural Law, and innate, basic common sense.
III. The Basis for our Beliefs
In 1689, after eighty years of severe internal turmoil, the English
firmly established the Right to own firearms for personal protection
in Article Seven of the English Declaration of Rights.
The English Declaration of Rights is extremely important in constitutional
law as it comprises part of the “unwritten” constitution
of Great Britain (the United Kingdom).
By 1765 the Right to possess firearms for self-defense was firmly entrenched
as part of English Common Law.
The British colonists carried these “Rights, Liberties, and Immunities”
to North America in their Royal Charters. British Royal Proclamations
affirmed these Rights for all North Americans - both to Aboriginal Peoples
and to immigrant French and British settlers.
The preamble of the British North America Act of 1867 incorporated
these British Rights into our Canadian Constitution.
Firearms are part of our unique Canadian heritage and culture. Canadian
history clearly demonstrates that firearms are a significant part of
our Common Law.
In Canada, God, not Parliament, is supreme. God commands that we honour
our life with self-defense.
IV. Our Methods
We want Parliament to repeal this unjust law. So far we have been unsuccessful
in our demonstrations and our political efforts. While we continue the
political fight we are asking the courts to intervene.
We have petitioned the courts to recognize the Right of Armes for their
Defense in law and to declare the Firearms Act unconstitutional.
Our latest effort in what has become a long, protracted legal process
is a Notice of Motion to the Court of Queens Bench in Saskatoon. We
are asking the Court to declare the licensing section of the Firearms
Act and the Criminal Code null and void.
We will not submit to an unjust law; we will not submit to licensing.
Members of our Association have submitted affidavits to the Court attesting
to our peaceful, nonviolent protection of our Rights and Freedoms.
The material which follows supports our court petition Q.B. No. 810
of 2007.
Q.B. No. 810 of 2007
In the Court of Queen’s Bench for Saskatchewan
Judicial Center of Saskatoon
Between:
Edward Burke Hudson
Applicant
-and-
The Attorney General of Canada
Respondent
______________________
Brief
of
Reasons
______________________
Edward B. Hudson
402 Skeena Court
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
S7K 4H2
Brief of Law
Court of Queen’s Bench, Saskatoon
Index
.................................................................................. Paragraph
1. List of Appendices ...................................................
00.
2. Introduction: the Basis of Our Complaint ...................
01.
3. Facts of the Case .....................................................
25.
4. Argument at Law ......................................................
30.
5. The Constitution of Great Britain ................................
31.
6. The English Declaration of Rights, Article Seven
.........32.
7. English Common Law ..............................................
39.
8. The Canadian Constitution - the preamble ................
45.
9. The Common History of North America ..................
49.
10. The Royal Charters ...............................................
50.
11. The Royal Proclamations ......................................
56.
12. Basis for Aboriginal Rights ....................................
59.
13. Canada’s Unique Cultural Heritage .......................
64.
14. The American Perspective ....................................
80.
15. The Lessons of History .........................................
89.
16. Protection from Tyranny ........................................
89.
17. Defense Against State Sponsored Genocide ..........
97.
18. The Reality in Canada .........................................
107.
19. How the British were Disarmed ..........................
115.
20. The Experience of General Roméo Dallaire
......... 122.
21. Self-defense: A Moral Imperative ........................
128.
22. The Bible, The Torah, and The Talmud ...............
129.
23. Self-protection: an innate, universal Truth ............
139.
24. The Supremeacy of God ....................................
147.
25. Lord Cooke on Common Law Rights ................
153.
26. Unwritten Constitutional Principles ....................
155.
27. Conclusions .....................................................
161.
28. Appendices .....................................................
180.
29. List of Authorities ............................................
181.
30. List of Affidavits ..............................................
182.
00.LIST OF APPENDICES
A. The Words of the Framers - English Declaration
of Rights, 1689
B. The Significance of the British Convention Parliament
C. British Royal Charters of North American
D. Use of Firearms in Canada
E. American Jurisprudence
F. The Admonitions of the Philosophers
G. Government Sponsored Genocide
H. The Torah and The Bible
I. Examples of Firearms Control Laws in Canada
J. Facts on the confiscation of my firearm
K. Statute of Northampton, 1328
L. definition of “licence”
M. The Autonomy of the Individual
N. Methods used to disarm the English, 1620 to 1689
O. Methods used to disarm the British, 1920 to 1990
P. A Constitution “Similar in Principle”
Q. Reference re Firearms Act
R. Time Magazine, 03 September 2007, p. 7 - see Appendix
R
S. Wouldn’t you feel safer with a gun? Richard
Munday
T. The Idenity of God
U. McLachlin, CJ, “Unwritten Constitutional Principles:
What Is Going On?”
V. Justice Michael D. Kirby quote
W. Supremacy of God
X. Notice Constitutional Questions Act, 20 April 2005
Y. Overview of English History
**************
Brief of Law
Court of Queen’s Bench, Saskatoon
27 September 2007
Armes for their Defense
I. Introduction
The Basis of Our Complaint
01. My associates and I are in Court today to challenge the constitutional
validity of one specific facet of the Firearms Act - the firearms licensing
scheme.
02. We are aware that the Supreme Court reviewed a significant constitutional
question in Alberta’s Reference re Firearms Act.
03. However, Alberta’s Reference only addressed the issue of
the constitutional division of powers between the federal and provincial
governments - see Reference Appendix Q.
04. The Supreme Court found that the Firearms Act “comes within
Parliament’s jurisdiction over criminal law;” the intrusion
into provincial jurisdiction is “not so excessive as to upset
the balance of federalism.”
05. We have no concern with that esoteric intergovernmental debate.
British Parliaments have been legislating against the criminal misuse
of firearms since the Statute of Northampton in 1328 - see Appendix
K.
06. Our Canadian Parliament has always had the authority to define
and restrict the misuse of firearms, e.g., Parliament has required the
registration of handguns in Canada since 1934
- see Examples of Firearms Control Laws in Canada - Appendix
I and
For their Own Good - Firearms Control in Canada, Parts I & II
Book of Authorities, Book Two QB Moose Jaw
07. Our dispute with Parliament is specifically their firearms licensing
scheme.
08. This is the crux of the matter - the “pith and substance”
of the issue is the licensing of firearms owners.
09. In this so-called program to reduce crime Parliament has gone far
beyond the acceptable requirement of the 1977 Firearms Acquisition Certificate
to obtain a police background check before acquiring a firearm.
10. Parliament’s new firearms licensing scheme makes the mere
possession of a firearm a crime -see definition of “licence”
- Appendix L.
11. Many a responsible citizen with a firearm locked securely in their
home is now a “criminal.”
12. Totally without valid reasons, Parliament has presumed to claim
the authority to tell responsible citizens if we may acquire a firearm.
13. Without justification, Parliament has presumed to tell us how,
when, and where we may use a firearm to defend ourselves.
14. Under Criminal Code Section 117.03 - which flows directly from
the firearms licensing scheme of the Firearms Act - the government can
now confiscate any firearm - at any time - from anyone - simply for
“failure” to have a firearms license.
15. We believe this section is an unwarranted intrusion into our personal
autonomy and is completely inexcusable.
16. We are here today to ask the Court to correct this injustice.
17. We maintain Canadians have the Right of “armes for their
Defense.”
18. We believe this Right is protected both by the Constitution of
Canada and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
19. We submit that the firearms licensing scheme of the Firearms Act
is beyond the authority of Parliament and violates ss 7 & 26 of
the Charter.
20. Therefore we are here to ask the Court to declare that Criminal
Code section 117.03
a)is ultra vires Parliament,
b) violates Section 26 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms,
and also
c) violates Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
21. In support of this request we will show that the Right to acquire,
own, and possess firearms without government let or hindrance is protected
by:
a) the Constitution of Great Britain (the United
Kingdom),
b) English Common Law,
c) the Constitution of Canada,
d) the common historical heritage of North America, and
e) our unique Canadian heritage and culture.
22. We will demonstrate that the firearms licensing scheme of the Firearms
Act ignores the lessons of history; the need for arms for defense against
tyranny and state sponsored genocide.
23. We will illustrate how the firearms licensing scheme of the Firearms
Act attempts to negate the Biblical and moral imperative of self-preservation.
24. Now concerning the facts of why we are here.
II. Facts of the Case
25. The path that brings all of us to this Court today is rather convoluted
- see Appendix J.
26. But the basic underlying event is simple; on Friday, 10 October
2003, an RCMP officer seized and confiscated my firearm simply because
I did not have a firearms licence.
27. The officer stated that he based the confiscation upon authority
of Criminal Code section 117.03.
28. This section of the Criminal Code flows directly from the firearms
licensing scheme of the Firearms Act, Section 4 which provides:
... for the issuance of licences ... under which
persons may possess firearms in circumstances that would otherwise
constitute an offence ... .
The Firearms Act, chapter 39, Statues of Canada -1995; p. 4
Book Four / item 20
29. And Firearms Act, Section 117 which states:
The Governor in Council may make regulations
(a) regarding the issuance of licenses, authorization certificates
and authorizations, including regulation respecting the purposes
for which they may be issued ... and prescribing the circumstances
in which persons are or are not eligible to hold licences; ...
(c) prescribing the circumstances in which an individual does or
does not need firearms
(1) to protect the life of that individual, ... .
The Firearms Act, chapter 39, Statues of Canada -1995;
p. 54
Book Four / item 20
III. Argument at Law
30. Through the Firearms Act Parliament is attempting to degrade a
Right into a mere privilege.
The Constitution of Great Britain
31. While the “constitution” of Great Britain is essentially
“unwritten” it consists of five very well known components:
a) the Magna Carta, 1215,
b) the Petition of Rights, 1628,
c) the English Declaration of Rights, 1689,
d) the Act of Settlement, 1701, and
e) the Common Law
The English Declaration of Rights,
1689
Article Seven
32. We submit that our Right to possess firearms comes directly from
the English Declaration of Rights, 1689, Article 7, which states:
That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their
defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law.
English Declaration of Rights -1689
Book Four / item 1
33. The relevant point of Article 7 is that the government can not pass
laws which prevent responsible citizens from acquiring firearms as happened
prior to 1689 -see Methods used to disarm the English, Appendix
N.
What “Armes for their Defense” means
34. In 1689 the meaning of Article 7 of the English Declaration of Rights
was quite clear. The framers of the Declaration intended never again to
be disarmed and subjugated by a tyrannical ruler.
35. The words of the framers of the Declaration make that emphatic -
see Appendix A.
“true, ancient, and indubitable”
36. In 1689 the English declared the Right to be armed for their defense
as one of their “true, ancient, and indubitable” Rights.
37. The framers of the Declaration established this Right in a Convention
Parliament before they offered the English crown to the Prince of Orange
and Mary, - see The Significance of the Convention Parliament - Appendix
B.
38. Significantly, the English then had to fight a bloody two-year war
to secure these Rights, e.g.,
the Siege of Derry - 1689,
the Battle of the Boyne - 1690,
the Battle of Aughrim - 1691, and
the Siege of Limerick - 1691.
English Common Law
39. The Right of “Arms for their Defense” is established
in English Common Law:
a) In 1739 in Rex versus Gardner:
The defense objected “that a gun is not mentioned is the statue
of [the Game Act, 1706], and though there may be many things for the
bare keeping of which a man may be convicted, yet they are only such
as can used for the destruction of the game, whereas a guns necessary
for defense of a house, or for a farmer to shoot crows.”
The court agreed with the defense and concluded: “We are of
the opinion, that a gun differs from nets and dogs, which can only
be kept for an ill purpose, and therefore the conviction should be
quashed.”
Rex v. Gardner, Michaelmas Term, 12 Geo. 2
Book Three / item 3
b) In 1752 in Wingfield versus Stratford and Osman:
Plaintiff appealed his conviction and the confiscation of a gun and
a dog, the dog being a “setting dog” and the gun “an
engine” for killing game. The conviction was overturned. The
court explained:
“It is not to be imagined, that it was the Intention of the
Legislature, ... to disarm all the People of England. ... a gun may
be kept for the Defense of a Man’s House, and for divers other
lawful Purposes, ... .
Wingfield vers. Stratford & Osman, Hilary Term, 25 Geo.II 1752
Book Three / item 4
c) In 1819 after the Peterloo Massacre in King against George Dewhurst
& Others:
A man has a clear right to arms to protect himself in his house. A
man has a clear right to protect himself when he is going singly or
in a small party upon the road where he is traveling or going for
the ordinary purposes of business.
King against George Dewhurst & Others
Book Three / item 2
40. While the British fought the Revolutionary War in the American Colonies,
the Gordon Riot in London killed over four hundred people in June 1780.
41. In July 1780 the Recorder of London, the chief legal adviser to the
mayor and council, attested:
The right of his majesty's Protestant subjects, to have arms for their
own defence, and to use them for lawful purposes, is most clear and
undeniable. It seems, indeed, to be considered, by the ancient laws
of this kingdom, not only as a right, but as a duty; for all the subjects
of the realm, who are able to bear arms, are bound to be ready, at all
times, [for] the preservation of the public peace.
Malcolm, Joyce Lee, The Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms: The
Common Law Tradition, Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly,
Vol. 10: 285-314 (1983)
Book Five / item 3
42. While these court cases mentioned the right to defend one’s
house, William Blackstone in his 1765 “Commentaries” underscored
perhaps the most compelling reason for the Right of individual ownership
of firearms; the protection of all of our civil liberties:
But in vain would these rights be declared, ascertained, and protected
by the dead letter of the laws, if the constitution had provided no
other method to secure their actual enjoyment ... ‘auxiliary rights
meant to protect all others’ is that of having arms for their
defense ... It is, indeed, a publick allowance under due restrictions,
of the natural right of resistance and self preservation, when the sanctions
of society and the laws are found insufficient to restrain the violence
of oppression.
43. Blackstone acknowledged that “restraints” on the possession
of firearms may be necessary, but he emphasized that the restraints would
be:
in themselves so gentle and moderate, as will appear upon farther
inquiry, that no man of sense or probity would wish to see them slackened.
William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 4 vols.;
1st ed. (London, 1765-1769, repr Chicago, 1979), I:136 & 139
44. Significantly, even though revolution, rebellion, and riot, English
Common Law has recognized and validated the private ownership of firearms
free from the restraint of a firearms licence.
The Preamble
of the
British North America Act, 1867
45. The preamble to the British North America Act states that the Provinces
of Canada shall be united:
with a Constitution similar in Principle to the United Kingdom.
The British North America Act - 1867. p.1
Book Four / item 18
46. The Supreme Court has interpreted this phrase to establish British
constitutional principles in Canada.
47. The Supreme Court has also clearly cited the 1689 English Declaration
of Rights in some very significant cases - Appendix P,
e.g.,
a. Judicial independence:
Reference: re Remuneration Judges Prov Court P.E.I., [1997] 3 S.C.R.
p. 5 Per C.J. Lamer
Book Two / item 5
b. Parliamentary privilege:
Canada (House of Commons) v. Vaid, [2005] SCC 30; p. 8,
Book 2 / item 3, para 21 & 34
c. Democratic principles:
Reference: re Secession of Quebec, [1998] 2 S.C.R. ; pp. 20 - 23
Book One/ item 2
d. Parliament’s “inherent” self-regulating authority:
Reference: Resolution to Amend Constitution [1981] 1 S.C.R.;
Book One/ item 3. p.785
e. No cruel and unusual Punishments:
R. v. Smith (Edward Dewey), [1987] 1 S.C.R. 1045; p. 15,
Book Two / item 2. para 24
f. Presumption of innocence:
R. v. Demers, [2004] 2 S.C.R. 489, p. 21, para 82
Book Two/ item 1
48. Thus we submit that Article 7’s “Armes for their Defense”
of the English Declaration of Rights, 1687, is firmly entrenched alongside
these other vital protections in our Canadian Constitution.
The Common History of North America
The Inherited “Rights, Privileges, and Immunities”
of North Americans
“Let an Englishman go where he will,
he carries as much of law and liberty with him,
as the nature of things will bear.”
49. Canadian history cannot be conveniently severed from North American
history. What happened in the “thirteen American colonies”
is intimately entwined with Canada’s history.
The Royal Charters
50. The royal charters that the kings and queens of Great Britain issued
to the North American colonists clearly demonstrate that the colonists
carried the Rights of Englishmen with them to North America. -- see Appendix
C.
