> https://www.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/xa9j3x/church_
to get
> Sorry, this post has been removed by the moderators of r/nottheonion.
> Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster's ICBC pirate hat fight deepens
If you think that about reddit mods, I can only imagine how you feel about HN.
Many drivers are worse alcohol-free than a legally drunk good driver.
Focussing on one cause of bad driving (lots of alcohol) is a weak approach to road safety.
They're also not a solution to road safety, they just address one category. Overall road safety comes from a complete reversal of car-dependance along with improvements to road design.
I was just wondering about these (in the US) the other day. When I was growing up, I seem to remember them being a thing and going through them as a passenger but in 20+ years of driving, including on NYE/July 4 and late at night, I've never come across one.
Are there still states doing these?
I think there are demographics that have different experiences than mine, especially when there's a dog involved (who can provide any excuse necessary:)
In Australia I've been stopped many dozens of times for a "random breath test" where they stop every car and make you blow into the device to check blood alcohol.
I've never had one take more than 30 seconds.
America's a big place, there's a very wide range of things that law enforcement do in it.
I’m pretty sure Canadian DUI checkpoints are limited to interrogations about alcohol/drug intoxication unless something else is offered/observed.
Supreme Court basically agreed that they are warrantless and detainments without reasonable suspicion, but considered them acceptable for the purposes of preventing drunk driving so that’s all the carve out it for.
Which in effect means that they are unlimited. They make wide use of drug detecting dogs. If a drug dog indicates you might have contraband, that allows further intervention. It is widely known that drug dogs can , worst case, be trained to hit when a hit is not present. Best case they have a bond with their handlers that tells them that the handler wants there to be a hit, whether the handler consciously conveys that or not. This increases the odds that there will be a hit.
Drug dogs are basically a override-the-law get you into jail free card, and any system that allows them as evidence of probable cause basically does not require probable cause.
I don’t know about K9 units, but I’ve never seen one anywhere in Canada, except maybe at an airport once.
I saw the principal come into the class I was in and point out a specific kid that she wanted searched.
The distrust of authority that I learned from that experience is without a doubt the greatest lesson I ever got in high school.
Police dogs manufacturing search warrants is more of an American problem than a Canadian problem.
You might have more rights on paper in the US, but in many respects, you have more of them in practice in Canada. The letter of the law matters way less than how the law is implemented in practice. Public culture, legal culture, political culture, and policing culture all play into this.
The right to bear arms is enshrined in the constitution, yet there's no shortage of people who have been executed for 'reaching for an (often imaginary) gun' during a 'routine traffic stop' that, oddly enough, predominantly targets minorities...
And speaking as someone who has lived or worked in a couple of those countries: it ain't all rainbows and cupcakes.
Denmark ain't exactly crazy about foreigners, plus there was just an article here about how ruthless they are with data surveillance. There isn't a huge market, jobs are tight, and "tall poppy syndrome" is a thing -- which is a problem for the HN wannabe-tech-mogul crowd. They're not the most open people -- kind, nice, polite -- but also closed off; its not easy to make friends. They're not crazy about immigrants, and there is very much a "for us, by us" mentality; high immigration in Sweden is, like in much of Europe, not popular with large segments of the population.
Outside of some cultural artifacts like Rugbrod or the Copenhagen obsession with fermenting every kind of food, there isn't much you can't get in Canada. Slightly less fat, slightly better dressed, and the English was often better.
7.5% of people in Denmark are foreign born, which isn’t as high as Canada’s 23%, but isn’t that far from the USA’s 13%.
In Canada the government unilaterally suspended the constitution (because that's a thing over there?) in the 70's for mailbox bombings. It was later revealed that the feds were behind these [0]. They did it again to shut down peaceful demonstrations against covid restrictions, where the protesters setup a bouncy castle close to the parliament. So I'm not sure about having more rights "in practice".
> The right to bear arms is enshrined in the constitution, yet there's no shortage of people who have been executed for 'reaching for an (often imaginary) gun' during a 'routine traffic stop' that, oddly enough, predominantly targets minorities...
