I myself frequently grow weary of the nonsense we have to deal with when trying to understand the silliness of what the government did when they decided to play what they thought was a trump card with pro-life people who use freedom of information requests to uncover just how many abortions are done in this province every year and what those pre-natal killings cost tax payers--by simply striking those FOIs that uncovered those abortion numbers off the books once and for all.
Easy peasy. Good-bye you pesky pro-lifers. We don't want you commenting on this any more so we'll just shut you down it's none of your business anyway. Kill democratic rights. Kill transparency. Kill openness. Kill accountability. Kill the babies and make sure nobody knows how many babies are being killed.
They thought they were geniuses.
And as I've shown again and again they have made no sense in anything they've said and argued.
For instance. In this blog entry I talk about how the government's lawyer argued to the judge that there was already "a large body of scholarly works on abortion policy" so that should be good enough and I don't need any other information. Which is nonsense in itself, since that argument is really just about censorship and in a democracy censorship of government information should not be allowed unless safety and security is an issue and in this case safety and security is not the issue even though they say it is. Never mind that the "scholarly work" itself grossly under reports what we're looking for..
In fact if we dig a little deeper into the public document that the government points to, the document that the government says should be enough for me and I don't need FOIs on abortion, we learn something that actually argues against their very own safety and security argument.
It's amazing how you can tie yourself up in knots when your arguments are illogical. And silly.
So what is it in that document that works against their S&S argument? Well it's this. According to abortion doctor Wendy Norman there is "minimal or no harassment" of facilities:
"Facilities reported very little harassment (Table 4). No Canadian facility reported a resignation of an abortion provider–physician or any staff member owing to harassment. Only a single facility reported any resignation of an allied health professional staff member, and in this case the facility specified that the one resignation was not owing to violence, fear, or threats. Similarly, two-thirds of reporting facilities (49 of 74, 66.2%) indicated no episodes of harassment or violence in 2012, with a further 28.4% (21 of 74) reporting solely picketing without interference. Among 7 facilities reporting “other” episodes of harassment, half specified only receipt of harassing e-mail."
Or their argument that hey, we're going to give you information outside of FIPPA all you have to do is ask is ask for it. Right. On Feb 2, I sent an email to Minister Eric Hoskins asking for more data. Three weeks and a half later and I still haven't even received an acknowledgement from the Minister.
Never mind that there is no policies, no gudelines, nothing at all that ensures that they will give us the information. Oh but we do have the word of the government that we can get the information. Well then. That's comforting.
And why don't they want this information to be given to us? Because we might want to defund abortion. Well yes we do but what has that got to do with freedom of expression rights? Nothing.
So what is this bogus safety and security argument anyway? Just one more of the boring silly arguments the government made in an effort to shut down free and open access to information for those pesky pro-lifers who keep asking for information on abortion and the powers that be don't want the public to know so we'll just keep making up silly arguments and wear them down.
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