Warman v Lemire: Round Up of the Round Ups

Jay Currie "Connects the Dots":

And, while we are looking at this, it might be an idea to look a little more closely at the police forces which, apparently, handed over evidence obtained under warrant to “investigators” who a not likely to have been entitled to that evidence. Whether or not there was a Memorandum of Understanding as between a particular police force and the CHRC is irrelevant. If evidence obtained during the course of a criminal investigation is released to a third party a serious abuse of process has occurred.

Covenant Zone has a round up on Warman v Lemire

SoCon or Bust attended Warman v Lemire - his account here.

Jaegar attended yesterdays session - his summary is here at SDA.

Jaeger Highlights Part 1:

Barbara K reads a long testimony by Richard Warman in a previous hearing into the record. I wasn't sure where she was going with this at first and we will have to examine the transcript to be sure I have the details right, but it seemed to chronicle a series of events like this:

1.Warman enters a document into evidence that he claims he printed out Friday, December 8. The document is a printout of a posting that starts with “Welcome, Jadewarr”, indicating the user signed on using that account. (Note that Steacy has claimed he never gave Warman the password for that account).

2.Warman “revises” his testimony that the document “originates from the commission”.

3.Pressed further, Warman says he doesn't know the origin of the document.Finally, she asks Steacy if he knows where the document came from. He replies that Warman came over to the Commission, searched for the post in question and couldn't find it, then signed on using the Jadewarr account, found the post and printed it.

This was one of a series of incidents that displayed a remarkably cozy dance between Warman registering a complaint and the commission prosecuting it, all the while not being very transparent about how close they work with Warman and later, other police forces.

Jaeger Highlights Part 2:

Actually, just one more thing. Towards the end Steacy's “assistant” made a grand show about the information revealed by Bell Canada earlier. A Jadewarr post (a CHRC account) was traced to an IP address owned by a woman entirely unconnected to the CHRC. The chair requested that the woman's identity not be disclosed, and now the CHRC lawyer was complaining about the information being on the internet and the fact that Lemire had been blogging during the day – though stopped just short of accusing him of having disclosed it. The woman insists she had nothing to do with it, but does run a wireless router in her downtown Ottawa appartment.

Since this account was controlled by four or five CHRC employees, I think we can conclude that one of them was attempting to hide their tracks by taking a laptop on the road and jumping on some anonymous access point.

That they are taking active (but ineffective) measures to hide their tracks is certainly disturbing. It certainly makes you wonder what else they're doing that we haven't uncovered yet.

I smell a Golem!

Jay Curry points out the inconsistencies:

Now for those of us following the Warman antics and the weird relationship between Warman and the CHRC this is interesting. Being the complainant and a staffer (or an ex-staffer) presents more than a few challenges management should have been dealing with. And it poses a bit of a contradiction to Dawg’s, I think correct, summary of Stacey’s evidence as being that he did not work with Warman on any file.
It is these small inconsistencies which add up to the capacity, in argument, to discredit both the complainant and the Commission investigation.

Kady O'Malley of MacLeans live blogged from the hearing but is not quite up to speed.

From the National Post:


Jeers and loathing at rights tribunal

...

There were moments of drama, such as when Mr. Steacy bluntly and repeatedly refused to answer a question (he was asked for the identity of an anonymous complainant, who never filed a formal complaint), to the evident shock of Athanasios Hadjis, the one-man tribunal hearing the case.

"You refuse to answer?" he said twice.

...

But, for skeptics of human rights commissions, the coup de grace came when the Tribunal wrongly outed an innocent person as a Commission operative, thus exposing her to the unwanted attention of the vast army of bloggers who support Mr. Lemire, or at least do not support the Canadian Human Rights Commission.
For a government agency that has fought for months to protect the personal security of their own staff, even going so far as to (unsuccessfully) invoke national security to keep them off the witness stand, their handling of the "Nellie Hechme" question was shocking.

...

...The rest

No sign of Lucy The Lizard Queen yet.