It is Getting Bizarre in Canada

by McQ | June 18, 2008 3:08 pm

First we have “hate speech” taking precedence over free speech[1]. And now we have at least one court deciding that it has the right to overrule a father’s discipline[2]:

An appeal will be filed in a Montreal court after a Quebec judge overruled a father who grounded his 12-year-old daughter for dangerous Internet use.

The lawyer for the father, who can’t be identified to protect the girl, told The Gazette newspaper that Justice Suzanne Tessier overstepped the court’s bounds last Friday when she ruled in favor of the girl’s legal challenge and said she would be allowed to go on a school trip her father had forbidden because of misbehavior.

This is simply insane.

For whatever reason, the first question that actually jumped into my mind was what was a 12 year-old doing with a lawyer? That was followed by questioning why a lawyer is involved at all and then wondering how the girl was going to pay the lawyer (my guess is the father will be billed).

Then, of course, I had to wonder why the court even accepted the case. If you read the rest of the story, it appears to be discipline which fits the girl’s misbehavior. Where in the world this judge got the idea she should involve the court in such a dispute, much less overrule the father is beyond understanding.

Were I that particular father, I’d be mightily tempted to load up the misbehaving girl and drop on the judge’s doorstep. As far as I’d be concerned the ruling would give the judge (court) ownership of the problem.

We all express shock and outrage at rulings like this. But this sort of intrusion seems to be becoming much less unusual than in the past, both in Canada and the US. What that portends for the future is not very pleasant to contemplate.