Fresh and Crispy

An accused rapist in Canada has been acquitted in two cases after a judge found one alleged victim to be “combative” on the stand and the other to be unreliable because her timing was off by one hour.

Paul Batchelor, 34, had been facing two counts of sexual assault and two of forcible confinement.

In handing down his decision, Justice Robert Beaudoin sided with the defence’s explanation that the women had requested rough sex. “Consent can be given without a word being spoken,” Beaudoin told the court, as reported by the Ottawa Citizen.

The encounters happened in May and June of 2015. Both women’s names are protected by a publication ban.

Batchelor is still facing three other, separate accusations of rape, to be tried in court next year.

In Friday’s acquittal, Beaudoin also told the court he didn’t believe one of the women’s claims she was too intimidated to say “no” because she had been “combative” while on the stand.

Julie Lalonde, an Ottawa educator and women’s rights advocate, took issue with the judge’s comments.

“The idea that because you get agitated while you’re being cross-examined in a courtroom, that you must be an assertive person 24/7, is a really damaging myth to put out into the world,” said Lalonde.

Continue Reading.

When Justin Trudeau’s government approved the Trans Mountain Pipeline for the second time, he added a new twist — every dollar of profit the project produced, which he pegged as an estimated $500 million a year in new annual corporate tax revenues, would go into green energy projects. It’s a nice thought, but it wont offset the pipeline’s climate damage.

The first problem is the science. According to the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that gave us 12 years to tackle climate change, we need to cut emissions at least in half by 2030. Right now, Canada is falling short— about 109 million tonnes short — of our Paris Agreement climate target to cut emissions by 30 per cent below 2005 levels. So, not only are we on track to miss our target, but our target is far too low.

The reality is that we can’t afford to build new fossil-fuel project like Trans Mountain, a pipeline that would have the same climate impact as adding another 34 million cars to Canadian roads or building 42 new coal-fired power plants every year.

Trudeau’s bargain — that revenue from Trans Mountain will go into green energy projects — won’t actually negate these emissions.  Around one quarter of all of Canada’s emissions come from the oil and gas industry. There’s no putting these emissions back in the ground when you put up a solar panel. And, because we actually export most of the fossil fuels we dig up, as well as their emissions, electrifying transportation in Canada won’t balance the equation, either. To tackle climate change at the scale that science demands, we have to stop expanding the fossil-fuel industry. Period.