51. The Royal Charter of Virginia of 1606 is typical:
Also we do ... DECLARE ... that all and every the Persons being our
Subjects, which shall dwell and inhabit within every or any of the said
several Colonies and Plantations, and every of their children, which
shall happen to be born within any of the Limits and Precincts of the
said several Colonies and Plantations, shall HAVE and enjoy all Liberties,
Franchises, and Immunities, within any of our other Dominions, to all
Intents and Purposes, as if they had been abiding and born, within this
our Realm of England, or any other of our said Dominions.
First Virginia Charter - 1606
Book Four / item 5
52. So firmly was this belief established that in 1720, Richard West,
counsel to the English Board of Trade, gave this description of the state
of law in the colonies:
The Common Law of England is the Common Law of the Plantations, and
all statutes in affirmance of the Common Law, passed in England antecedent
to the settlement of a colony, are in force in that colony, unless there
is some private Act to the contrary; though no statutes, made since
those settlements, are there in force unless the colonies are particularly
mentioned. Let an Englishman go where he will, he carries as much of
law and liberty with him, as the nature of things will bear.
Roy G. Weatherup, Standing Armies And Armed Citizens: An Historical
Analysis of The Second Amendment, 1975 Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly.
Originally published as 2 Hastings Const. L.Q. 961-1001 (1975)
53. These royal charters, which were issued over a period of one hundred
and twenty-five years by a succession of six monarchs, all have very similar
statements regarding the need to have firearms for defense of their settlements.
The 1632 Charter of Maryland is typical:
But because, that in so remote a Region, placed among so many barbarous
Nations, the Incursions as well of the Barbarians themselves, as of
other Enemies, Pirates and Ravagers, probably will be feared. Therefore
We have Given,... as full and unrestrained Power, as any Captain-General
of an Army ever hath had, ... to summon to their Standards, and to array
all men, of whatsoever Condition, or wheresoever born, ... to wage War,
and to pursue, even beyond the Limits of their Province, the Enemies
and Ravagers aforesaid, infesting those Parts by Land and by Sea, and
(if God shall grant it) to vanquish and captivate them, and the Captives
to put to Death, ... .
Charter of Maryland - 1632
Book Four / item 9
54. Along with Indian attack, the English settlers of North America had
to content with the warfare brought on by the complex European affairs
of the mother country. By the late 17th century and for most of the 18th
century war was almost continuous in North America with England fighting
France and her Indian allies - see Appendix D.
55. Thus the possession of personal arms for defense was not only necessary,
but militia training was a requirement.
The Perpetual Acts of the General Assemblies of Nova Scotia, 1767
Book Seven / item 10
Royal Proclamations
56. With General Wolfe’s victory on the Plains of Abraham and Great
Britain’s ultimate victory over France for supremacy in North America,
King George III’s Royal Proclamation of 1763 now extended the guarantee
of British liberty to all North Americans:
[F]or the security of the Liberties and Properties of those who are
and shall become Inhabitants thereof, ... by this Our Proclamation,
... under our Great Seal of Great Britain, ... those Colonies and Provinces
in America which are under our immediate Government: ..., to make, constitute,
and ordain Laws. Statutes, and Ordinances for the Public Peace, Welfare,
and good Government of our said Colonies, and of the People and Inhabitants
thereof, as near as may be agreeable to the Laws of England... .
Royal Proclamation - 1763
Book Four / item 14
57. The Quebec Act of 1774, and especially the Constitution Act of 1791,
issued by King George III after the conclusion of the Revolutionary War,
reaffirmed Britain's commitment to the established Rights and Freedoms
of loyal Canadians. Especially noteworthy is the Constitution Act’s
requirement for all Canadians personally to “defend the King.”
The Quebec Act - 1774
Book Four / item 15
The Constitution Act - 1791
Book Four / item 16
58. Thus, during the years leading up to Great Britain granting Canada
her own constitution, Canadians continued to have the Right to possess
firearms.
Basis for Aboriginal Rights
59. The significant importance of the Royal Proclamation is not lost
to Canada’s Aboriginal People. The words and actions of the British
Crown form the basis of the the First Nation’s hunting Rights and
their claim for self-government.
Simon v. The Queen, [1985] 2 S.C.R. 387; p. 14
R. v . George, (1963), 41 D.L.R. (2d) 31; p.4
Book Three / items 7 & 8
60. Specifically concerning the importance of the Royal Proclamation
of 1763 the Court noted:
The Royal Proclamation must be interpreted liberally, and any matters
of doubt resolved in favour of aboriginal peoples: ... Further, the Royal
Proclamation must be interpreted in light of its status as the “Magna
Carta” of Indian rights in North America and Indian “Bill
of Rights”: ...
R. v. Marshall; R. v. Bernard, 2005 SCC 43; p.19, para 86
Book Three / item 5
61. And very significantly:
The Proclamation confers Rights on the Indians without necessarily thereby
extinguishing any other right ....
R. v. Sioui, [1990] 1 S.C.R. 1025; p. 18
Book Three / item 6
62. The Rights guaranteed to the citizens of Canada by the Royal Proclamation
should be equally important to present-day Canadians whose forebears arrived
by ship.
63. Thus, we suggest that the Right to have “armes for their Defense”
arrived in Canada with our immigrant forebears from Great Britain.
Canada’s Unique Cultural
Heritage:
Responsible Firearm’s Ownership
64. Some Canadians, in a perverse desire “not to be like Americans,”
have attempted to create a myth that Canada does not have a significant
history of firearms. Nothing could be further from the truth.
65. Canada has a very long, and a very proud, tradition of the ownership
and use of firearms.
66. From the earliest “discovery” of Canada by Europeans
explorers, Canadians have acquired, possessed, and used firearms for self-protection.
67. We tend to forget that from Champlain’s first encounter with
the Iroquois in 1609 the next two hundred years of Canadian history saw
intermittent, but frequent international warfare, with subsequent massacres
of Indians, and Indian massacres.
68. Even after the War of 1812, responsible citizens still counted upon
personal firearms for protection of their home through numerous internal
Canadian conflicts - see Appendix D.
69. As for the prevalence of the individual ownership of firearms, the
Royal Canadian Legion website notes:
By 1665 virtually every parish in what was known as "the new
world" could muster some form of militia for local protection.
http://www.legion.ca/asp/docs/about/MilHeritage_e.asp
70. Canadians have used their personal firearms to defend their homes
and to defend their country, both from our neighbors to the south and
from international aggressors. It is indeed unfortunate that the over
sixty-eight thousand Canadian dead from World War I and the over forty-six
thousand Canadian dead from World War II are not buried in Canadian soil
so that we would be more easily reminded of this sacrifice of arms.
71. With the European introduction of firearms as an item of trade into
North America in the early seventeenth century, Canada’s First Nations
people very readily relinquished the bow and arrow for firearms for personal
defense, warfare, and hunting. As the European demand for more furs from
North America grew, so did the number of firearms in the fur trade.
72. As late as 1874, Queen Victoria, in her treaties with the Aboriginal
People of Canada, stated:
that yearly and every year she will cause to be distributed ... powder,
shot, ball ....
Bounty and Benevolence; A History of Saskatchewan Treaties
Arthur Ray, Jim Miller, & Frank Tough, McGill-Queen’s University
Press, Montréal & Kingston, 2000
73. Our First Nations’ people continue this tradition of hunting
with firearms by Right of treaty.
Simon v. The Queen, [1985] 2 S.C.R. 387; p.1
Book Three / item 7
74. Firearms are part of our unique Canadian heritage and culture. For
over three hundred years Canadians, both Aboriginal and immigrant, have
acquired, owned, and used firearms responsibly without a licence.
75. Canada would not have emerged as an independent nation without responsible
citizens, both settler and aboriginal, having had unfettered access to
“powder, shot, ball” and the firearms in which to use them.
76. While some people may not be proud of our sanguinary national history
and culture, we are not free to ignore it nor deny it. Firearms ownership
is part of our unique Canadian heritage.
77. We submit that Parliament does not have the authority to deny the
Right of responsible citizens to be armed.
78. The Right to firearms is an explicit part of our British heritage
and is implicit in our Canadian history and culture.
79. I would like to call specific attention to the affidavits which my
associates and I have submited testifying to that fact. These are statements
from responsible citizens from all across Canada.
The American Perspective
80. We are aware that in Hasselwander Justice Cory was dismissive of
the American jurisprudence concerning the Right of individuals to possess
firearms.
R. v. Hasselwander, [1993] 2 S.C.R. 398 ; p. 8 para 2
Book Three / item 10
81. We sincerely hope this Court will thoughtfully consider the history
of the debate in the United States over the issue of the Right of individual
ownership of firearms.
82. As the enclosed six American articles and the 2004 opinion of the
US Attorney General demonstrates, the jurisprudence of American law is
based solidly on the English Declaration of Rights 0f 1689 - see Appendix
E.
83. Americans inherited the Right to own firearms from their British
forebears in the same manner as did we Canadians.
84. That Right was a well established part of North American culture
well before the 1776 rupture with King George III.
85. I would hope that the Court would not ignore the knowledge and insight
these American authorities have to offer.
86. When one compares the United States where the Right to “keep
and bear arms” has so recently been reaffirmed, to Great Britain
where the citizens have so recently lost the Right of self-defense and
where the crime rate is so suddenly rising, one cannot help but be puzzled
by the push of the British government to disarm the population - see Appendix
S and Dr. Malcolm’s Exhibit E.
87. Dr Gary Mauser of Simon Fraser University makes clear in The Failed
Experiment, Gun Control in Canada, Australia, England and Wales, the firearms
licensing schemes are having a perverted effect on crime.
Mauser, Gary A., The Failed Experiment Gun Control and Public Safety
in Canada, Australia, England, and Wales Public Policy Sources No. 71
November 2003
Book Six /item 7
88. Several other prominent authors have also noted that crime in the
United Kingdom is now worse than in the United States, and the crime rate
in Canada is also continuing to rise.
David Kopel, The Failure of Canadian Gun Control , p.1
Book Seven / item 16.
Breitkreuz, MP., Garry, But Did Our gun Laws Actually Save Any Lives?
Press Release 30 June 2005
Breitkreuz, MP., Garry, RCMP Say They Have No Information on Why 70-Years
of Registering Handguns Hasn’t Worked,
Press Release 15 December 2004
Book Six / item 10
John Dixon, The gang that couldn’t shoot straight, Globe &
Mail, 28Jan2003
Book Seven / item 6
Goodchild, Sophie, & Paul Lashmar, Up to 4m guns in UK and police
are losing the battle, The Independent 04 September 2005
Book Six /item 14
The Lesons of History:
Tyranny and State Sponsored Genocide
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to
repeat it.
- George Santayana
Life of Reason, Reason in Common Sense, Scribner's, 1905, p. 284
Protection from Tyranny
"I came to Ottawa in November with the firm belief
that the only people in this country who should have guns are police officers
and soldiers."
— Allan Rock, then Canada's Minister of Justice
Maclean's "Taking Aim on Guns", 1994 April 25, page 12.
89. Regrettably, history teaches that individuals more often
need protection from their government than by their government. Abuse
of government power - tyranny- is not a popular subject.
90. Lord Acton reminds us:
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
91. This corruption of power is not limited to dictatorships, but occurs
just as easily in democratic states as Swiss author J.L. DeLolme, (1740-1806)
noted of the English government in 1755,
[It is] absolutely necessary, for securing the Constitution of a State,
to restrain the Executive power ... it is still more necessary to restrain
the legislative. What the former can do only by successive steps (I
mean subvert the laws) and through a longer or shorter train of enterprises,
the latter does in a moment. As its bare will can give being to the
laws; so its bare will can also annihilate them: ... the Legislative
power can change the Constitution as God created the light.
J.L. DeLolme, The Constitution of England; or an Account of the English
Government, (New York, 1792), p. 164
92. The necessity of the private, individual ownership of firearms as
protection against tyranny is not simply an “outdated” American
idea. Through the ages philosophers and statesmen have warned of the dangers
of government abuse of power. The admonitions of the philosophers are
recorded for our enlightenment and protection - see Appendix
F.
93. In 1761 when James Otis wrote Against Writs of Assistance he did
not consider it “a chimerical suggestion of a heated brain”
to suggest that the Parliament of Great Britain was abusing the Liberties
of her citizens.
94. Does it take an over-stimulated brain or a wildly fanciful imagination
to suggest that in Canada we may one day need a defense from our own government?
95. Who other than a criminal or a tyrant would seek to disarm responsible
citizens?
96. Shall we learn nothing from history; from Solzhenitsyn; from Blackstone,
from Raleigh?
Defense Against State Sponsored
Genocide
97. More people have been murdered by their government than by criminals.
Kates, Don B., Democide and Disarmament, SAIS Review 23.1, 305-309 (2003),
p.1
Book Six/ item 6
98. That should be a sobering statement, but as the list of genocides
reveals, genocide is not a once-in-a-millennium aberration that died with
the defeat of the German Nazi war machine in May 1945. Genocide continues
unabated - see Appendix G.
99. As the authors on the articles about genocide demonstrate, too many
Canadians have been bombarded with false propaganda and therefore believe
that firearms are inherently dangerous. Governments, not firearms, are
more often the problem.
Kates, Don B., Henry E. Schaffer, Ph.D., John K. Lattimer, M.D., George
B. Murray, M.D., & Edwin H. Classem, M.D. Guns and Public Health:
Epidemic of Violence or Pandemic of Propaganda ? 61 Tenn. L. Rev. 513-596
(1994)
Book Six/ item 2
Polsby, Daniel D., & Don B. Kates, Of Holocausts and Gun Control,
75 Wash. U. L.Q. 1237 (1997)
Book Six/ item 4
Olson, Joseph E. & David B. Kopel, All the Way Down the Slippery
Slope: Gun Prohibition in England and Some Lessons for Civil Liberties
in America,
Hamiline Law Review Vol. 22, April 1999
Book Six/ item 5
100. As retired Canadian General Romeo Dallaire makes brutally clear
in Shake Hands with the Devil, genocide is something that the people of
the world must face, or be forced to endure again and again.
101. In light of these international outrages against humanity should
citizens be forced to ask the government for permission to own firearms?
Is Canada somehow immune to what is happening in the rest of the world?
102. The fact that the Canadian Criminal Code has recently been amended
to include “hate crimes” seems to argue that Canada is not
really that much different.
103. As Hurricane Katrina so graphically demonstrated, when the “thin
veneer of civilization” is violently stripped away, self-protection
becomes an individual responsibility.
Gery Klein, It could very well happen here, StarPhoenix 01 Sept 2005
Book Seven / item 18
When the duty to obey without question is accepted,
that is the moment of freedom’s death.
104. That warning of Canadian historian, writer, and poet George Woodcock
is apropos.
George Woodcock (1912 - 1995), Civil Disobedience Seven Talks for
CBC Radio, T.H. Best, Toronto 1966 CBC Publ, Box 500, Toronto
105. The Firearms Act demands obedience to rules and regulations which
make the mere possession of a firearm illegal. Obedience to the Firearms
Act would indeed be the moment of Freedom’s death.
106. History teaches that citizens can not trust their government when
the government begins to restrict the access to the necessary means to
self-defense.
107. When we argued these points in Provincial Court, Judge Orr ruled:
It is possible that in some hypothetical future Canada where a tyranny
has arisen, or, alternatively, where anarchy and lawlessness have broken
out, even the relatively mild restrictions of section 117.03 would so
hinder Canadians in their right of self-defense that the section might
be rules by courts (if there still were any) to be an infringement of
section 7. I can only comment that such social conditions do not presently
exist, nor do they seem likely to exist in the foreseeable future. The
courts must deal with reality as it is, not as it might be in some awful
and hopefully never-to-be future. (emphasis added)
Judge Orr’s Decision, Provincial Court transcript p. 8 [16]
108. Unfortunately, that misses the very point the English made in 1689.
Once tyranny has arisen, we will have lost any hope that the courts would
be able to protect our Rights.
109. The “reality” that we face today is that a licence merely
to possess of a firearm serves no valid societal purpose. While making
the means of self-protection illegal, licensing honest, responsible citizens
does nothing to keep firearms from criminals .
110. The reality is that the government lied to Parliament by submitting
improper data during the parliamentary debates.
Murray, J.P.R. , RCMP Letter to Mr. George Thompson, Deputy Minister
of Justice
Garry Breitkreuz, M.P., Press Releases Re: RCMP Commissioner’s
Letter
Book Seven, item 13
111. The reality is that since Parliament made the means of self-protection
illegal, violent crime in Canada has been steadily increasing.
