The Privilege Lists

Obfuscation-A-Go-Go
RailgateVille

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Update: Thanks to the tireless efforts of private citizen Mr. Robin Mathews, the Railgate Defense Team's voluminous application for disclosure of Jan 4, 2008 has now been made available to the public. Bill Tieleman has posted the entire thing, all 15 pages and 83 points of particulars. Our favorite so far is # 76, which is a request for:

"An Order that the Special Prosecutor provide the witness statement described by the Special Prosecutor as "an interview with a member of the public who provided the RCMP with his opinion of two witnesses on the condition of anonymity".
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When Bill Tieleman and Robin Mathews reported yesterday that George Copely, a lawyer acting on behalf of the executive branch of Gordon Campbell's British Columbia government, announced that 'a number' of documents sought by the defence in the Railgate Trial would be waived from cabinet privilege, we were immediately concerned that some obfuscatory cherrypicking might be going on here.

Specifically, we were concerned about the possibility of a significant difference between the term 'a number' and the term 'all', particularly as they pertain to the entirety of the documents being sought by the defence (especially all of those documents that Judge Bennett has already deemed to be relevant to the question of guilt and/or innocence of the accused).

Well, according to Mark Hume in today's Globe and Mail it appears that our worries of continuing obfuscation may, indeed, be warranted.

Why?

Well, it appears that there is a list of documents that will be waived and a list of documents that will not.

Not be waived, that is:

Kevin McCullough, the lawyer for Mr. Virk, told the court over speaker phone from Victoria that he has lingering concerns about the disclosure process.

"I don't want you to think that everything's fine there," he said.

"No, I didn't think that," Judge Bennett replied.

Mr. McCullough said he is concerned because the Crown initially gave the defence two lists: one of documents that were available for disclosure and one of documents that would not be disclosed.


All of which is troubling enough.

But what is even more egregious, if it is true, is the possibility that there is a third list of ghost documents that are not on either the waived or the unwaived list.

Again, from Mr. Hume's report:

Only later did the defence learn there were relevant documents that didn't appear on either list and it's not yet clear exactly how many documents might have fallen between the cracks.


Finally, Mr. Hume, like us, concludes that even if there are no further delays (ha!) the real trial will not start until June at the earliest.

Sheesh.

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You may be wondering why relied so heavily on Mr. Hume's report. In part it is because Mr. Hume does good work. However, we would once again be remiss if we did not note the dearth of reporting in the rest of Lotuslandia's pro-media on the subject. Then again, this is perhaps not unexpected, what with the all that time and space that had to be filled with stories of green shoes today instead.

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