Sonne Out On Bail

Byron Sonne is finally out on bail (The Star, CBC). The conditions are very strict but some are a little strange. For example, I don't understand why there is a prohibition on contact with his ex-wife, when it has nothing to do with the charges and there's no history of domestic violence. Why prohibit contact with groups with which Sonne has never associated? We won't know why the prosecution required these strange conditions until after the publication ban is lifted, but to me it seems that the prosecution is looking very hard for things that are not there.

Political Prisoner

Read this article about Canada's G20 political prisoner, Byron Sonne. Now ask yourself if you feel safer that he has been in custody for almost a year. In fact, the whole fiasco makes me even more uneasy because it suggests the security establishment is unable to distinguish real threats from false ones. That scares me because they used Sonne as a way to justify the security theatre by catching someone whether he represented a danger or not.

The more recent charge of "counselling to commit mischief not committed" is equally disturbing because, essentially, it turned the basic freedom of speech into a crime. When this charge was laid earlier this year, this happened in Zimbabwe. If one excludes the torture, which thankfully is not standard procedure in Canada (I'm sure some police wish it was), the rationale of the security forces is disturbingly similar. I did not refer to Sonne as a "political prisoner" for the sake of hyperbole.