Mauser, Gary A., The Failed Experiment Gun Control and Public Safety
in Canada, Australia, England, and Wales Public Policy Sources No. 71
November 2003
Book Six, item 7
112. The reality is that the federal government has been relentless in
its push for ever more and more restrictive firearm’s legislation,
e.g.:
- The Firearms Acquisition Certificate, Bill C-51, 1977,
- Expanded questions on FAC application, Bill C-17, 1991,
- Firearms licensing, Bill C-68, 1995.
- Explosive Components Act, 2005
113. While personal safety has been eroded, these laws have ushered in
harsher and harsher regulations, closing many firearms ranges, limiting
access to gun shows, diminishing the number of gun shops, and even limiting
reloading supplies for ammunition for hand loaders.
114. We beseech the Court to heed the warning of the philosophers:
[It is] absolutely necessary ... to restrain the Executive power ...
it is still more necessary to restrain the legislative.
Methods Used to Disarm the British
115. We need only witness what happened to civilian ownership of firearms
in the United Kingdom:
Before 1920 gun control was at least as lenient in Great Britain as
in the United States.
Gary Kleck Targeting Guns; Firearms and their Control
QB Book of Authorities, item 13
- see Methods used to disarm the British, Appendix O.
116. The British government began to slowly outlaw self-protection:
As a general rule applications to possess firearms for house or personal
protection should be discouraged on the grounds that firearms cannot
be regarded as a suitable means for protection and may be a source of
danger.
“Memorandum for the Guidance of the Police,” Home Office,
Firearms Act, 1937.
Joyce Lee Malcolm, Guns and Violence, The English Experience p. 171
117. From a “general rule” that applied only to “personal
use” the British government expanded the prohibition:
If should hardly ever be necessary to anyone to possess a firearm for
the protection of his house or person ... this principle should hold
good even in the case of banks and firms who desire to protect valuables
or large quantities of money; only in very exceptional cases should
a firearm be held for protection purposes.
“Memorandum for the Guidance of the Police,” Home Office,
1964, p.7
Malcolm p. 171
118. From a “general rule” to a general restriction, to an
absolute prohibition:
It should never be necessary for anyone to possess a firearm for the
protection of his house or person.
“Memorandum for the Guidance of the Police,” Home Office,
September, 1969, p. 22
Malcolm p. 171
119. The United Kingdom has become:
a nation in which law-abiding citizens have been effectively disarmed
of all weapons for nearly fifty years, their rights of self-defense
severely circumscribed, dependent upon inadequate police protection,
their judicial system reluctant to incarcerate those offenders it is
able to apprehend, affords only minimal deterrence. The result is a
crime rate soaring to record levels ... In England fewer guns have meant
more crime. In America more guns have meant less crime.
Joyce Lee Malcolm, Guns and Violence, The English Experience, pp. 252
- 253
120. The English Declaration of Rights of 1689 was specifially designed
to prevent this slow erosion of Rights.
121. The greatest folly which could befall the citizens of Canada would
be to wait until “some awful and hopefully never-to-be future”
has arrived and then attempt to petition the courts for the means to overthrow
tyranny, or in desperation, search vainly for the means to protect ourselves
from genocide.
Canadian General Roméo
Dallaire on Genocide
122. Only in folly do we close our eyes to the occurrence of genocide.
As observed retired Canadian General Roméo Dallaire:
Almost fifty years to the day that my father and father-in-law helped
to liberate Europe -- when the extermination camps were uncovered and
when, in one voice, humanity said, ‘Never again,’ -- we
once again sat back and permitted this unspeakable horror to occur.
In 100 days - between April 6 and July 16, 1994 - an estimated 800,000
men, women and children were brutally killed in the obscure African
country of Rwanda. The victims - many horrifically hacked to death ...
the machete-wielding government-sponsored forces... a damning indictment
of world leaders and UN bureaucrats who failed to stop the genocide.
Even to write the story was painful.
General (Ret) Roméo Dallaire, Shake Hands with the Devil, Random
House, Toronto, 2003
Book of Authorites, QB Saskatoon
123. Those slaughtered citizens were completely unarmed - defenseless
before the onslaught.
124. And the United Nations - ostensibly the world’s best hope
for universal peace, with its Universal Declaration of Human Rights which
contains a mandate to provide for means to resist tyranny and genocide
- stood by and did essentially nothing to stop the slaughter.
United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
10 December 1948
Book Six, item
125. General Dallaire’s book is a stinging indictment of the civilian
disarmament policy pushed by any government.
126. The obvious lesson from history: responsible citizens cannot allow
government to control their access to firearms.
No government has the legitimate authority to forbit a person from
exercising her human right to defend herself against a violent attack,
or to forbit her from taking the steps and acquiring the tools necesasary
to exercise that right.
The Human Right of Self-Defense, David Kopel, et al, BYU Journal of
Public Law 2007
Book of Authorities QB Saskatoon, Item 1
127. When someone is breaking down the door, a telephone call to “911”
is not sufficient to protect life.
128. We ask for no more, nor any less, than our British
ancestors; that our Right to “armes for their defense” be
restored to us.
Self-defense:
A Moral Imperative
The Bible, The Torah, and The
Talmud
129. The Torah and the Old Testament of the Bible are rife with examples
of God’s instructions for His people to defend themselves - see
Appendix H.
130. Not only are we to defend ourselves during invasions and foreign
domination, we are to defend our homes and lives from thieves.
131. While the Sixth Commandment of the Old Testament, which is recognized
as sacred Scripture by Jews, Christians, and Muslims, explicitly prohibits
murder - “Thou shall not murder,” The Torah, Exodus 20.13
- the scripture instructs persons to defend themselves with deadly force
when their home is being robbed.
132.The Torah, Exodus 22.2 declares:
If a thief be found breaking in, and be smitten so that he dieth,
there shall be no bloodguiltiness for him.
133. The Jewish Talmud expands upon this premise:
What is the reason for the law of breaking in ? Because it is certain
that no man is inactive where his property is concerned; therefore this
one [the thief] must have reasoned, “If I go there, he [the owner]
will oppose me and prevent me; but if he does, I will kill him.”
Hence the Torah decreed “If he comes to slay thee, forestall by
slaying him.”
Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin. 1994, 2, 72a; The Babylonian Talmud:
Tractate Berakoth 1990, 58a, 62b.
134. David Kopel explains:
This ... is sometimes translated as “If someone comes to kill
you, rise up and kill him first.”
This ... does not delegate discretion; it is a positive command. A Jew
has a duty to use deadly force to defend ... against murderous attack.
David B. Kopel, The Torah and Self-Defense, Penn State Law
Review, Vol. 109, No. 1, pp. 17-42, 2004 ; p. 29
Book Seven / item 3
135. The Current Catholic Catechism (1994) states the principle in this
manner:
2321 The prohibition of murder does not abrogate the right to render
an unjust aggressor unable to inflict harm.
2263 "The act of self-defense can have a double effect: the preservation
of one's own life; and the killing of the aggressor ... The one is intended,
the other is not."[St. Thomas Aquinas, STh II-II, 64, 7, corp.
art.]
2264 Love toward oneself remains a fundamental principle of morality.
Therefore it is legitimate to insist on respect for one's own right
to life. Someone who defends his life is not guilty of murder even if
he is forced to deal his aggressor a lethal blow:
http://landru.i-link-2.net/shnyves/wlegitimate_defense.htm
136. While some religious groups suggest nonviolence in the face of personal
attack, Thomas Paine succinctly states the underlining problem of this
approach:
Could the peaceable principle of the Quakers be universally established,
arms and the art of war would be wholly extirpated: But we live not
in a world of angels . . . [The] peaceable part of mankind will be continually
overrun by the vile and abandoned, while they neglect the means of self
defense. The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while
on the other hand, arms like the laws discourage and keep the invader
and the plunder in awe, and preserve order in the world, as well as
property. ... Horrid mischief would ensure were one half the world deprive
of the use of them; the weak will become prey to the strong.
Thomas Paine (1737 - 1809), Thoughts on Defensive War, 1775
137. Thus when asked about the utility of nonviolence as a means of self-defense,
the leader of Tibetan Buddhism, The Dalai Lama, offered his belief:
[l]ogically you have the responsibility to protect. Then if something
attacks, a human being is going to attack on your child, then if you
let that person attack not only does your child suffer, but then that
person (also) committed a negative action. Then, I think, thinking both
sides, the protection of your child ... – with that motivation
stop, if necessary with some stick or even gun.
If someone has a gun and is trying to kill you, it would be reasonable
to shoot back with your own gun.
The Dalai Lama, CBC Interview & The Seattle Times May 15, 2001
138. The English philosopher John Locke captures the essence of self-preservation
as “not simply or primarily a right, but ... a duty to God.”
[I]t being reasonable and just I should have a Right to destroy thast
which threatens me with Destruction. For by the Fundamental Law of Nature
... one may destroy a Man who makes War upon him ... for the same Reason,
that he may kill a Wolf, or a Lyon; because such Men are not under the
ties of the Common Law of Reason ... so may be treated as Beast of Prey
...
“This makes it Lawful for a Man to kill a Thief, who has not
in the least hurt him ... let his pretense be what it will ... therefore
it is Lawful for me ... to kill him if I can; for to that hazard does
he justly expose himself ... .”
John Locke, Second Treatise on Government, (in Two Treatises on
Government, ed Peter Laslett, 278- 281, 284 [1988] in Gun Control and
Rights, ed Andrew J. McClung, David B. Kopel, and Brannon P. Denning
New York University Press, New York 2002
An innate, universal Truth
139. One does not need to be a believer in the Judeo-Christian God to
have a firm belief in self-protection, for as Cicero (106 - 43 B.C) observed,
self-protection is a universal truth:
[T]herefore, is a law, O judges, not written, but born with us,--which
we have not learnt or received by tradition, or read, but which we have
taken and sucked in and imbibed from nature herself; a law which we
were not taught but to which we were made,--which we were not trained
in, but which is ingrained in us,--namely, that if our life be in danger
from plots, or from open violence, or from the weapons of robbers or
enemies, every means of securing our safety is honourable. For laws
are silent when arms are raised, and do not expect themselves to be
waited for ... .
“In Defense of Titus Annius Milo” (in Selected Political
Speeches
of Cicero, ed. and trans. Michael Grant, 222 [1969])
An Inalienable Right
140. Even Thomas Hobbes, the great apologist for the sovereignty of the
monarchy recognized the inalienable right of self-preservation:
Of the First and Second Natural Laws and of Contracts: A covenant
not to defend myself from force, by force, is always void. For ... no
man can transfer or lay down his right to save himself from death ...
An individual can neither sell nor give away his right of self-defense.
This is an inalienable right.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan pt II Chap 29, pp. 80/82 & p. 85
141. Or as Hugo Grotius, the “Father of International Law”
said:
[W]hen our lives are threatened with immediate danger, it is lawful
to kill the aggressor, if the danger cannot be otherwise avoided ....
[T]his kind of defense derives its origin from the principle of self-preservation,
which nature has given every living creature ... . For I am not bound
to submit to the danger or mischief intended, any more than to expose
myself to the attack of a wild beast.
Hugo Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace,
(ed. A.C. Campbell, 76 -77, [1901])
142. The practicality of having a firearm for self-defense was most vividly
demonstrated by John Adams (1735 - 1826), defense attorney, in recalling
the testimony at the trial of the British soldiers accused of murder in
the so-called Boston Massacre of 1770, in which the unit commanding officer
did not give the order to fire:
[P]eople crying “kill them! kill them! knock them over!”
heaving snowballs, oyster shells, clubs, white birch sticks. ... consider
yourselves, in this situation, and then judge whether a reasonable man
. . . would not have concluded they were going to kill him.
He was knocked down at his station, ... Had he not reason to think his
life in danger?
If an assault was made to endanger their lives, the law is clear, they
had the right to kill in self-defense . . . .
from the trial of Pvt. Montgomery, accused of murder in the Boston Massacre,
1770. Constitutional Rights Foundation, Bill of Right in Action, Winter
19 (16:1)
http://www.crf-usa.org/bria/bria16_1.html
143. Even if God were dead - or even if God were never to have existed
- we believe we have a moral imperative to protect ourselves.
144. Self-defense is hardwired into our very physiology whether by God
or Darwinian evolution.
145. To defend ourselves we must have effective means to do so. For the
government to require a licence to those means is for the government to
deny those means.
146. We can not be true to our faith nor properly heed the lessons and
the teachings of the Bilble if we, in the absence of criminal conviction,
surrender our means of self-protection to the government.
The Supremacy of God
Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize
the supremacy of God and the rule of law:
147. The preamble to the Charter of Rights and Freedom recognizes two
founding principles:
Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of
God and the rule of law
The Constitutions Act, Schedule B, 1982;
Book Four / item 19, p.1
148. Halsbury’s The Laws of England clearly establishes the identity
of the God mentioned in the preamble - see Appendix T.
149. Many of the cases which I have reviewed dwell long and laboriously
on “The Rule of Law.”
Reference: Manitoba Language Rights, [1985] 1 S.C. R. 721;
Book One / item 1, p. 2
150. The “supremacy of God” must likewise carry highly significant
meaning - see Appendix W.
151. The “supremacy” of God would seem to command a higher
rank than the rule of law.
152. The courts have the authority to remind Parliament of its constitutional
limitations before God, before the natural principles of the universe.
Some common law Rights presumably
lie so deep
that even Parliament could not override them.
153. Lord Cooke of New Zealand has postulated:
Some common law Rights presumably lie so deep that even Parliament
could not override them.
Lord Cooke, Taylor v New Zealand Poultry Board,
[1984] 2N.Z.L.R. 394
quoted by Kirby, Michael D., AC, CMG, “Lord Cooke and Fundamental
Rights” Conference Auckland, 4/5 April 1997
Book of Authorities QB Moose Jaw, item 2, @ fn# 37
154. Justice Michael D. Kirby of Australia disagreed -see Appendix
V.
Unwritten Constitutional Principles
155. But Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin seems to agree with Lord Cooke:
There exist fundamental norms of justice so basic that they form part
of the legal structure of governance and must be upheld by the courts,
whether or not they find expression in constitutional texts. (p.2)
Unwritten constitutional principles [refer to] the ancient doctrine
of natural law. Like those concepts of justice, ... these principles
presuppose the existence of some kind of natural order ... derived from
history, values, and the culture of the nation, viewed in its constitutional
context. (p.5)
Beverley McLachlin, CJ, Unwritten Constitutional Principles: What is
Going On? Lord Cooke Lecture, Wellington, New Zealand, 01 December 2005.
Book of Authorities, QB Moose Jaw item 1, - see Appendix
U.
156. The English Declaration of Rights, British Common Law, Canadian
custom and heritage, the common background for our North American jurisprudence,
the necessity for defense against tyranny and genocide, the United Nations’
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the supremacy of God - all
these point to a common bedrock underlying the Right of Armes for their
Defense.
Rights are not absolute
The most stringent protection of free speech would not
protect a man
in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
U.S. Supreme Court SCHENCK v. U.S. , 249 U.S. 47 (1919)
157. The Supreme Court recognizes that:
The rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Charter are not, however,
absolute. It may become necessary to limit rights and freedoms in circumstances
where their exercise would be inimical to the realization of collective
goals of fundamental importance.
R. v. Oakes 1 S.C.R. [1986] 103, p. 17
Book Seven / item 19
158. But the criminalization of the mere possession of a firearm goes
far beyond the scope of the “so gentle and moderate” restraint
recognized by William Blackstone.
illegal exercise of power
159. The Supreme Court has stated:
The Courts will not question the wisdom of enactments which, by the
terms of the Canadian Constitution are within the competence of the
Legislatures, but it is the high duty of this Court to insure that the
legislatures do not transgress the limits of their constitutional mandate
and engage in the illegal exercise of power.
Reference: Manitoba Language Rights, [1985] 1 S.C. R. 721
Book One / item 1, p. 12, para. 49
160. We assert that Parliament has attempted an illegal exercise of power.
IV. Conclusions
In a world where children's hands are hacked off with machetes and
bombs are detonated in marketplaces, where young women are burned alive
as punishment for affairs of the heart, civilization clearly remains
a work in progress. Our aspirations are shadowed by the stubborn brutality
of the human animal, which, it seems, cannot be tamed and can only be
kept at bay.