Well, in Canada minorities found out the hard way what happens when only the cops (and criminals) have guns [1]. Not sure either of those are better.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_controversies_involvin...
It didn't seem like anyone needed to suspend the constitution to firebomb a neighbourhood in Philadelphia in 1985, either. 250 completely uninvolved people were left homeless by that. Go back a bit further in time, and discover that both countries were perfectly fine with running internment camps.
It frankly doesn't matter what the law says. What matters is how it is applied in practice.
PS. The constitution was suspended not for the mailbox bombings, but during the October crisis, when a cabinet minister was kidnapped and murdered by a secessionist terrorist group. You did a sleight of hand on unaware readers by portmanteauing the two events together.
Also, the CORAF (the 'constitution') was only adopted in '82, a decade after the crisis.
They should certainly not be able to avoid prosecutions because "woops we decided that, on that particular day we'll just ignore the constitution". You can't build a truly free country without the rule of law.
The War Measures Act was invoked in October 1970, replaced with the Public Order act in November 1970, which expired in April 1971.
The fed-created bombing attempt was in 1974. Unless the RCMP has a time machine, I don't think the invocation of the WMA or the POA can be blamed on Robert Samson.
> They should certainly not be able to avoid prosecutions because "woops we decided that, on that particular day we'll just ignore the constitution".
The US has invoked martial law 68 times in its history, 29 of them for a labour[1] dispute (The WMA has only been invoked three times, and the Emergencies act, which references the trucker case has only been involved once).
The mechanism for just deciding to ignore the constitution is very similar in both countries[2], but one of them has invoked it a lot more frequently. And, as mentioned a few posts above, government repression doesn't even need any invocation of such acts.
[1] With that frequency, it should be pretty clear as to who the government sees as its real enemy.
[2] In the US, the 2007 National Defense Authorization act even gave this power directly, and unilaterally, to the President, but it did get overturned in 2008. Now, it's largely in the unilateral hands of state governors.
They were caught in 1974. That doesn't mean (and Samson's testimony corroborated that) they didn't plant bombs or fake threats before. Ted Bundy wasn't caught the first time he murdered someone.
> but it did get overturned in 2008.
Thankfully, some still read the constitution.
> Thankfully, some still read the constitution.
Did you miss the second part of this equation, where martial law is still a thing, it can still be declared by state governors, and will happily suspend your rights?
The only thing that happened in 2007 and 2008 was a change to who can declare it.
They apparently got a confession from the alleged murderer (of course, one might question a confession obtained while the suspect's constitutional rights were suspended) but couldn't even place him at the scene of the murder.
And let's be honest, once you admit to planting evidence, there's not a lot of credibility left...
> How far down does this conspiracy theory go, exactly?
People said the same thing about the lab leak hypothesis back in 2020.
> The only thing that happened in 2007 and 2008 was a change to who can declare it.
As with any law, let's see if it stands the test of courts.
> And let's be honest, once you admit to planting evidence, there's not a lot of credibility left...
The most likely and obvious conclusion of this is that they got the wrong guy for the murder, not that they killed him.
> People said the same thing about the lab leak hypothesis back in 2020.
'People' also say smoking doesn't cause cancer, marijuana causes reefer madness, and that Bigfoot is real. 'People' believe and say all sorts of stupid things. You're going to need a better argument.
> As with any law, let's see if it stands the test of courts.
The application of martial law in the US has already stood the test of 68 invocations. How many more invocations are you going to need before you are convinced of the basic fact that the US constitution can and has been suspended during states of emergency?
And you're pointing fingers at Canada for invoking the WMA three times, and the Emergencies act once? [1]
This is a completely ridiculous double standard. Please open your eyes.
[1] When the Canadian CORAF has explicit, clear provisions for when those kinds of acts can be invoked, and by whom?
"No, your honor, we planted evidence on a different black man. No this one we really did find evidence. Just trust us".
