Cheers! Court Takes Our Side

Can it be that the day of the common man arrived?

Probably not, but a wondrous fine decision has came out of Ottawa from Supreme Court of Canada. Who could imagine anything good coming out of our Supreme Court? Well, it did. The court recently voted nine to zero for our side.

Many of us didn’t expect to see decisions like this from the rulers. We were pathetically but respectfully grateful when Madame Justice Bertha Wilson departed from the court, taking her excessively motherly feelings about criminals with her. True, we still have Madame Justice Dube, who in a recent speech appeared to be proudly announcing a personal bias in favor of homosexuals. Earlier her social activism on the bench had caused a senior Alberta court judge to issue a rare public criticism of a fellow judge. But that’s Madame Dube. She’s only one judge and even she must have been among the nine voting on this occasion.

Lest you overlooked it, the story from Ottawa said that a citizen who has a complaint against a company or a government agency has the right to put up a sign in his yard declaring them to be a bunch of sons of bitches.

Roger Guignard of Ste. Hyacinthe, Quebec, put up a sign in his yard declaring that his insurance company was incompetent. No doubt the insurance company found this offensive, particularly since another insurance company recently paid out a whopping one million dollars punitive damages, an unheard of award, for bad service to one of its customers. But it wasn’t the insurance company which went to law with a libel action against Mr. Guignard but the city fathers of Ste.Hyacinthe. They found his sign distasteful and prosecuted him for it all the way up to the highest court in the land, where they got their teeth kicked in.

Those judges found that the Ste.Hyacinthe municipal bylaw was trying to rob Mr. Guignard of his right to free speech. Far more important, Mr. Justice Louis LeBel, who wrote the unanimous judgment, tackled head-on the great, horrid flaw in our Charter of Rights. We Canadians now have plenty of rights, but hardly any of us has the money to enforce them in our courts.

An example of consumer helplessness readily at hand is the Telus phone system of which I am, to my intense regret, a customer. I bought the telus.net service for the same reason that the gambler played in the crooked poker game of poker in the mining town. He knew it was crooked, but it was the only game in town.

There are now other phone companies to which one can turn, but Telus is the only one large enough to provide Internet connections in any town of British Columbia or Alberta. Lousy service, but the only service in town.

For the captive consumer, which I am, telus.net exhibits nothing but contempt. It knows its strength and my weakness. Any and all efforts to obtain service can be disregarded by this most powerful of all the western Canadian phone systems.

The Canadian Radio, Television and Telecommunications System of Canada won’t act. It is far too busy--doing what? don’t ask--to pay attention to consumer complaints. They wrote to tell me so a year ago. I cannot afford to hire a lawyer to go up against the kind of legal talent that Telus can afford. To pay $10,000 to argue about a monthly bill of $24.94 is absurd..

However, for less than a grand, I might be able to afford an advertisement somewhere which would hold the Telus company up to hatred, ridicule or contempt, thus inviting them to sue me for libel. Then the legal expenses are theirs instead of mine and in such libel action my defence, ready at hand and all in writing, is truth.

Mine is the familiar consumer dilemma that Mr. Justice LeBel so clearly perceives. The bylaw which prohibited the citizen’s public message of complaint took no account of the fact that consumers may not have the financial resources for court action. If forbidden the alternative of public protest, “...it restricts him to private, or virtually private, communications...” Mr.Guignard could tell his friends about his insurance company’s failings but any effect would pale, milk and water stuff, compared with broadcasting his complaint on a billboard.

Mr. Justice Lebel has raised my spirits several notches. Watch for a billboard in your area soon which holds the Telus company up to hatred, ridicule or contempt.

February/01