Time Magazine, 03 September 2007, p. 7 - see Appendix
R
A. The English Declaration of Rights of 1689
161. The English Declaration of Rights of 1689 definitively stated that
responsible citizens may have “armes for their defense.”
162. English Common Law confirmed the Right of all citizens to be armed;
“a gun may be kept for the Defense of a Man’s House.”
163. The English Declaration of Rights of 1689 is in force in Canada:
- Article 9 - the inherit authority of Parliament and parliamentary
privilege,
- Article 10 - protection against cruel and unusual punishment, and
- Article 11 - the presumption of innocence,
164. The Court must surely recognize Article 7 as part of our Canadian
Constitution.
B. The Common History of North America
165. The common history of North America confirms that firearms are an
essential part of our national heritage and culture.
C. The Importance of Canadian Culture
166. Our unique Canadian culture and heritage affirms the Right of “armes
for their defense”.
D. Defense Against Tyranny and Genocide
167. Tyranny and genocide are as real in the 21st century as they were
in England in 1689.
168. Are we to close our eyes and ears and ignore three hundred years
of warnings by our English and international philosophers?
169. Is it reasonable or rational to “trust the government”
with our lives when we cannot even trust the government ot honour their
election promises?
170. Must we first suffer under a tyrannical government before we may
ask the courts for redress?
E. Self-defense: A Moral Imperative
171. The Right of arms for defense is God-given, innate, a Natural Law,
and is an unwritten constitutional principle.
172. The Firearms Act, and the subsequently enacted portions of the Criminal
Code, specifically Section 117.03, violates our Right of “armes
for their Defense”.
173. Common sense, our understanding of the lessons of history, and our
faith in God demand that we protect that Right.
174. I have not been charged with a crime, yet I was disarmed.
175. To allow the seizure, confiscation, and destruction order of my
shotgun to stand in the total absence of any criminal charges would destroy
over three hundred years of Canadian tradition and history.
176. To allow the government to destroy my firearm in absence of any
criminal conviction is to invite the worst form of tyranny.
177. By using Criminal Code section 117.03 the federal government can
disarm all the responsible citizens of Canada and never lay a charge.
178. Can the Court ignore three hundred years of Canadian culture and
allow Parliament to prescribe “the circumstances in which an individual
does or does not need firearms to protect the life of that individual”?
179. We respectfully petition the Court of Queen’ Bench to set
aside the Provincial Court’s decision of 06 December 2005, to declare
Criminal Code section 117.03 unconstitutional, and to order the RCMP to
return my shotgun.
Sincerely,
Edward B. Hudson DVM, MS
402 Skeena Crt
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7K 4H2
1-306-242-2379
17 September 2007
180.
Appendix A
The Words of the Framers
of the
English Declaration of Rights, 1689
The significance of the English Declaration of Rights is inherent in
the words of the drafters of the document. Recorded over three hundred
years ago, these are the words of the Parliamentary drafters:
Anthony Cary, Lord Falkland:
It concerns us to take such care, that, ... we may secure ourselves
from Arbitrary Government. The Prince’s Declaration is for a lasting
Government. I would know what that foundation is.
Mr. Garroway:
We have had such Violation of our Liberties in the last reigns, that
the prince of Orange cannot take it ill, if we make conditions, to secure
ourselves for the future; and in it we shall but do justice to those
who sent us hither, and not deliver them up without good reason.
Sir William Williams:
When we have considered the preservation of the Laws of England for
the future, then it will b e time to consider the persons to fill the
Throne.
Sir Richard Temple, complained of the previous king’s malicious
intention:
to disarm all England [and] to provide for a standing army [in peacetime].
Said another:
Redeem us from Slavery; What you omit now is lost for ever.
To the concern that they could not cover everything necessary, Edward
Seymore challenged:
Will you do nothing, because you cannot do it all? Will you establish
the Crown, but not secure yourselves ?
Sir John Maynard, at age eighty-six the “father of the House,”
was incensed that:
An Act of Parliament was made to disarm all Englishmen, whom the Lieutenant
should suspect, by day or night, by force or otherwise ... an abominable
thing to disarm a nation ... .
Of the abuses of the militia, Mr. Boscawen complained:
[U]nder pretense of persons disturbing the government, disarmed and imprisoned
men without any cause ... I myself was so dealt with.
Thomas Earl:
There is a law made against it soe that tis not the gun or musket
that offends but the man that makes ill use of his Armes and he may
be punished for it by the law.
Mr. Finch:
No safety but the consent of the nation - The constitution being limited,
there is good foundation for defensive arms - It has given us right
to demand full and ample security.
The House agreed to assert:
Rights and Liberties of the Nation, to bring in general Heads of such
things as are absolutely necessary for securing the Laws and Liberties
of the Nation.
As note by a contemporary commentator, Englishmen are “the freest
subjects under heaven” because they have the right:
to be guarded and defended from all Violence and Force, by their own
Arms, kept in their own hands, and used at their own charge ... .
On 13 February 1689 the Convention Parliament presented to William and
Mary the Declaration of Rights. That document of thirteen “ true,
ancient, and indubitable” Rights and Liberties forever proclaimed:
That the Subjects which are Protestants
may have Armes for their defense
Suitable to their condition and as allowed by Law.
As Bishop Gilbert Burnet stated in his history, the Convention Parliament
had presented a document meant to be no less than “a new Magna Carta.”
Above quotes from:
Joyce Lee Malcolm, To Keep and Bear Arms, the Origins of an Anglo-American
Right, Harvard University Press, 1994 pp. 113 - 121
Appendix B
The Significance of the Convention Parliament
In January 1689 (New Style date), the Lords and Commons assembled as
a Convention Parliament to declare the throne vacant and to invite William
and Mary to become King and Queen of England. Before they did so, they
took two weeks to formulate a Declaration of Rights to ensure that their
“true, ancient, and indubitable Rights” would never again
be usurped.
The Declaration of Rights is not simply an act of Parliament. A Convention
Parliament is not “summoned” or called in the normal manner.
The Convention Parliament device has only been used three times throughout
a thousand years of English history. In all three cases the Convention
Parliament was used to resolve an highly unusual circumstance.
The Declaration of Rights is significantly more than mere “legislation.”
The Declaration of Rights is an international treaty signed as an agreement
between a sovereign people and a prince of a foreign nation.
Convention Parliament
The term Convention Parliament has been applied to three different English
Parliaments, of 1399, 1660, and 1689.
The definition of the term convention parliament is generally taken to
be:
"A parliament which does not derive its authority or legitimacy from
an existing or previously enacted parliamentary action or process".
Features of the convention parliaments
The features which unite the three convention parliaments and which mandate
their status as convention parliaments, are:
- The recognition by the convention of the preceding parliamentary
process as having come to an end of its powers in terms of determining
future parliamentary proceedings
- The implicit self-empowerment of the parliamentary convention to
act in place of the preceding process, thereby establishing its own
legitimacy in determining the future of parliamentary proceedings
Convention Parliament of 1399
The first example of a convention parliament (a parliament which is not
often referred to as a 'convention parliament' but is always recognized
as being one) in September 1399, came about as a result of the deposition
of King Richard II of England and a parliament which accepted Henry Bolingbroke
as King Henry IV of England.
Convention Parliament of 1660
The second example is the Convention Parliament also known as the English
Convention which was elected in April 1660. It was elected after the Rump
of the Long Parliament had finally voted for its own dissolution. It was
predominantly Royalist in its constitution. It assembled for the first
time on the April 25, 1660.
The Convention, after the Declaration of Breda had been received on the
8th of May, declared that King Charles II had been the lawful monarch
since the death of Charles I in January 1649. The Convention Parliament
then proceeded to conduct the necessary preparation for the Restoration
Settlement. These preparations included the necessary provisions to deal
with land and funding such that the new regime could operate.
Convention Parliament of 1689
This parliament, which met in 1689 after the departure of King James
II of England, formally recognized Prince William of Orange as King William
III of England.
A assembly of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and the Commons, the
Convention convened on Jan. 22, 1689 to deal with the crisis created by
the arrival of William , the flight of James II, the collapse of the government,
and the disappearance of the Great Seal. On Feb. 12, 1689, the Convention
approved the Declaration of Rights, which enumerated the crimes and illegalities
of James II, declared the throne vacant, and resolved that William and
Mary be made king and queen. On Feb. 20, 1689, one week after William
and Mary became king and queen, the Convention enacted the Parliament
Act of 1689, 1 W. & M., ch. 1, which transformed the convention into
a Parliament, later known as the "Convention Parliament."
http://www.answers.com/topic/convention-parliament
http://www.lawsch.uga.edu/~glorious/convention.html
Appendix C
British Royal Charters of North American
- The Raleigh Charter granted by Elizabeth I in 1585
- The Charter of Virginia granted by James I in 1606
- Nova Scotia granted by James I in 1625
- The Charter of Massachusetts Bay granted by Charles I in 1629
- The Charter of Maryland granted by Charles I in 1632
- The Connecticut Colony Charter granted by Charles II in 1662
- The Charter of South Carolina granted by Charles II in 1663
- Royal Charter of the Hudson’s Bay Company by Charles II in
1670
- Charter of Massachusetts Bay granted by William & Mary in 1691
- The Charter of Georgia by granted George II in 1732
Appendix D
Use of Firearms in Canada
Wars in Canada
1. Indian Beaver Wars 1640-1670
2. European Wars also fought in North America
a. King William's War 1689–97 (War of the Grand Alliance)
b. Queen Anne's War 1702–13 (War of the Spanish Succession)
c. King George’s War 1744 - 48 (War of the Austrian Succession)
d. The French and Indian War 1754 - 63 (The Seven Years War)
3. Pontiac’s Rebellion 1763
4. Revolutionary War 1775 - 1783
5. War of 1812
6. Battle of Seven Oaks 1816 (Hudson Bay Co. v. NorthWest Company)
7. Patriot's Rebellion in Lower Canada 1837
8. The Upper Canada Rebellion 1837
9. Caroline Affair 1837
10. Aroostook Border War 1839
11. The Pig War 1859 (San Juan Boundary Dispute)
12. Fenian Invasions 1865
13. Red River Rebellion 1869
14. Northwest Rebellion 1885
Canadians in Foreign Wars
- Boer War in South Africa 1899 - 1902
- World War I 1914 - 1918
- World War II 1939 - 1945
- Korean War 1950 -1953
Canadian International Peace Keepers
Since 1947, the Canadian Forces have completed 72 international operations,
e.g.,
- Suez 1956
- Cypress 1964
- Middle East 1974
- Rwanda 1994
- Bosnia-Herzegovin 1995
- Afghanistan 2004 - current
Appendix E
American Jurisprudence
To Keep and Bear Arms
- Report of the Subcommittee of the United States Senate, The Right
to Keep and Bear Arms February 1982
- Caplan, David I. The Right of the Individual to Bear Arms: A Recent
Judicial Trend 4 Det. L.R. 789-823 (1982)
- Malcolm, Joyce Lee, The Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms:
The Common Law Tradition, Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, Vol.
10:285-314 (1983).
- Hardy, David T. Armed Citizens: Towards a Jurisprudence of the Second
Amendment 9 Harv. J.L. Pub. Pol’y 559-638 (1986)
- Vandercoy, David E. The History of the Second Amendment 28 Val. L.
Rev. 1007-1039 (1994)
- Cottrol, Robert J. & Raymond T. Diamond, The Fifth Auxiliary
Right Yale Law Journal, Vol. 104: 995-1026 (1995)
- Malcolm, Joyce Lee, Gun control and the Constitution: Sources and
Explorations on the Second Amendment Tennessee Law Review vol. 62, no.
3 (1995)
- Memorandum Opinion for the Attorney General Whether the Second Amendment
Secures an Individual Right 24 August 2004
Appendix F
The Admonitions of the Philosophers
****
the basic principle of a tyrant is
to unarm his people of weapons,
money, and all means whereby they resist his power.
Sir Walter Raleigh (1552 - 1618) who was framed in a plot against
James I.
The Works of Sir Walter Raleigh, ed T. Birch, 8 vols (Oxford, 1829),
3:22 (pp 9)
***
The election or suffrage of the people is most free,
where it is made or given in such a manner that it can neither oblige
nor disoblige another,
nor through fear of an enemy,
or bashfulness toward a friend, impair a man's liberty.
James Harrington (1611–1677)
English political philosopher and author of Commonwealth of Oceana
(1656) who was imprisoned in the Tower of London and held without
trial by Charles II.
http://www.constitution.org/jh/oceana.htm
***
Self-preservation (is) a duty to God ... according to the God of Nature.
It is the first and foremost of our
inalienable rights without which we can preserve no other.
John Locke (1632-1704)
English philosopher whose influence is reflected in the American Declaration
of Independence:
Any single man must judge for himself whether circumstances warrant
obedience or resistance to the commands of the civil magistrate; we
are all qualified, entitled, and morally obliged to evaluate the conduct
of our rulers. This political judgment, moreover, is not simply or primarily
a right, but like self-preservation, a duty to God. As such it is a
judgment that men cannot part with according to the God of Nature. It
is the first and foremost of our inalienable rights without which we
can preserve no other.
For the legislative acts against the trust reposed in them when they
endeavour to invade the property of the subject, and to make themselves,
or any part of the community, masters or arbitrary disposers of the
lives, liberties, or fortunes of the people.
§ 222. Whensoever, therefore, the legislative shall transgress
this fundamental rule of society, and either by ambition, fear, folly,
or corruption, endeavour to grasp themselves, or put into the hands
of any other, an absolute power over the lives, liberties, and estates
of the people, by this breach of trust they forfeit the power the people
had put into their hands for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to
the people, who have a right to resume their original liberty, and by
the establishment of a new legislative (such as they shall think fit),
provide for their own safety and security, which is the end for which
they are in society.
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, (1680-1690)
***
That which is not just, is not Law;
and that which is not Law, ought not to be obeyed
Algernon Sydney (1623 – 1683)
English political writer executed by Charles II:
[T]he principle of liberty in which God created us . . . includes
the chief advantages of the life we enjoy, as well as the greatest helps
towards felicity, that is the end of our hopes in the other. I:2:5
[T]hey could not . . . lay more approved foundations, than, that man
is naturally free; that he cannot be justly deprived of that liberty
without cause; and that he does not resign it, or any part of it, unless
it be in consideration of a greater good, which he proposes to himself.
I:2:5
The Liberty of a people is the gift of God and nature. III:33:406.
The legislative power is always arbitrary, and not to be trusted in
the hands of any who are not bound to obey the laws they make. III:45:455.
It is ill, that men should kill one another in seditions, tumults,
and wars; but it is worse, to bring nations to such misery, weakness,
and baseness, as to have neither strength nor courage to contend for
anything; to have nothing left worth defending, and to give the name
of peace to desolation. II:26:206.
Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government, ed. Thomas West,
Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Classics, 1990
***
The possession of arms is the distinction
between a freeman and a slave
Andrew Fletcher (1653 - 1716)
Member of the Scottish Parliament who understood the process of parliament
very well:
The possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a
slave. He who has nothing, and belongs to another, must be defended
by him, and needs no arms: but he who thinks he is his own master, and
has anything he may call his own, ought to have arms to defend himself
and what he possesses, or else he lives precariously and at discretion.
And though for a while those who have the sword in their power abstain
from doing him injury; yet, by degrees, he will be awed into submission
to every arbitrary command. Our ancestors, by being always armed, and
frequently in action, defended themselves against the Romans, Danes
and English; and maintained their liberty against encroachments of their
own princes.
Andrew Fletcher, A Discourse of Government With Relation to Militias,
(1698)
***
the Legislative power can change the Constitution
as God created the light
J.L. DeLolme (1740-1806)
Swiss author made this observation of the English government in 1755:
[It is] absolutely necessary, for securing the Constitution of a State,
to restrain the Executive power ... it is still more necessary to restrain
the legislative. What the former can do only by successive steps (I
mean subvert the laws) and through a longer or shorter train of enterprises,
the latter does in a moment. As its bare will can give being to the
laws; so its bare will can also annihilate them: ... the Legislative
power can change the Constitution as God created the light.
J.L. DeLolme, The Constitution of England; or an Account of the English
Government, (New York, 1792), p. 164
***
an appeal from the sovereignty of the people
to the sovereignty of mankind
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805 - 1859)
French political thinker and writer:
When I refuse to obey an unjust law, I do not contest
the right of the majority to command, but I simply appeal from the sovereignty
of the people to the sovereignty of mankind. Some have not feared to
assert that a people can never outstep the boundaries of justice and
reason in those affairs which are peculiarly its own; and that consequently
full power may be given to the majority by which it is represented.