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and all you have is... Well, not even any circumstantial evidence, it's just conjecture.
Generally speaking in the US, the rights you have in practice (as opposed to on paper) are determined by how wealthy you are. Much like how we have the best health care in the world if you're wealthy, but the worst (among wealthy nations) if you aren't.
Fun fact: Most police "drug dogs" you see in public are actually normal dogs, because "drug dogs" are quite expensive and can only be put to service for a limited time (and they stress out with lots of noise and people). But if the people think the dog is a drug dog, then their reaction is often telling enough.
(but I don't know, if they do this in canada to get the "allows further intervention", but this is usually a grey area anyway)
Here what matters in court is, have drugs been found. If the cops think someone looks suspicious enough, they can search him. And if drugs were found, than this is all that matters in court, because obviously the cops were right with their suspicion if something was found. I don't see how that evidence could be challenged in court?
(No one said, that the dog is a drug dog. People just assume it and the police uses that assumption)
That is entirely incorrect. German law follows a similar structure to the United States regarding the admissibility of evidence that was collected improperly. Evidence obtained in violation of the law, particularly by infringement of the privacy of the home or person, may be excluded from the trial if the violation is deemed to have a significant impact on the reliability of the evidence. The standard of probable cause in German law is known as "concrete indications of a specific criminal offense" (konkrete Anhaltspunkte für eine bestimmte Straftat). It requires officials to have concrete indications that a specific criminal offense has been committed or is about to be committed before they can conduct a search or seizure.
Still, in case of the dog: it would be interesting, if there was a case about it, as I am very sure of the practice in reality.
Police will do, what works and with what they can get away. Most people will just comply when the police tells them to open their pockets (note that they don't have to articulate it as an order, the same if police comes to your door without a warrant and they ask if they can come in) assuming the police has the right. (and drug addicts usually do not have a lawer).
I don't know if it would hold up in court as a justification for searching, that a person looked nervous because of a police dog as the person just could have fear of dogs in general, so they likely would avoid it.
(Also, if you happen to live within 30 km of a nation border like me, then police (Zoll) can search pockets and cars all the time without concrete indications. So they could use this tactic without problems, but I have never seen the Zoll doing it, but the normal police in the cities)
Not just BC. ON, too.
No, this is only true for the most basic plans (called Autoplan). For anything beyond this, eg third-party liability, collision, comprehensive, etc., you can buy private insurance or go with ICBC for those plans too if you want.
> mitigation of indirect damage caused by drivers
But, private insurance covers that.
> through public services
Examples?
It is a start. But there is one guarantee, driver hate paying for what they use.
I'll grant you that this is anecdata, but if there are any public opinion polls demonstrating that ICBC is doing what it's doing with an actual consent of the governed, I'd love to see them.
(Elections don't satisfy this because people effectively vote on many different issues as a batch, so a few hot-button issues can dominate everything else in practice, making it impossible to interpret the outcome as a mandate for a particular policy unless it was one of those hot-button issues.)
Anyway, you can pretty sure simply analyse this with the business data.
If you make a poll you'll just poll for the public sentiment. And frankly "the tax is too damn high" can be heard everywhere pretty much regardless of the taxes.
When I moved to BC, my rate didn't change by much. But the rest of the experience got worse. For starters you had to go into an office for everything. In my case, it took a few times to get it right. They screwed up my license and insurance twice - things like name, address, etc. (In one case a field in their database was blank that a future agent said shouldn't have been possible not to populate... go figure).
Next they gave me incorrect information. They tried to tell me I had to buy an extra add-on for my liability coverage to carry over when driving in the US - which is dead wrong if you actually read the policy. I got into a 40-minute argument that wound up being me vs. every single employee in the office (they all wandered over to see what was going on). In the end we all called ICBC-central together - it took two escalations to finally get someone who knew what they were talking about who could authoritatively confirm I was correct and all the agents in the office were wrong. They were all stunned; the one I was dealing with said "Wow, I've been selling that package to everybody who comes in and nearly none of them need it!"
