Like it or not a lot of people’s knowledge about the system they exist in comes essentially via osmosis from the media they consume. And most of the media we consume is American. We laugh at Canadians who defend themselves referencing American laws but I suspect a poll of people who mistakenly believe that some American legal concept applies to them would be disturbingly high.
This is why CanCon laws and more recently the Online News Act are so important. We have the average person in school for 12-16 years and then a lifetime where you’d hope people would be somewhat self-driven in keeping informed about this stuff, but we’ve got the humanity we’ve got and not the one we’d wish we’d got so we’d better ensure the media Canadians are consuming informs us about our own system.
This is why CanCon laws and more recently the Online News Act are so important.
Which is why the Cons having the CBC in their crosshairs is so terrifying.
@grte #Saskatchewan has been subject to essentially a state radio program for years that is the singular voice telling the population what to believe. They go unchecked and the population has been largely indoctrinated because they feel no need to question or challenge the blatant disinformation platform. Without strong journalism and fact checking, #Saskatchewan will continue to be fleeced.
I hear lying on AM Radio is a prerequisite for any Conservative party leadership these days
CanCon isn’t the answer until it pushes actual content instead of writers and production staff.
If Dick Wolf had done things differently, he could have made Law & Order in Canada without changing one thing in the scripts and had it labeled CanCon.
On the other hand, if he had decided to make a Law & Order actually that takes place in Canada without changing anything about the various writers and staff or production facilities, it couldn’t have been labeled CanCon.
I’m all for trying to build the industry, but I think it’s more important to reflect who we are.
Well yeah, unless you’re an immigrant or refugee that recently got citizenship, Canadians were likely last educated about the Charter back in grade school or high school. And never again since unless they look it up themselves.
And, what’s worse, the ubiquity of US media has many Canadians confused about which legal documents are even Canadian and thus apply to them.
But muh 5th amendment rightz?!
—WAYYYY too fucking many idiot fellow Canadianz
Edit: to clarify, we DO have the right against self-incrimination and being compelled to take the stand but we don’t have Amendment rights—we have the Charter 'n shit
I can forgive Canadians for thinking they have the 5th amendment, because we still have some legal structures which are at least similar.
Canadians who think they have some specially engrained fundamental right to own firearms on the other hand… Like… What?
I still have trouble accepting either of these beliefs are commonplace among Canadians. My late-20th century education only briefly touched on the Charter but it seems common sense that stuff from US TV wouldn’t apply to us.
The odd times I’ve had questions about various areas of law or governance, I always have to spend time looking them up. (Seems to me people in the US should still research these things though. It’s not like TV/movies are accurate, complete, and up-to-date.)
I guess I don’t know if I’d say my experience is that it’s “commonplace”, but that it’s “surprisingly common”.
but it seems common sense that stuff from US TV wouldn’t apply to us.
Common sense is misnamed, though—it’s among the rarest qualities for anyone to have, alas.
The amount of gun owners who think that gun ownership is a constitutional right is kinda hilarious though
Was the average Canadian educated in it even then? As far as I can recall, the Charter was barely touched on in any required material during my mandatory schooling. We spent more time on stuff like the internal timeline of the Seven Years’ War than we did on any kind of civics.
Granted, that was back in the 20th century. I really hope that the subject matter covered in mandatory education has been rebalanced since then, but I’m not holding my breath for the result having been any better.
If it was covered back then, I don’t remember. It’s been literally a generation since I was in school. So what little I did learn has certainly been lost by now.
I was in junior high when the Constitution was ratified in 1982. We were each given a copy of it and went through it in a fair amount of detail considering our age.
Quck question to drive the point home: How do you address a Canadian judge?
The proper form of address for a judge in Canada is “Your Honour”. A justice of the peace is supposed to be called “Your Worship”, but that’s cringe so “Your Honour” is also acceptable.
Honestly, that depends on if it’s KB or just provincial court. If it’s provincial court, it kinda depends on the judge/region. Alberta provincial judges seem to like being called “Sir”, not-so much in Saskatchewan or Manitoba
Duh…
IF education doesn’t educate people on something that people NEED to understand,
THEN the population doesn’t understand what they need to understand.
This is simply “education” masquerading as education, is all.
Nothing new.
As https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto TRIED getting people to understand, the “education system” in North America was paid-for by the coal industry in order to prevent autonomous competence, … and once you institute a system, it tends to remain essentially-the-same, in its heart, no matter how much you change its makeup/lipstick/appearance.
~ an autonomously-valid kid isn’t dependent on institutionally-bestowed “validtation”.
That is, for institutions, an Unacceptable Problem.
Broken, insecure kids, however, are manipulable, and therefore dependent on bestowed “validation”, and that is REQUIRED by the institutions. ~
is one of his many points.
“Education” is much more profoundly-wrong, in its orientation, its organization, its frame-of-reference, etc, than it’ll tolerate people to know.
A school administrator told me years-ago that ~ when the law came in to permit parents to see ALL of the children’s files, because we’d been having secrets on 'em, we just segregated them into the “legal” files & the Dirt Files. ~
Psychologist Susan Pinker laments the systematic failure of education for boys, in her book “The Sexual Paradox”.
The book “The Heretic’s Guide to Best Practices” identifies that the teacher-lobby will NEVER tolerate any change that would undermine Teacher Importance, no matter how good it would be for the learners/students.
Read John Taylor Gatto’s stuff. Education needs to be restructured, right from the very-bottom, to the very-top. Completely. Bandaids-on-broken-bones hides nothing, & never has.
( I’m saying this as a guy who quit trying to get his grade-11, after 5 attempts, many many years ago, because of the intellectual-dishonesty of the “education”.
IF you show me evidence that an electron microscope can do 7-million magnification, and you have a handout that says it can only do 1-million, and THEN you dock my test-score for putting 7-million as the magnification of the things, you can go eat rocks.
And yes, I know that scanning/tunneling electron microscopes are waaaay higher in resolution than a mere 7-million magnification.
We autistics have NO tolerance for intellectual-dishonesty-that-is-“right”-because-established-authority.
Fuck institutional gaslighting. )
_ /\ _
Susan Pinker is a great writer.
Tbh death penalty for people spreading disinformation on the charter. IDC we did away with the death penalty, bring it back just for this. EDIT: yeah that joke was in poor taste.
Corporations continue to infringe on our rights and freedoms every day and get away with it with a slap on the wrist or a fine, so of course canadians wouldn’t bother to memorize this I hardly blame them given how absolutely and thoroughly inept our regulatory bodies and politicians are.
Which parts of the Charter are corporations continuing to infringe on?
They can’t do so directly, of course, because it doesn’t apply to them. They can be an indirect factor in that privatizing anything that was formerly a government responsibility takes it out from under the protection of the Charter (and corporations will certainly push for privatization if they feel it’s worth their while). They can also clog the courts required for the Enforcement section of the Charter with unrelated cases, although I don’t know if this is a significant cause of legislative backlog at the moment.
(I’m just polaying devil’s advocate, of course—the person you’re responding to likely doesn’t realize what rights are specifically in the Charter and was too lazy to look it up, even though the full text is on-line and it isn’t a very long document.)
Doubly ironic that the specific topic of this post is that many people don’t know what is included in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