But this is the language of a slave.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. I 1835 & Vol.
II, 1840
***
A nation’s ultimate security (is) held in its own hand;
the power of the sword
Thomas Macaulay (1800 - 1859)
British poet and historian:
The Englishman's ultimate security depended not upon the Magna Carta
or parliament but upon ‘the power of the sword’ ... the
legal check was secondary and auxiliary to that which the nation held
in its own hands ... the security without which every other is insufficient.
Thomas Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays, Contributed to Edinburgh
Review, vol I (Leipzig, 1860) pp 154-162
***
the natural right of resistance and self-preservation
William Blackstone (1723 - 1780)
English jurist and professor:
The fifth and last auxiliary right ... is that of having arms for
their defense, ... of the natural right of resistance and self-preservation,
when the sanctions of society and laws are found insufficient to restrain
the violence of oppression. ... security, of personal liberty, and of
private property. So long as these remain inviolate, the subject is
perfectly free; for every species of compulsive tyranny and oppression
must act in opposition to one or other of these rights, having no other
object upon which it can possibly be employed. To preserve these from
violation, ... to vindicate these rights, when actually violated or
attacked, the subjects of England are entitled ... to the right of having
and using arms for self-preservation and defense. And all these rights
and liberties it is our birthright to enjoy entire; ... .
William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, (1765 - 1769)
***
When we elect persons to represent us in parliament ...
We make a lodgment, not a gift;
James Burgh (1714-1775)
Scottish writer who advocated parliamentary reform:
When we elect persons to represent us in parliament ... We make a
lodgment, not a gift; we entrust, but part with nothing. And, were it
possible, that they should attempt to destroy that constitution which
we had appointed them to maintain, they can no more be held in the rank
of representatives than a factor, turned pirate, can continue to be
called the factor of those merchants whose goods he had plundered, and
whose confidence he had betrayed. ... .
That all history shows the necessity, in order to the preservation
of liberty, of every subjects having a watchful eye on the conduct of
Kings, Ministers, and Parliament, and of every subjects being not only
secured, but encouraged in alarming his fellow subjects on occasion
of every attempt upon public liberty.
James Burgh, Political Disquisitions: Or, an Enquiry into Public Errors,
Defects, and Abuses, London, 1774-1775
***
A man’s house is his castle
James Otis (1725 - 1783)
British colonist living in Massachusetts who knew firsthand of the abuses
of the legislative power of Parliament:
Now, one of the most essential branches of English liberty is the
freedom of one's house. A man's house is his castle; and whilst he is
quiet, he is as well guarded as a prince in his castle. This writ, if
it should be declared legal, would totally annihilate this privilege.
Custom-house officers may enter our houses when they please; we are
commanded to permit their entry. Their menial servants may enter, may
break locks, bars, and everything in their way; and whether they break
through malice or revenge, no man, no court can inquire. Bare suspicion
without oath is sufficient.
This wanton exercise of this power is not a chimerical suggestion of
a heated brain.
James Otis, Against Writs of Assistance, February 1761.
****
The Legislative has no right to absolute,
no arbitrary power over the lives and fortunes of the people
Samuel Adams (1722 - 1803)
British colonist and defense attorney living in Massachusetts:
Among the natural rights of the Colonists are these: First, a right
to life; Secondly, to liberty; Thirdly, to property; together with the
right to support and defend them in the best manner they can. These
are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation,
commonly called the first law of nature. ...
If men, through fear, fraud, or mistake, should in terms renounce or
give up any essential natural right, the eternal law of reason and the
grand end of society would absolutely vacate such renunciation. The
right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power
of man to alienate this gift and voluntarily become a slave.
The absolute rights of Englishmen and all freemen, in or out of civil
society, are principally personal security, personal liberty, and private
property.
All persons born in the British American Colonies are, by the laws
of God and nature and by the common law of England, exclusive of all
charters from the Crown, well entitled, and by acts of the British Parliament
are declared to be entitled, to all the natural, essential, inherent,
and inseparable rights, liberties, and privileges of subjects born in
Great Britain or within the realm. Among those rights are the following,
...
The Legislative has no right to absolute, arbitrary power over the
lives and fortunes of the people; nor can mortals assume a prerogative
not only too high for men, but for angels, and therefore reserved for
the exercise of the Deity alone.
Samuel Adams, The Rights of the Colonists, November 20, 1772
***
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human liberty;
it is the arguments of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves
William Pitt, “the Younger” (1759 - 1806),
British politician and later Prime Minister, who advocated peace with
the American colonies and parliamentary reform:
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human liberty; it
is the arguments of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Speech in the House of Commons, November 18, 1783
***
A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, ...
is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free,
unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself
John Stuart Mill (1806 - 1873)
British philosopher and plotical economist:
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and
degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth
a war, is worse. ... A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical
injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good,
and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their
free choice,—is often the means of their regeneration. A man who
has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares
more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature
who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions
of better men than himself.
John Stuart Mill, “The Contest in America,” Dissertations
and Discussions, vol. 1, p. 26 (1868). First published in Fraser’s
Magazine, February 1862
***
The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms
has justly been considered as the palladium of the liberties
Joseph Story (1779 - 1845)
Associate Justice, U.S. Supreme Court:
The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered
as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong
moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and
will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance,
enable the people to resist and triumph over them.
Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States,
Hillard, Gray & Co., Boston, 1833
***
Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India,
history will look upon the act of
depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest.
Mahatma Gandhi (1869 - 1948)
Mahatma Gandhi, The Story of my Experiment with Truth p. 238
***
The rifle hanging on the wall
is the sympol of democracy.
George Orwell (1903 - 1950)
English author and journalist; author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four:
That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's
cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays
there.
Michael Shelden, Orwell: The Authorized Biography, New York: HarperCollins
Publishers, 1991, p. 328
***
Who would deprive men of the use of fire
for fear of their being burnt?
Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794)
Italian utilitarian reformer:
A principal source of errors and injustice are false ideas of utility.
... who would sacrifice a thousand real advantages to the fear of an
imaginary or trifling inconvenience; who would deprive men of the use
of fire for fear of their being burnt, and of water for fear of their
being drowned; and who knows of no means of preventing evil but by destroying
it.
The laws of this nature are those which forbid to wear arms, disarming
those only who are not disposed to commit the crime which the laws mean
to prevent. Can it be supposed, that those who have the courage to violate
the most sacred laws of humanity, and the most important of the code,
will respect the less considerable and arbitrary injunctions, the violation
of which is so easy, and of so little comparative importance? Does not
the execution of this law deprive the subject of that personal liberty,
so dear to mankind and to the wise legislator? and does it not subject
the innocent to all the disagreeable circumstances that should only
fall on the guilty? It certainly makes the situation of the assaulted
worse, and of the assailants better, and rather encourages than prevents
murder, as it requires less courage to attack unarmed than armed persons.
Cesare Beccaria , Of Crimes and Punishments, 1764
Translated by Edward D. Ingraham. 2nd American ed. Philadelphia, Philip
H. Nicklin 1819
***
Those who would give up essential Liberty,
to purchase a little temporary Safety,
deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
Benjamin Franklin (1706 - 1790)
author, political theorist, politician, printer, scientist, inventor,
civic activist, and diplomat.
An Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania,
1759.
***
paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918 -)
Russian novelist, dramatist, historian - and a survivor of the Soviet
gulag:
How we burned in the prison camps later thinking: What would things
have been like if every police operative, when he went out at night
to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive?
If during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat there in
their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door
and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing
to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half
a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever was at hand?
The organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and,
notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have
ground to a halt.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Vol. I, p.13 Note 5
Appendix G
Government Sponsored Genocide
Canada: 1755 Acadians
United States: 1830 Cherokee Indians
Turkey: 1866 Armenians
United States: 1890 American Indians
Turkey: 1911 Armenians
Soviet Union: 1929 - 1953 political opposition
Soviet Union: 1932 - 1933 Ukraine
Japan: 1937 Rape of Nanking
Germany: 1938 - 1945 Jews, Gypsies, & Homosexuals
Soviet Union: 1944 Chechnya
China: 1949 -1952
China: 1957 - 1960
Guatemala: 1960 - 1981 Maya Indians
China: 1966 - 1976 Cultural Revolution
Nigeria: 1967 - 1970 Biafra
United States: 1968 My Lai, South Viet Nam
Uganda: 1972 - 1979 Acholi & Lango
Cambodia: 1977 - 1979 Killings Fields
Iraq: 1988 Kurds
China: 1989 Tiananmen Square
Rwanda: 1994 Tutsi
Yugoslavia: 1995 Bosnians
Somalia: 1991 -1995 southern Somalians
Indonesia: 1999 East Timor
Sudan: 2003 - current Darfur
Appendix H
The Torah and The Bible
Scriptural examples of Self-defense:
Abraham defending Lot (Genesis 14.13-20),
When Abram heard that his kinsman had been taken captive, he led forth
his trained men, ... went in pursuit ... and routed them ... After his
return from the [victory], Melchizedek ... priest of the God Most High
... blessed him ... .
Moses against Pharaoh (Exodus 13.18 - 15.3),
Torah v. 13.18b “and the children of Israel went up armed out
of the land of Egypt.”
Joshua against the Amalekites (Exodus 17.8 - 14), Torah vv.9 & 13
And Moses said unto Joshua: “Choose us out men, and go out,
fight with Amalek; tomorrow I will stand on the top of the hill with
the rod of God in my hand.”
And Joshua discomfited Amelek and his people with the edge of the sword.
Joshua against the Amorites (Joshua 10.5 - 11), v. 7
So Joshua went up ... he, and all the people of war with him, ... And
the Lord said, “Do not fear them, for I have given them into your
hands ... .”
Deborah against the Canaanites (Judges 4.6 - 8),
Now Deborah, a prophetess, ... said to [Barak], “The Lord God
of Israel commands you, ‘Go, gather your men ... I will draw ...
the general ... with his chariots and his troops; and I will give him
into your hand.’ ”
Gideon against the Midianites (Judges 6.11 - 7.25), vv. 7.19
So Gideon and the hundred men with him came to the outskirts of the
camp ... And the three companies blew the trumpets and broke the jars
... and cried, “A sword for the Lord and for Gideon!” ...
the Lord set every man’s sword against his fellow ... and the
army fled ..
Samson against the Philistines (Judges 16.23 - 31), v. 23
Now the lords of the Philistines gathered ... So they called Samson
out of prison, and he made sport before them ... Then Samson called
to the Lord ... Then he bowed with all his might; and the house fell
upon the lords and upon all the people that were within it ... .
David against Goliath (I Samuel 17. 12 - 53), vv. 37 - 46
And David said, “The Lord who delivered me from the paw of the
lion and from the paw of the bear, will deliver me from the hand of
this Philistine ... then .... he chose five smooth stones from the brook
... with his sling ... Then David said to the Philistine, “You
come to me with a sword and a spear and with a javelin; but I come to
you in the name of the Lord of hosts ... This day the Lord will deliver
you into my hand, and I will strike you down, and cut off your head
... that all earth may know that there is a God in Israel ... .
the Jews in Persia (Ester 8.11 - 14), v. 11
By these [writings] the king allowed the Jews who were in every city
to gather and defend their lives, to destroy, to slay, and to annihilate
any armed force of any people or province that might attack them.
Nehemiah in Jerusalem (Nehemiah 4.16 - 20). vv. 11 - 15
And our enemies said, “They ... kill [us] and stop the work.”
... So ... I stationed the people ... with their swords, their spears,
and their bows. ... and said ... “Do not be afraid of them. Remember
the Lord, who is great and terrible, and fight for your brethren, your
sons, your daughters, your wives, and your homes.”
Harper Study Bible The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version,
Harold Lindsell, Zondervan Bible Publishers, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1978
The Torah, Henry Holt & Company, New York, 1996
Appendix I
Examples of Firearms Control Laws in Canada
I came to Ottawa in November with the firm belief
that the only people in this country who should have guns are police
officers and soldiers.
— Allan Rock, Canada's Minister of Justice
Maclean's "Taking Aim on Guns", 1994 April 25, page 12.
In 1994 when Allan Rock introduced Bill C-68, Canada already had some
of the best firearms safety measures in the world:
1977 Bill C-51: introduced the Firearm Acquisition Certificate (FAC)
and made certain firearms “classes” “prohibited”
and “restricted”.
David Kopel, The Failure of Canadian Gun Control , p.1
Book Seven / item 16.
1991 Bill C-17: made the application procedure for an FAC far more
restrictive and onerous.
Coalition for Gun Control, The Gun Control Story
Book Seven / item 17
Thus, in Canada, as contrasted to the United States, fully automatic
firearms are classified “Prohibited,” and all handguns and
some types of rifles are classified as “Restricted.” Ownership
of these types of firearms require special registration certificates for
possession, and since 1977 all firearm sales have been restricted to persons
who have undergone police background checks.
R. v. Schwartz, [1988] 2 S.C.R. 443
R. v. Hasselwander, [1993] 2 S.C.R. 398
R. v. Zeolkowski, [1989] 1 S.C.R. 1378
Book Three / items 11, 10, & 9
Appendix J
Facts concerning the confiscation of my firearm
“The pathway to Court”
On 10 October 2003 Jack Wilson and I were out in an isolated field north
of Davidson, Saskatchewan, in a rural location designated by the Province
of Saskatchewan as a hunting area.
We both had provincial hunting licenses, wildlife habitat certificates,
and federal migratory game bird permits.
Neither of us had a licence to possess firearms.
Responding to our prior faxed communication in which we notified the
local RCMP detachment of our plans and intentions, the RCMP attended to
our location.
While I was in obvious “Unauthorized Possession of a Firearm,”
the attending RCMP officer made no mention of Criminal Code s. 91(1):
every person commits an offense unless the person is the holder of
(a)
a licence under which the person may possess it. ... .
Nonetheless the officer seized and confiscated my shotgun pursuant to
s. 117.03.
As per s. 117.03 the RCMP gave me fourteen days in which to produce a
licence to claim my shotgun. I had no licence to produce as I had previously
burned my Firearms Acquisition Certificate (FAC) on Armistice Day 2001
in protest of the Firearms Act.
On 02 March 2004 the RCMP requested a court sanctioned destruction order
of my shotgun.
At that time I advised the court that I would attempt to establish that
I am “lawfully entitled to possess” my shogun without a firearms
licence based upon the personal Liberty guarantees in the Canadian Charter
of Rights and Freedoms.
On 17 August 2004 I submitted our Notice of Charter Challenge as required
under the Constitutional Questions Act.
On 07 September 2004 Mr. Wilson and I made our first Charter argument
before the Judge Orr in Provincial Court of Saskatchewan.
On 04 January 2005 Jack Wilson and I again appeared before Judge Orr.
At this time Federal Senior Crown Counsel Mr. Scott Spencer was present
representing the Attorney General of Canada. Judge Orr, Mr. Spencer, Jack
Wilson and I then all conferred and agreed on the new ‘ground rules’
for our next appearance. I was instructed to specify clearly the items
we intended to challenge in our next appearance.
On 20 April 2005 I submitted a revised Notice of Charter Challenge under
the Constitutional Questions Act - see Appendix X.
Subsequently Mr. Wilson and I made our Charter argument on O4 October
2005, and Judge Orr gave written reason for not accepting our argument
on 06 December 2005.
With Judge Orr’s destruction order of 02 May 2006,
and after two unsuccessful attempts to have the Court hear an appeal,
we have now applied to this Honourable Court’s original and exclusive
jurisdiction to interpret and declare that the statutory intent and meaning
of Section 117.03 of the Criminal Code.
Appendix K
Statute of Northampton
2 Edw. 3, c. 3 (1328)
Item, it is enacted, that no man great nor small, of what condition soever
he be, except the king's servants in his presence, and his ministers in
executing of the king's precepts, or of their office, and such as be in
their company assisting them, and also [upon a cry made for arms to keep
the peace, and the same in such places where such acts happen,] be so
hardy to come before the King's justices, or other of the King's ministers
doing their office, with force and arms, nor bring no force in affray
of the peace, nor to go nor ride armed by night nor by day, in fairs,
markets, nor in the presence of the justices or other ministers, nor in
no part elsewhere, upon pain to forfeit their armour to the King, and
their bodies to prison at the King's pleasure. And that the King's justices
in their presence, sheriffs, and other ministers in their bailiwicks,
lords of franchises, and their bailiffs in the same, and mayors and bailiffs
of cities and boroughs, within the same cities and boroughs, and borough-holders,
constables, and wardens of the peace within their wards, shall have power
to execute this act. And that the justices assigned, at their coming down
into the country, shall have power to enquire how such officers and lords
have exercised their offices in this case, and to punish them whom they
find that have not done that which pertained to their office.