Years later I tried to make a comprehensive claim for ~$7k worth of damage related to a freak weather event. The ICBC-central agent said "don't even bother to file a claim, it won't be covered". Some time later I was chatting with my old Ontario broker who said it was a no-brainer and would have been 100% covered under my old plan. (In retrospect I should have sent in the claim anyway and put up a fight... but I just didn't have the time - was doing lucrative consulting, and it made more financial sense to spend the time on billable hours than wasting it on that).
Over the years they've made many more mistakes and generally drive me nuts. At least compared to the two different companies I used for insurance during the years I spent in Ontario. Again anecdotally, most of my neighbours haven't any good things to say about them either.
One silver lining of the pandemic is it finally forced ICBC to put a process in place for doing renewals over a combination of phone and email. Still not as convenient as in Ontario, but at least it's an improvement.
I still fail to understand why BC thinks they need their own government-run insurance provider. This is a solved problem in the rest of the world.
Regarding the ICBC add-on for US liability… aren’t all ICBC policies exclusively sold by independent brokers? If true then wouldn’t that have been an independent broker who was mistaken and ICBC proper cleared it up?
It is now:
Hey u/misanthrope2327, thanks for contributing to r/nottheonion. Unfortunately, your post was removed as it violates our rules:
Rule 2 - Sorry, but this story isn't oniony.
There has been a lot of pushback to DUIs. I did a poli-sci BA thesis on it. Essentially its one of the few times they make exception to constitutional rights, and assume guilt without due process.
A fairly deep explanation of what I'm talking about, and why states like WA gave up on it:
As an observer of the process, they definitely have an impact. You can see people spot the checkpoint and then peel off to the nearest onramp / off-street where they then get picked up by the special checkpoint designed to ask some questions of people willing to cross medians to avoid a standard checkpoint.
It's impressive to see how omnipresent the government is everyday life in Canada, often via these state sponsored entities with bizarre ties to the government.
Alcohol sales are handled by government-owned stores (because it takes the government's unique expertise to run a liquor store?). Dairy products are subject to production quotas administered by the government, and excess production has to be destroyed (it is illegal to compete and lower your prices!). Car insurance is done through the state run monopoly so you can't shop around for rates. Health is handled by a single player, so you have no say in which providers you are assigned to (if you get one at all, they can deny coverage with year long wait times but you are still on the hook for the tax bill!). The country's largest broadcaster is state owned and operated, with journalists on government payroll reporting on... the government! Say the right thing and you might even land yourself a cushy government job [0]
Government run car insurance only exists in two or three provinces. It’s the exception, not the rule.
The CBC is not “on government payroll”. It’s run independently but government funded. If you’ve got significant evidence of political parties interfering in the CBC’s reporting I’d love to hear it.
I’m not sure why you singled out Canadas first black, female, Governor General as being a problem. The GG’s role is a ceremonial, public facing, non-political role that perfectly suits someone well known who’s adept at public speaking. She’s not even the first former journalist to get the posting. Others were famous astronauts, military heroes or business leaders.
While there’s some truth in what you say (health care is in a real pickle, the dairy board is just bizarre) the rest is textbook right-wing propaganda.
The ICBC has a literal state sponsored monopoly over car insurance, titling a vehicle and driver licensing, whereas in the US no state handles car insurance, while titling a vehicle and driver licensing are not necessarily the same state organizations.
This state sponsored vertical integration enables abuse of authority in cases like https://www.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/xa9j3x/church_...
Whereas here in the US I know many people that mix and match between different states DOLs and DORs for a variety of reasons, and your not going to get stuck with the same stubborn employee who can control every facet of your ability to identify yourself and also legally drive a vehicle on the road.
The DUI checkpoints up in BC are wild too, I'm glad they are banned in Washington and Oregon. Suspicionless stopping of cars en masse followed by interrogation by police seems like an overreach.