How Lambda broke public health rules and won in court
How Lambda broke public health rules and won in court
It’s Wednesday. Here are some deer who were downtown yesterday. Let’s get into it:
John Brink is building a 66,000 square foot warehouse. He’s pretty bullish on the idea that Prince George is going to be a major shipping centre with plans to build one million square feet of warehouses in the next five years, with plans to service them to Amazon and other delivery companies connected to CN Rail and the ever-growing Port of Prince Rupert. He talked about it in his podcast here just after the 35 minute mark.
Before he was elected mayor, Simon Yu was a working engineer. According to documents obtained by the Citizen, he was involved in 23 different projects being built or considered in the city from which he has now had to recuse himself from future council decisions on whether they be allowed to proceed.
Just picking up on reporting from Monday’s council meeting that’s more organized than what I had in the newsletter yesterday: Council to go ahead with B.C. government agency meetings, despite debate on timing and Prince George’s tree protection bylaw to be reviewed.
It seems that Meeting Mr. Christmas, the other Christmas movie filmed in Prince George I wrote about last week, is now available on Apple TV.
How Lambda broke public health rules and won in court
Last week I wrote about the case of Lambda Cabaret, which had somehow managed to openly and repeatedly violate public health orders around vaccinations, masking and gathering and yet had the tickets in that case dismissed by a judge.
Well, the CBC’s Jason Proctor got his hands on the recordings from the trial and is able to give more insight into what happened:
The first hint the Crown might have trouble winning its case against a nightclub accused of posting videos on social media of patrons flouting COVID-19 restrictions came when the judge overseeing the proceedings asked what Facebook was.
Things just went downhill from there.
What unfolds is a judge who will not accept evidence gathered via social media because Facebook accounts can be hacked. So even though Lambda posted things like "Open with zero mandates 2 weekends in a row," and videos from inside the club where rules were being violated, that didn’t "come anywhere close to proving beyond a reasonable doubt that this particular bar was open," according to the judge.
Other evidence is likewise dismissed, such as health officers testifying they saw people going inside the club without masks on because they didn’t record the time it happened, or the fact that health orders were ripped down because anyone could have done so.
It probably doesn’t help that Northern Health didn’t have a lawyer representing them, instead relying on an environmental health officer who was repeatedly schooled on how evidence works, but at the same time it’s quite something to see how public health rules can be so publicly and openly violated.
All of that said, the dismissal of these tickets had previously been touted by Lambda in a way that could lead people to believe the judge ruled because the public health orders violated human rights. They didn’t. They ruled this way because they didn’t believe Northern Health had strong enough evidence to try the case. Some interesting insight into our justice system.
You can — and should — read the whole thing here.
Another Prince George newsletter writer moves on
Matt Scace announced yesterday that he has left the Prince George Post for a job with the Calgary Herald. The Post hasn’t been around long but has quickly established its own space within the local media ecosystem. We’re lucky to have so many reporters in a city of this size — certainly, I rely on them for giving you the links we have here every day — so best of luck to him.
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