The Founders' Constitution
Volume 5, Amendment II, Document 1
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendIIs1.html
The University of Chicago Press
Appendix L
definition of “licence”
a “licence” is:
A Revocable permission to commit some act that would otherwise be
unlawful,
Black’s Law Dictionary, 7th ed, Bryan A. Garner editor, West Group,
1999
Book Seven / item 2
Appendix M
The Autonomy of the Individual
The Right to Life and Security of Person
Rodriguez v. British Columbia [1993] 3 S.C.R.
the right to security of the person included in s. 7 of the Charter
... has an element of personal autonomy, which protects the dignity
and privacy of individuals with respect to decisions concerning their
own body.
Book of Authorities, QB Moose Jaw. item 8
R. v. Morgentaler, [1988] 1 S.C.R. 30
The right to "liberty" contained in s. 7 guarantees to every
individual a degree of personal autonomy over important decisions intimately
affecting his or her private life. Liberty in a free and democratic
society does not require the state to approve such decisions but it
does require the state to respect them.
Book of Authorities, QB Mosse Jaw. item 7
Godbout v. Longueuil (City), [1997] 3 S.C.R. 844
The right to liberty in s. 7 goes beyond the notion of mere freedom
from physical constraint and protects within its scope a narrow sphere
of personal autonomy wherein individuals may make inherently private
choices free from state interference.
Book of Authorities, QB Mosse Jaw, item 9
The guarantees of life and security of person are meaningless
without the means to secure that life.
Kopel, David, et al, The Human Right of Self-Defense, BYU Journal of Public
Law 2007, Book of Authorities QB Saskatoon, Item 1
Appendix N
Methods Used to Disarm the English
1660 to 1689
1660 April: Parliament asks Charles II to return
1660 May: Coronation of Charles II
Priviy Council Order, 1660
all gunsmiths to report production of firearms
and names of customers
Militia Act, 1662
An Act declaring the sole right of the Militia to be in the King
permitted militia officers to disarm subjects at their discretion
Royal Proclamations
1660, 1661, 1662, 1664, 1665, 1670
Banishment of the Veterans
The Game Act, 1671
Game keepers “may take and seize all such Guns,
Bowes, Greyhounds, Setting-doggs ... Snares, or other Engines for
the taking or killing of game ... persons, who by this act are Prohibited
to keep or use the same.
In all previous game acts all devices used in the act
of poaching could be seized, while all others designed exclusively for
hunting were illegal per se.
Now all these (including firearms) were illegal per se. (pp 70)
Requirement of property to hunt severely increased; requirement now fifty
times the amount required to vote.
Notes from:
Joyce Lee Malcolm, To Keep and Bear Arms; The Origins of an Anglo-American
Right, Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts 1994
Appendix O
Methods Used to Disarm the British
1903 to 2007
Before 1920 gun control was at least as lenient in Great Britain
as in the United States.
Gary Kleck Targeting Guns; Firearms and their Control
The United Kingdom has become:
a nation in which law-abiding citizens have been effectively disarmed
of all weapons for nearly fifty years, their rights of self-defense
severely circumscribed, dependent upon inadequate police protection,
their judicial system reluctant to incarcerate those offenders it is
able to apprehend, affords only minimal deterrence. The result is a
crime rate soaring to record levels ... In England fewer guns have meant
more crime. In America more guns have meant less crime.
Joyce Lee Malcolm, Guns and Violence, The English Experience
Pistols Act, 1903
prohibited sale of pistols minors & felons
The Firearms Act, 1920
Required a firearms certificate for anyone wishing to “purchase,
have in his possession, use, or carry any firearm or ammunition.”
The local chief of police was to decide who could obtain such a certificate
and exclude anyone of intemperate habits, unsound mind, or anyone he considered
“for any reason unfitted to be trusted with firearms.”
Applicant had to convince he police officer that he had a “good
reason for requiring such a certificate.”
The “good reason” to be decided by practice.
Certificate to specify the type of firearm, but also the quantity of ammunition
an individual could purchase and hold at any one time.
Certificate would expire after three years, renewal for an additional
fee and need to be re-qualified.
Penalty for violation: a fine not exceeding fifty pounds, or imprisonment
with or without hard labor for a term not exceeding three months, or both.
Guidance from the Home Office, 1920
Policy stated in a secret document:
It would be a good reason for having a firearm if a person
lives in a solitary house, where protection from thieves and burglars
is essential, or having been exposed to definite threats to life on
account of his performance of some public duty.
And also the chief of police was to be satisfied that the
grant of the certificate to the particular person was:
without danger to the public safety or to the peace,
and must judge this chiefly from the person’s character, antecedents
and associations, so far as can be ascertained.
Firearms Act, 1937
Extended controls to shotguns and other smoothbore firearms
with barrels less than twenty inches.
“Memorandum for the Guidance of the Police”
Home Office, 1937
As a general rule applications to possess firearms for
house or personal protection should be discouraged on the grounds that
firearms cannot be regarded as a suitable means for protection and may
be a source of danger.
“Memorandum for the Guidance of the Police,”
Home Office, 1964
It should hardly ever be necessary to anyone to possess a firearm
for the protection of his house or person ... this principle should
hold good even in the case of banks and firms who desire to protect
valuables or large quantities of money; only in very exceptional cases
should a firearm be held for protection purposes.
“Memorandum for the Guidance of the Police”
Home Office, 1969
It should never be necessary for anyone to possess a firearm for the
protection of his house or person.
Prevention of Crime Act, 1953
Banned public carriage of all offensive, or potentially offensive, weapons
and to transfer to the police sole responsibility for the protection of
individuals.
Hungerford Massacre, August 1987
The Firearms Act, 1988
Shotguns now have same stringent controls as handguns and rifles
Dumblane Massacre, 13 March 1996
Firearms Act (No. 2), 1997
Complete handgun ban
The English Declaration of Rights of 1689 was specifically designed to
prevent this slow erosion of Rights.
Notes from:
Joyce Lee Malcolm, To Keep and Bear Arms; The Origins of an Anglo-American
Right, Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts 1994
and
Joyce Lee Malcolm, Guns and Violence, The English Experience,
Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts 2002
Appendix P
A Constitution
“Similar in Principle”
The Importance of the Preamble to the British North America
Act
and
the English Declaration of Rights 1689
in Canadian Constitutional Law
The preamble to the British North America Act states that the Provinces
of Canada shall be united with a Constitution:
similar In Principle to the United Kingdom.
The British North America Act - 1867. p.1
Book Four / item 18
The Preamble’s “similar in Principle”
Several very significant Supreme Court cases testify to the menaing of
this phrase:
a. Judicial independence
Reference: re Remuneration of Judges:
Judicial independence is an unwritten norm, recognized and affirmed
by the preamble to the Constitution Act, 1867 -- in particular reference
to “a Constitution similar in principle the that of the United
Kingdom ... The preamble ... invites the courts to turn those principles
into the premise of a constitutional argument that culminates in the
filling of gaps in the express terms of the constitutional text ...
Reference: re Remuneration Judges Prov Court P.E.I., [1997] 3 S.C.R.
p. 5 Per C.J. Lamer
Book Two / item 5
b. Parliamentary privilege:
Canada (House of Commons) v. Vaid
21 Parliamentary privilege, therefore, is one of the ways in which
the fundamental constitutional separation of powers is respected. In
Canada, the principle has its roots in the preamble to our Constitution
Act, 1867 which calls for “a Constitution similar in Principle
to that of the United Kingdom”. Each of the branches of the State
is vouchsafed a measure of autonomy from the others. Parliamentary privilege
was partially codified in art. 9 of the U.K. Bill of Rights of 1689,
1 Will. & Mar., sess. 2, c. 2, but the freedom of speech to which
it refers was asserted at least as early as 1523 (Erskine May’s
Treatise on The Law, Privileges, Proceedings and Usage of Parliament
(23rd ed. 2004), at p. 80). Parliamentary privilege is a principle common
to all countries based on the Westminster system, and has a loose counterpart
in the Speech or Debate Clause of the United States Constitution, art.
1, § 6, cl. 1.
34 Historically, the legislative source of some privileges (e.g., art.
9 of the Bill of Rights of 1689) did not diminish the jurisdictional
immunity they attracted. In Bradlaugh v. Gossett (1884), 12 Q.B.D. 271,
Stephen J. stated, at p. 278:
I think that the House of Commons is not subject to the control
of Her Majesty’s Courts in its administration of that part of
the statute-law which has relation to its own internal proceedings...
[Emphasis added.]
The same rule was adopted in Canada (Temple v. Bulmer, [1943] S.C.R.
265; Carter v. Alberta (2002), 222 D.L.R. (4th) 40, 2002 ABCA 303, at
para. 20, leave to appeal refused, [2003] 1 S.C.R. vii). The immunity
from external review flowing from the doctrine of privilege is conferred
by the nature of the function (the Westminster model of parliamentary
democracy), not the source of the legal rule (i.e. inherent privilege
versus legislated privilege). The doctrine of privilege attaching to
a constitution “similar in Principle to that of the United Kingdom”
under the preamble to the Constitution Act, 1867 is not displaced by
the wording of s. 32(1) of the Charter. As was pointed out in New Brunswick
Broadcasting, parliamentary privilege enjoys the same constitutional
weight and status as the Charter itself.
Canada (House of Commons) v. Vaid, [2005] SCC 30; p. 8, para 21 &34
Book 2 / item 3
English Declaration of Rights 1689:
c. Democratic principles
Reference: Re Secession of Quebec:
Our Constitution is primarily a written one, the product of 131
years of evolution. Behind the written word is an historical linage
stretching back through the ages which aids in the consideration of
the underlying constitutional principles ... they are vital unstated
assumptions upon which the text is based {paragraph 49} ...
Canadians have long recognized the existence and importance of unwritten
constitutional principles in our system of government {paragraph 52}
...
Underlying constitutional principles may in certain circumstances
give rise to substantive legal obligations (have “full legal
force and effect,” as we described in the Partition Reference
... .{paragraph 54} ...
The evolution of our democratic principles can be traced back to
the Magna Carta (1215) and... in the English Bill of Rights of 1689
... and eventually, the achievement of the Constitution itself in
1867. {paragraph 63}
Reference: re Secession of Quebec, [1998] 2 S.C.R. ; pp.20 - 23
Book One/ item 2
d. Parliament’s “inherent” self-regulating authority:
Reference: Resolution to Amend the Constitution
It is unnecessary here to embark on any historical review of the “court”
aspect of Parliament and the immunity of its procedures from judicial
review. Courts come into the picture when legislation is enacted and
not before (unless references are made to them ...). It would be incompatible
with the self-regulating -- “inherent” is as apt a word--
authority of Houses of Parliament to deny their capacity to pass any
kind of resolution. Reference may appropriately be made to art. 9 of
the [English] Bill of Rights of 1689, undoubtedly in force as part of
the law of Canada ... .
Reference: Resolution to Amend Constitution [1981] 1 S.C.R.; p. 785
Book One/ item 3
e. Citizens’ most basic freedoms:
Nor cruel and unusual Punishments
We in Canada adopted through the preamble of our constitution the legislative
restraint set out in s. 10 of the English Bill of Rights 0f 1688 (sic
1689), I Wm. & M. sess. 2, c. 2, which states:
10. That excessive bail ought not be required, nor excessive fines
imposed; nor cruel and unusual Punishments inflicted.
R. v. Smith (Edward Dewey), [1987] 1 S.C.R. 1045; p. 15, pra 24
Book Two / item 2
f. Presumption of innocence:
[I]n importing certain principles found in the United Kingdom, the
Constitution Act, 1867 incorporated principles of civil liberties and
human rights embedded in English constitutional history ... “residing
in the theory of government these documents proclaim.” These documents
... were the Magna Carta and the [English] Bill of Rights of 1689 ...
.
R. v. Demers, [2004] 2 S.C.R. 489, p. 21, para 82
Book Two/ item 1
Appendix Q
Reference re Firearms Act
1 In 1995, Parliament amended the Criminal Code, R.S.C., 1985, c. C-46,
by enacting the Firearms Act, S.C. 1995, c. 39, commonly referred to as
the gun control law, to require the holders of all firearms to obtain
licences and register their guns. In 1996, the Province of Alberta challenged
Parliament’s power to pass the gun control law by a reference to
the Alberta Court of Appeal. The Court of Appeal by a 3:2 majority upheld
Parliament’s power to pass the law. The Province of Alberta now
appeals that decision to this Court.
2 The issue before this Court is not whether gun control is good or bad,
whether the law is fair or unfair to gun owners, or whether it will be
effective or ineffective in reducing the harm caused by the misuse of
firearms. The only issue is whether or not Parliament has the constitutional
authority to enact the law.
3 The answer to this question lies in the Canadian Constitution. The Constitution
assigns some matters to Parliament and others to the provincial legislatures:
Constitution Act, 1867. The federal government asserts that the gun control
law falls under its criminal law power, s. 91(27), and under its general
power to legislate for the “Peace, Order and good Government”
of Canada. Alberta, on the other hand, says the law falls under its power
over property and civil rights, s. 92(13). All agree that to resolve this
dispute, the Court must first determine what the gun control law is really
about – its “pith and substance” – and then ask
which head or heads of power it most naturally falls within.
4 We conclude that the gun control law comes within Parliament’s
jurisdiction over criminal law. The law in “pith and substance”
is directed to enhancing public safety by controlling access to firearms
through prohibitions and penalties. This brings it under the federal criminal
law power. While the law has regulatory aspects, they are secondary to
its primary criminal law purpose. The intrusion of the law into the provincial
jurisdiction over property and civil rights is not so excessive as to
upset the balance of federalism. Reference re Firearms Act (Can) [2000]
1 S.C.R. p. 4
Book Three / item 1
Appendix R
the stubborn brutality of the human animal
Thursday, Aug. 23, 2007
By DAVID VON DREHLE
In a world where children's hands are hacked off with machetes and bombs
are detonated in marketplaces, where young women are burned alive as punishment
for affairs of the heart, civilization clearly remains a work in progress.
Our aspirations are shadowed by the stubborn brutality of the human animal,
which, it seems, cannot be tamed and can only be kept at bay.
One notable success: the rise of regulated athletic competition to take
the place of blood sport as mass entertainment. In Rome at the height
of its imperial glory, gladiators by the thousands fought to the death
before cheering crowds. They hacked one another with swords; they were
torn to pieces by wild animals. Most of them perished in near anonymity,
but some became idols and sex symbols--men such as Celadus the Thracian,
immortalized as "the young girls' heartthrob," and Crescens,
"the netter of young girls by night."
Michael Vick, an NFL quarterback, battled the Bears and the Lions rather
than actual bears and lions--a seemingly simple step up in terms of civilization
but one for which Vick ought to have been deeply thankful. Along with
his "netting" license, he stood to gain $100 million or more.
He risked sprains and bruises instead of severed arteries and a crushed
skull. His career might be measured in decades rather than hours.
But Vick's dogs were not so lucky. On Aug. 20 he agreed to plead guilty
to federal charges stemming from his involvement in the blood sport of
dogfighting. There are additional allegations that he shot, hanged and
electrocuted dogs that lost. He faces prison, the loss of millions and
maybe even the end of his career.
A number of people have argued that the punishment is far too harsh,
given that pit bulls have been bred over several centuries to fight and
that, after all, these are just dogs in a world where worse cruelties
are suffered by humans. And why should a killer of dogs go to prison while
butchers of hogs go to the fair?
All good points. Perfect consistency may be too much to
expect, however, from our veneer of civilization. The Vick case isn't
about children or farming; it is about suffering and death as entertainment.
A modern gladiator, of all people, ought to know what's wrong with that.
Appendix S
Wouldn’t you feel safer with a gun?
British attitudes are supercilious and misguided
Richard Munday
From The Times of London
September 8, 2007
Despite the recent spate of shootings on our streets, we pride ourselves
on our strict gun laws. Every time an American gunman goes on a killing
spree, we shake our heads in righteous disbelief at our poor benighted
colonial cousins. Why is it, even after the Virginia Tech massacre, that
Americans still resist calls for more gun controls?
The short answer is that “gun controls” do not work: they
are indeed generally perverse in their effects. Virginia Tech, where 32
students were shot in April, had a strict gun ban policy and only last
year successfully resisted a legal challenge that would have allowed the
carrying of licensed defensive weapons on campus. It is with a measure
of bitter irony that we recall Thomas Jefferson, founder of the University
of Virginia, recording the words of Cesare Beccaria: “Laws that
forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined
nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for
the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage
than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater
confidence than an armed man.”
One might contrast the Virginia Tech massacre with the assault on Virginia’s
Appalachian Law School in 2002, where three lives were lost before a student
fetched a pistol from his car and apprehended the gunman.
Virginia Tech reinforced the lesson that gun controls are obeyed only
by the law-abiding. New York has “banned” pistols since 1911,
and its fellow murder capitals, Washington DC and Chicago, have similar
bans. One can draw a map of the US, showing the inverse relationship of
the strictness of its gun laws, and levels of violence: all the way down
to Vermont, with no gun laws at all, and the lowest level of armed violence
(one thirteenth that of Britain).
America’s disenchantment with “gun control” is based
on experience: whereas in the 1960s and 1970s armed crime rose in the
face of more restrictive gun laws (in much of the US, it was illegal to
possess a firearm away from the home or workplace), over the past 20 years
all violent crime has dropped dramatically, in lockstep with the spread
of laws allowing the carrying of concealed weapons by law-abiding citizens.
Florida set this trend in 1987, and within five years the states that
had followed its example showed an 8 per cent reduction in murders, 7
per cent reduction in aggravated assaults, and 5 per cent reduction in
rapes. Today 40 states have such laws, and by 2004 the US Bureau of Justice
reported that “firearms-related crime has plummeted”.
In Britain, however, the image of violent America remains unassailably
entrenched. Never mind the findings of the International Crime Victims
Survey (published by the Home Office in 2003), indicating that we now
suffer three times the level of violent crime committed in the United
States; never mind the doubling of handgun crime in Britain over the past
decade, since we banned pistols outright and confiscated all the legal
ones.
We are so self-congratulatory about our officially disarmed society,
and so dismissive of colonial rednecks, that we have forgotten that within
living memory British citizens could buy any gun – rifle, pistol,
or machinegun – without any licence. When Dr Watson walked the streets
of London with a revolver in his pocket, he was a perfectly ordinary Victorian
or Edwardian. Charlotte Brontë recalled that her curate father fastened
his watch and pocketed his pistol every morning when he got dressed; Beatrix
Potter remarked on a Yorkshire country hotel where only one of the eight
or nine guests was not carrying a revolver; in 1909, policemen in Tottenham
borrowed at least four pistols from passers-by (and were joined by other
armed citizens) when they set off in pursuit of two anarchists unwise
enough to attempt an armed robbery. We now are shocked that so many ordinary
people should have been carrying guns in the street; the Edwardians were
shocked rather by the idea of an armed robbery.
If armed crime in London in the years before the First World War amounted
to less than 2 per cent of that we suffer today, it was not simply because
society then was more stable. Edwardian Britain was rocked by a series
of massive strikes in which lives were lost and troops deployed, and suffragette
incendiaries, anarchist bombers, Fenians, and the spectre of a revolutionary
general strike made Britain then arguably a much more turbulent place
than it is today. In that unstable society the impact of the widespread
carrying of arms was not inflammatory, it was deterrent of violence.
As late as 1951, self-defence was the justification of three quarters
of all applications for pistol licences. And in the years 1946-51 armed
robbery, the most significant measure of gun crime, ran at less than two
dozen incidents a year in London; today, in our disarmed society, we suffer
as many every week.
Gun controls disarm only the law-abiding, and leave predators with a
freer hand. Nearly two and a half million people now fall victim to crimes
of violence in Britain every year, more than four every minute: crimes
that may devastate lives. It is perhaps a privilege of those who have
never had to confront violence to disparage the power to resist.
Richard Munday is editor and co-author of Guns & Violence: the Debate
Before Lord Cullen
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article2409817.ece?Submitted=true
Appendix T
The Idenity of God
Halsbury’s The Laws of England helps to explain the significance
of God in the British Constitution. The Holy Bible is mentioned as being:
presented [to the sovereign] as the most valuable thing on earth, and
signifies wisdom, royal law, and the lively oracles of God;
And at the coronation the Sovereign is presented the orb which signifies:
that the whole world is subject to the empire of Christ.
The Constitution of the United Kingdom clearly recognizes
the existence of God and the Holy Scripture.
The Laws of England, 3rd ed, Lord Simonds, edVol. 7, Butterworth, London
1954 p.204
Book Seven / item 1
Appendix U
Unwritten Constitutional Principles
Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin
In an address in Wellington, New Zealand in December 2005 entitled, “Unwritten
Constitutional Principles: What Is Going On?”, Chief Justice Beverley
McLachlin expounded upon this concept, stating:
There exist fundamental norms of justice so basic that they form part
of the legal structure of governance and must be upheld by the courts,
whether or not they find expression in constitutional texts. (p.2)
Unwritten constitutional principles [refer to] the ancient doctrine
of natural law. Like those concepts of justice, ... these principles
presuppose the existence of some kind of natural order ... derived from
history, values, and the culture of the nation, viewed in its constitutional
context. (p.5)
Quoting Canadian legal scholar M.D. Walters on this idea of natural law,
Ms. McLachlin said:
unwritten fundamental laws is regarded as an assertion of the supremacy
of natural law, right reason or universal principles of political morality
and human rights over legislation, it is part of a rich intellectual
heritage that had informed common law thinking from medieval times through
the English and American revolutionary ages, and into the high Victorian
era of empire out of which Canada’s written constitution emerged.
(p.6)
M.D. Walters “The Common Law Constitution in Canada” (2004),
51 U.T.L.J. 91 at 136
Ms. McLachlin continued:
Cast in the language of religion, early natural law theories saw the
manifestation of the divine in something that became the foundation
of the Western world’s concept of itself: human rationality. Natural
law was, Thomas Aquinas wrote, “Something appointed by reason.”
(p.7)
Summa theologiae I-II, Question 94, /First Article
Furthermore, the Chief Justice stated:
the state ... exists as an expression of its citizens, ... it follows
that its legitimacy and power must be based on the citizens’ consent
... this is so whether the right is written down or not; (p.8)
The legitimacy of the modern state ... depends on its adhesion to fundamental
norms that transcend the law and executive action. This applies to all
branches of state government - Parliament, the executive, and the judiciary.
(p.9)
On the protection of our fundamental human rights, the Chief Justice
then quoted:
Parliaments, Executives and Judiciaries are the guarantors in their
spheres of the rule of law, the promotion and protection of fundamental
human rights ... based on the highest standards of honesty, probity
and accountability. (p.9)
Commonwealth Principles on the Accountability of and the Relationship
Between the Three Branches of Government Commonwealth Secretariat et
al., 2004
Speaking of genocide, Ms. McLachlin said:
I believe the world was right, in the wake of the horrors of Nazi
Germany and the Holocaust, to declare that there are certain fundamental
norms that no nation should transgress. I believe that it was right
to prosecute German judges ... for applying laws that sent innocent
people to concentration camps and probable death ... The Universal Declaration
of Human Rights in 1949 was a giant step forward ... I believe that
judges have a duty to insist that the legislative and executive branches
of government conform to certain establish and fundamental norms ...
. (p.11)
Speaking on the need to maintain human dignity, Ms. McLachlin then quoted
Benjamin L. Berger:
Our modern faith in human rights (of which the Charter is our national
manifestation) suggest that justice is not a matter of majoritarian
or popular debate, but an expression of a reasoned commitment to the
dignity of all human beings. (p.14)
Benjamin L. Berger, “Judicial appointments and Our Changing Constitution.”
The Lawyers Weekly, 16 September 2005 at 3
The Chief Justice then turned to The Rule of Law:
The rule of law signifies that all actors in our society - public
and private, individual and institutional - are subject to and governed
by law. The rule of law excludes arbitrary power in all its forms. It
requires that the laws be known or ascertainable to citizens, and ensures
that laws are applied consistently to each citizen, without favouritism
... . (p.14)
Ms. McLachlin then pointed to the foundation of our Constitution:
Magna Carta is a fundamental text designed to provide written guarantees
of fundamental principles. ... common law fleshed out and supplemented
these principles .. . . (p.15)
The Preamble to Canada’s 1867 constitutional text stipulates
‘a Constitution similar in principle to that of the United Kingdom’,
contemplating reference to unwritten constitutional norms derived from
British history. ... While [courts] may interpret their written constitutions,
courts are never free to ignore them. (p.19)
On the subject of unjust laws the Chief Justice was direct:
Judges who enforce unjust laws ... lose their legitimacy. (p.23)
Beverley McLachlin, CJ, Unwritten Constitutional Principles: What
is Going On? Lord Cooke Lecture, Wellington, New Zealand, 01 December
2005.
Book of Authorities, QB Moose Jaw item 1
Appendix V
Justice Michael D. Kirby
Justice Michael D. Kirby’s approach to the constitution who endorsed:
Lord Reid's rejection of the notion that an Act of Parliament could
be disregarded because it was contrary to the law of God or the law
of nature or of natural justice:
I do so in recognition of years of unbroken constitutional law and
tradition in Australia and, beforehand, in the United Kingdom. That
unbroken law and tradition has repeatedly reinforced and ultimately
respected the democratic will of the people as expressed in Parliament.
It has reflected political realities in our society and the distribution
of power within it. I also do so in recognition of the dangers which
may attend the development by judges (as distinct from the development
by the people's representatives) of a doctrine of fundamental rights
more potent than parliamentary legislation. Such extra-constitutional
notions must be viewed with reservation not only because they lack
the legitimacy that attaches to the enactments ultimately sanctioned
by the people. But also because, once allowed, there is no logical
limit to their ambit. They may thereby undermine a rule of law and
invite the only effective substitute, viz. the rule of power.
Michael D. Kirby. “Lord Cooke and Fundamental Rights,”
Auckland Conference, 4/5 April 1997, at NF: #70
Book of Authorities QB Moose Jaw
Appendix W
Supremacy of God
One needs only to note the extreme importance in constitutional interpretation
attached to the parallel expression “the rule of law” in Manitoba
Language Rights to know that this perambulatory expression cannot be ignored.
“the rule of law” ... becomes a postulate of our own constitutional
order by way of the preamble to the Constitution Act, 1982, and its
implicit inclusion in the preamble to the Constitution Act, 1867 by
virtue of the words "with a Constitution similar in principle to
that of the United Kingdom".
This Court cannot take a narrow and literal approach to constitutional
interpretation. The jurisprudence of the Court evidences a willingness
to supplement textual analysis with historical, contextual and purposive
interpretation in order to ascertain the intent of the makers of our
Constitution.
The Court has in the past inferred constitutional principles from the
preambles to the Constitution Acts and the general object and purpose
of the Constitution.
Re Manitoba Language Rights, [1985] 1 S.C.R. 721, 1985 CanLII 33 (S.C.C.)
Book One, item 1, para 63,65,66
Exhibit X
Notice
Constitutional Questions Act
Wednesday, 20 April 2005
The Honourable Irwin Cotler
Attorney General of Canada
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0A6
|
The Honourable Frank Quennell, Q.C
Attorney General of Saskatchewan
Legislative Building
Regina, Saskatchewan S4S 0B3
|
Judge David Orr
Saskatchewan Provincial Court
Rm 211 - 110 Ominica St
Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan S6H 6V2
|
Fred Dehm, Q.C
Saskatchewan Crown Prosecutor
224 - 4th Ave South Rm800
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7K 2H6
|
Scott R. Spencer, Senior
Department of Justice
10th Floor, 123 Second Ave S.
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7K 7E6 |
Counsel Brian Henderson,
Saskatchewan Crown Prosecutor
Rm 221 - 110 Ominica Street W
Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan S6H 6V2 |
Dear Honourable Sirs,
Re: Craik RCMP File # 2003 - 866
Constitutional Questions Act / Charter Challenge
As required by the Constitutional Questions Act, being Chapter C-29 of
The Revised Statutes of Saskatchewan 1978 ... and 2000, c.I-2.01., and
in compliance with Judge Orr’s instructions of Tuesday, 04 January
2005, as amended by the Court on Tuesday, 01 March 2005, I hereby serve
notice to all the aforementioned parties that I will be in Saskatchewan
Provincial Court in Craik, Saskatchewan, on Tuesday, 04 October 2005,
to show why I am legally entitled to possess the shotgun which the the
RCMP seized from me and wants to destroy. In so doing I will challenge
the constitutional validity of the Firearms Act, and the corresponding
sections of the Criminal Code of Canada under which the RCMP seized my
shotgun.
The Firearms Act of 1995 and the corresponding sections of the Criminal
Code of Canada, Section 91(1), 91(2), and 117.03 violate the Canadian
Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Sections 7, our Right to “Life,
Liberty and Security of Person,” and Section 26, “this Charter
... shall not be construed as denying the existence of any other rights
or freedoms that exist in Canada,” specifically, the Right to have
“armes for their defense.”
Thank you for your continued attention to this matter.
Sincerely,
Edward B. Hudson, DVM, MS
Secretary
Encl.: Revised Appendix A / Particulars of the Points to be Argued
CC: Lt Governor Lynda Haverstock Prime Minister Paul Martin
Dept Prime Minister Anne McLellan Garry Breitkreuz, MP
Premier Lorne Calvert Brad Wall, Leader Opposition
Don Morgan, Justice Critic
Canadian Unregistered Firearms Owners Association
402 Skeena Crt Saskatoon
Saskatchewan S7K 4H2
1-306-242-2379 1-306-249-2359 fax
edwardhudson@shaw.ca
www.cufoa.ca
Revised Appendix A
20 April 2005
Particulars of the Points to be Argued
The Firearms Act of 1995 violates our Right to have “armes for their
defense” and our Right of “security of the person.”
the Firearms Act:
Section 4. The purpose of this Act is
(a) to provide, notably by sections 5 to 16 and 54 to 73, for the issuance
of
(i) licences, registration certificates and authorizations under which
persons may possess firearms in circumstances that would otherwise constitute
an offence under subsection 91(1), 92(1), 93(1) or 95(1) of the Criminal
Code,
Section 112. (1) Subject to subsections (2) and (3), every person commits
an offence who, not having previously committed an offence under this
subsection or subsection 91(1) or 92(1) of the Criminal Code, possesses
a firearm that is neither a prohibited firearm nor a restricted firearm
without being the holder of a registration certificate for the firearm.
I. “Armes for their defense”
Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms:
Section 26.
“The guarantee in this Charter of certain rights and freedoms shall
not be construed as denying the existence of any other rights or freedoms
that exist in Canada.”
The Right to “armes for their defense” is guaranteed by the
English Declaration of Rights of 1689, the Canadian Bill of Rights, the
Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The English Declaration of Rights of 1689 provides for citizens to have
“armes for their defense.”
The Canadian Bill of Rights and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms
brought the Right of “armes for their defense” into Canadian
law.
Canadian Bill of Rights:
Section 5. (1) Nothing in Part I shall be construed to abrogate or abridge
any human right or fundamental freedom not enumerated therein that may
have existed in Canada at the commencement of this Act.
II. “Security of the person”
Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms:
Section 7.
“Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person
and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the
principles of fundamental justice.”
Appendix Y
Overview of English History
| Year |
King |
Event |
Contemporary |
Legacy |
2800 BC .................................Immigration of Celts
Druids
Stonehenge
55 B.C. .........Julius Caesar ......Roman Invasion
Queen Boudicca, 60 A.D.
rebellion against Roman pillage
Hadrian's Wall, 122 A.D.
"to separate Romans from Barbarians"
410 A.D. Emperor Honorius
Britons “to look to their own defense”
450 A.D. Anglo-Saxon Invasion
(Germanic peoples, the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes)
516 A.D. Battle of Mount Badon
King Arthur
597 A.D. St. Augustine
established Catholic Church
first archbishop of Canterbury
600 A.D. Wessex
law early militia
625 A.D. Raedwald
675 A.D
poem “Beowulf”
House of Wessex (Anglo-Saxon)
802-839: Egbert
839-855: Aethelwulf
855-860: Aethelbald
860-866: Aethelbert
866-871: Aethelred Danish Invasions
871-899: Alfred, the Great
national militia Danelagh Danegeld berserk
899-925: Edward, the Elder
925-940: Athelstan
940-946: Edmund, the Magnificent
946-955: Eadred
955-959: Eadwig (Edwy), All-Fair
959-975: Edgar, the Peaceable
975-978: Edward, the Martyr
978-1016: Aethelred, the Unready
1016: Edmund, Ironside
Danish Line
1014: Svein, Forkbeard
1016-1035: Canute, the Great
1035-1040: Harald, Harefoot
1040-1042: Hardicanute
House of Wessex, Restored
1042-1066: Edward, the Confessor
1066: Harold II
Battle of Hastings 14 October 1066
Norman Line
1066-1087: William I, the Conqueror
oath of “loyalty against all men”
1087-1100: William II
1100-1135: Henry I
1135-1154: Stephen
Plantagenet, Angevin Line
1154-1189: Henry II
Assize of Arms 1181
“every able bodied freeman ... to provide weapons ...
to serve the king at his own expense when summoned.”
Thomas a Becket
1189-1199: Richard I the Lionheart
Third Crusade
1199-1216: King John
Magna Carta 1215
1216-1272: Henry III
Assize of Arms 1253
1272-1307: Edward I, Longshanks
Assize of Arms 1285
Braveheart
1307-1327: Edward II
1327-1377: Edward III
Statute of Northampton 1328
100 Years War began
Canterbury Tales
1377-1399: Richard II
Peasants’ Revolt
Robin Hood
Game Act 1389
first restrictions on firearms ownership - property qualification
Plantagenet, Lancastrian Line
Convention Parliament, 1399
1399-1413: Henry IV
1413-1422: Henry V
Agincourt 1415
“Once more into the Breach”
1422-1461: Henry VI
Wars of the Roses begins
Siege of Orleans
Joan of Arc
Plantagenet, Yorkist Line
1461-1470: Edward IV
Hundred Years’ War ends
1470-1471: Henry VI
1471-1483: Edward IV
1483: Edward V
1483-1485: Richard III
Wars of the Roses ends
Bosworth Field, 1485
House of Tudor
1485-1509: Henry VII
Game Act 1485
forbid hunting deer with disguises & at night
1509-1547: Henry VIII
Catherine of Aragon / Anne Boleyn
Church of England
Martin Luther 1517 Reformation Lutheran Church
John Calvin 1533 Presbyterianism
1547-1553: Edward VI
rise of Protestantism
influx of “continental heretics”
1553: Lady Jane Grey
1553-1558: “Bloody Mary” I
reestablished Catholicism
burning at the stake
1558-1603: Elizabeth I
Marlowe Shakespeare Walter Raleigh Francis Drake
army to aid French Huguenots
(French Protestants)
Spanish Armada 1585
Raleigh Charter 1585
House of Stuart
1603-1625: James I
Catholic dissent:
Guy Fawkes
Gunpowder Plot 05 November 1605
Game Acts of 1604, 1605, 1609
Jamestown in Virginia, 1609
King James Bible 1611
1625-1649: Charles I
married a devoutly French Catholic princess
Puritans to America, 1620
Petition of Rights, 1628
Civil War, 1642-1649
monarchist Cavaliers vs Parliament (Roundheads, Puritans)
executed for treason
The Commonwealth
1649-1658: Oliver Cromwell
1658-1659: Richard Cromwell
Convention Parliament, 1660
House of Stuart, Restored
1660-1685: Charles II
Hudson’s Bay Charter 1670
Game Act of 1671
1685-1688: James II
attempted to force Catholicism on England;
forced to flee
1689:
Convention Parliament, 1689
English Declaration of Rights 1689
“Armes for their Defense”
House of Orange and Stuart
1689-1702: William III, Mary II
War of the Grand Alliance, 1689–97
Battle of the Boyne, 1690
Act of Settlement, 1701
House of Stuart
1702-1714: Anne
War of the Spanish Succession, 1702–1713
Game Act of 1706
House of Brunswick, Hanover Line
1714-1727: George I
1727-1760: George II
War of the Austrian Succession, 1740 - 1748
1760-1820: George III
The Seven Years War, 1754 - 1763
Royal Proclamation 1763
William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 1765
British confiscation of firearms at Lexington and Concord, 18 April 1775
Revolutionary War 1775 - 1781
Constitution Act 1791
War of 1812, 1812 - 1815
1820-1830: George IV
1830-1837: William IV
1837-1901: Victoria
British North America Act 1867
Gun License Act,1870
House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha
1901-1910: Edward VII
Pistols Act 1903
House of Windsor
1910-1936: George V
Firearms Act 1920
1936: Edward VIII
1936-1952: George VI
Firearms Act, 1937
1952- Elizabeth II
Prevention of Crime Act, 1953
Firearms Act 1968
Firearms Act 1988
Firearms Act 1997
181.
List of Authorities
Book of Authorities
Book One
Provincial Court, Craik
Cases
1. Reference: Manitoba Language Rights, [1985] 1 S.C. R. 721
2. Reference: re Secession of Quebec, [1998] 2 S.C.R.
3. Reference: Resolution to Amend constitution [1981] 1 S.C.R.x
Book of Authorities
Book Two
Provincial Court, Craik
Cases
1. R. v. Demers, [2004] 2 S.C.R. 489
2. R. v. Smith (Edward Dewey), [1987] 1 S.C.R. 1045
3. Canada (House of Commons) v. Vaid, [2005] SCC 30
4. Ford Credit Can Ltd. v. Canada (National Revenue), [1994] BC S.C.
1782
5. Reference: re Remuneration of Judges of Prov. Court P.E.I., [1997]
3 S.C.R.
Book of Authorities
Book Three
Provincial Court, Craik
Cases
1. Reference re Firearms Act (Can) [2000] 1 S.C.R.
2. King against George Dewhurst & Others
The King versus George Dewhurst and Others, John Macdonell, ed Reports
of State Trials, new series, vol I pp 529-608 *(pp 167)
3. Rex v. Gardner, Michaelmas Term, 12 Geo. 2
John Strange, Reports of Adjudged Cases in the Courts of Chancery, King’s
Bench, Commons Pleas and Exchequer, 2 vols London, 1755, 2:1096; Burn,
Justice of the Peace, I:443 *(pp 129)
4. Wingfield vers. Stratford & Osman, Hilary Term, 25 Geo.II 1752
Joseph Sayer, Reports of Adjudged Cases in the Courts of King’s
Bench
Beginning Michaelmas Term, 25 Geo. II England Trinity Term, 29 & 30
Geo. II 1751-1756 London, 1775, pp. 15-17 *(pp 129)
5. R. v. Marshall; R. v. Bernard, 2005 SCC 43
6. R. v. Sioui, [1990] 1 S.C.R. 1025
7. Simon v. The Queen, [1985] 2 S.C.R. 387
8. R. v . George, (1963), 41 D.L.R. (2d) 31
9. R. v. Zeolkowski, [1989] 1 S.C.R. 1378
10. R. v. Hasselwander, [1993] 2 S.C.R. 398
11. R. v. Schwartz, [1988] 2 S.C.R. 443
12. R. v. Wayne Soroka, 17 November 2004 Saskatoon Provincial Court
13. Canadian Council of Churches v. Canada (Minister of Immigration),
[1992] 1 S.C.R. 236
14. Chamberlain v. Surry School Division No. 36, [2002] 4 S.C.R. 710
15. Reference: Motor Vehicles Act [1985] 2 S.C.R.
Book of Authorities
Book Four
Provincial Court, Craik
1. English Declaration of Rights -1689
2. I William & Mary, c.1
3. I William & Mary, c. 6
4. Charter to Sir Walter Raleigh - 1584
5. First Virginia Charter - 1606
6. Charter of New England - 1620
7. Nova Scotia - 1625
8. Charter of Massachusetts Bay - 1629
9. Charter of Maryland - 1632
10. Charter of Carolina - 1663
11. Royal Charter of the Hudson’s Bay Company - 1670
12. Charter of Massachusetts Bay - 1691
13. Charter of Georgia - 1732
14. Royal Proclamation - 1763
15. The Quebec Act - 1774
16. The Constitution Act - 1791
17. The Colonial Laws Validity Act - 1865
18. The British North America Act - 1867
19. The Constitutions Act, Schedule B, 1982
20. The Firearms Act, chapter 39, Statues of Canada -1995
21. Proposed regulations, Firearms Act - 1996
Book of Authorities
Book Five
Provincial Court, Craik
Authors
1. Report of the Subcommittee of the United States Senate, The Right
to Keep and Bear Arms February 1982
2. Caplan, David I. The Right of the Individual to Bear Arms: A Recent
Judicial Trend 4 Det. L.R. 789-823 (1982)
3. Malcolm, Joyce Lee, The Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms:
The Common Law Tradition, Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, Vol.
10:285-314 (1983).
4. Hardy, David T. Armed Citizens: Towards a Jurisprudence of the Second
Amendment 9 Harv. J.L. Pub. Pol’y 559-638 (1986)
5. Vandercoy, David E. The History of the Second Amendment 28 Val. L.
Rev. 1007-1039 (1994)
6. Cottrol, Robert J. & Raymond T. Diamond, The Fifth Auxiliary Right
Yale Law Journal, Vol. 104: 995-1026 (1995)
7. Malcolm, Joyce Lee, Gun control and the Constitution: Sources and
Explorations on the Second Amendment Tennessee Law Review vol. 62, no.
3 (1995)
8. Memorandum Opinion for the Attorney General Whether the
Second Amendment Secures an Individual Right 24 August 2004
Book of Authorities
Book Six
Provincial Court, Craik
Authors
1. United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 10 December
1948
2. Kates, Don B., Henry E. Schaffer, Ph.D., John K. Lattimer, M.D., George
B. Murray, M.D., & Edwin H. Classem, M.D. Guns and Public Health:
Epidemic of Violence or Pandemic of Propaganda ? 61 Tenn. L. Rev. 513-596
(1994)
3. Latham, Andrew, Light Weapons and International Security: A Canadian
Perspective, YCISS Occasional Paper No. 41, August 1996
4. Polsby, Daniel D., & Don B. Kates, Of Holocausts and Gun Control,
75 Wash. U. L.Q. 1237 (1997)
5. Olson, Joseph E. & David B. Kopel, All the Way Down the Slippery
Slope: Gun Prohibition in England and Some Lessons for Civil Liberties
in America, Hamiline Law Review Vol. 22, April 1999
6. Kates, Don B., Democide and Disarmament, SAIS Review 23.1, 305-309
(2003)
7. Mauser, Gary A., The Failed Experiment Gun Control and Public Safety
in Canada, Australia, England, and Wales Public Policy Sources No. 71
November 2003
8. Diefenbaker Canada Center, Anne Frank in the World 1929 - 1945, May
2005
9. Wilkins, Kathryn, Deaths involving firearms, Health Reports vol. 16,
No. 4
June 2005
10. Breitkreuz, MP., Garry, But Did Our gun Laws Actually Save Any Lives
? Press Release 30 June 2005
Breitkreuz, MP., Garry, RCMP Say They Have No Information on Why 70-Years
of Registering Handguns Hasn’t Worked, Press Release 15 December
2004
11. Zim Online (SA), Police have ordered all civilians to surrender firearms,
30 June 2005
12. Hansen, Darah, & Nicholas Read, Warriors Society Ready to Defend
Native Land, Vancouver Sun 30 June 2005
13. Editorial, Katrina focuses spotlight on need for disaster plans,
StarPhoenix
02 September 2005
14. Goodchild, Sophie, & Paul Lashmar, Up to 4m guns in UK and police
are losing the battle, The Independent 04 September 2005
15. Kopel, David B., Paul Gallant, & Joanne D. Eisen, Micro-Disarmament:
The Consequences for Public Safety and Human Rights, UMKC Law Review,
Vol. 73, No. 4, 1-45, (2005)
Book of Authorities
Book Seven
Provincial Court, Craik
Books
1. The Laws of England, 3rd ed, Lord Simonds, editor Vol. 7, Butterworth
& C0., London 1954
2. Black’s Law Dictionary, 7th ed, Bryan A. Garner editor, West
Group, 1999
Articles
3. David B. Kopel, The Torah and Self-Defense, Penn State Law Review,
Vol. 109, No. 1, pp. 17-42, 2004
4. Edward B. Hudson, The Philosophical Basis of Self-Protection, Firearms
Ownership, and Liberty, 2005
5. Edward B. Hudson, “Armes for their Defense” An Inherited,
Historical Canadian Right, 2005
6. John Dixon, The gang that couldn’t shoot straight,
Globe & Mail, 28 January 2003
Firearms in Canada
7. Timeline of Firearms in Canada
8. Samuel de Champlain’s Journal
9. The Northwest Smooth Indian Trade Gun
10. The Perpetual Acts of the General Assemblies of Nova Scotia, 1767
11. The Battle of Seven Oaks, 1816 & John Rowand halts the Blackfoot
charge
12. An Appeal for Arms, Province of Ontario, 1940
Miscellaneous
13. Murray,J.P.R. , RCMP Letter to Mr. George Thompson, Deputy Minister
of
Justice
Garry Breitkreuz, M.P., Press Releases Re: RCMP Commissioner’s Letter
14. Government Sponsored Genocide
15. Overview of English History
16. David Kopel, The Failure of Canadian Gun Control
17. Coalition for Gun Control, The Gun Control Story
18. Gerry Klein, It could very well happen here, StarPhoenix
01 September 2005
Cases
19. R. v. Oakes 1 S.C.R. [1986] 103
Court of Queen’s Bench, Moose Jaw
Book of Authorities
(book one)
Court of Queen’s Bench, Moose Jaw
List of Authorities
Authors
1. McLachlin, Beverley, CJ, “Unwritten Constitutional Principles:
What Is Going On?” Lord Cooke Lecture, Wellington, New Zealand,
01 December 2005
2. Kirby, Michael D., AC, CMG, “Lord Cooke and Fundamental Rights”
Conference Auckland, 4/5 April 1997
3. Malcolm, Joyce Lee, “Why Britain needs more guns” BBC
News,
5 January, 2003
4. Malcolm, Joyce Lee, “Where I come from, our homes are still
our castles”
The Telegraph (London), 31 October 2004
5. Mauser, Gary, Ph.D., “After the Registry” Fraser Forum,
May 2006
6. Canadian Unregistered Firearms Owners Association, “The Firearms
Prohibition Registry”
Cases
7. R. v. Morgentaler, [1988] 1 S.C.R. 30, 1988
8. Rodriguez v. British Columbia [1993] 3 S.C.R.
9. Godbout v. Longueuil (City), [1997] 3 S.C.R. 844
Books
10. To Keep and Bear Arms; The Origins of an Anglo-American Right,
Joyce Lee Malcolm, Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts,
1994
11. Guns and Violence, The English Experience,
Joyce Lee Malcolm, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts,
2002
12. Bounty and Benevolence; A History of Saskatchewan Treaties
Arthur Ray, Jim Miller, & Frank Tough, McGill-Queen’s University
Press, Montréal & Kingston, 2000
13. Targeting Guns; Firearms and their Control, Gary Kleck,
Aldine de Gruyter, New York, 1997
Book of Authorities
Book Two
Court of Queen’s Bench, Moose Jaw
List of Authorities
Authors
1. Al Smithies, Research Director, CILA
For Their Own Good. Part I - Firearm Control In Canada 1867-1945
An in depth look at Gun Control in Canada.
http://www.cdnshootingsports.org/referenceinformation.html
2. Al Smithies, Research Director, CILA
For Their Own Good, Part II -Firearm Control In Canada 1946-1977
Continued in depth look at Gun Control in Canada.
http://www.cdnshootingsports.org/referenceinformation.html
Book of Authorities
Book One
Court of Queen’s Bench, Saskatoon
Authors:
1. The Human Right of Self-Defense, David Kopel, et al, BYU Journal of
Public Law 2007.
182.
List of Affidavits
Affidavits
(book one)
1. Edward B. Hudson
2. Jack Wilson
3. William Floyd
4. Kingsley Beattie
5. Randy Schmidt
6. Yvon Dionne
7. Pierre Lemieux
8. Dr. Joyce Lee Malcolm
9. Dr. Gary Mauser
Affidavits
Book #2
1. Dr. Joe Gingrich
2. James Turnbull
3. Larry Neufeld
|