Hey Dundonald Park advocates, throw us a bone!

Trash can at the corner of McLaren & Bay St. Photo Credit: Jim Davies

I recently read Dorian Panchyson's article in the Centretown Buzz about a community effort to revitalize Dundonald Park. I think the first place to start is to change the way dogs and, de facto,  dog owners, are treated in the park. Dog owners, as well as tai chi practitioners, people enjoying a sunny day on a park bench, homeless people, bocci players, chess players and daily commuters use this park on a regular basis.  Dundonald Park is an oasis of neighbourly-ness in the urban core that has few greenspaces. Since becoming a dog owner in 2008, I consistently look forward to walking my dog, Mrs. Wiggles, to meet up with fellow dog walkers and passers-by; many of whom have become friends of mine.

Mrs. Wiggles in February 2011. Photo Credit: Sean Toomey. Throw the dog a bone and give  her a place to walk or run freely. And maybe another little boot.

However, the tone established in the park is one of prohibition. I think it's in the same spirit as the Safe Streets Act, which attempts to overregulate public space for the elusive goal of "protecting the public".

Observe and Report! The world is clearly going to the dogs! Photo credit: Vanessa Davies; courtesy of  ottawa.ca

At each corner of the park, there is a trashcan marked "Do not deposit dog waste here." I appreciate the City of Ottawa's effort to clean up the park, but I think the plan is aimed at the wrong end, so to speak. I think the internal logic is that if people are prohibited from disposing their trash, they won't bring their dogs here. The evidence (twice daily walks to the park 10 months of the year) dictates the plan is a failure, because lots of people walk their dog and pick up after it. Frankly, I think the prohibition on depositing dog waste aims to punish the few owners who neglect to pick up after their pet, but in fact punishes us all unfairly and makes us feel unwelcome in our local park. It also raises the question, "if not in the only 4 trash receptacles in the park, where else do I deposit the waste of the loyal animal for whom I care and who I consider part of my family?" I ignore the ban and simply put the trash in the receptacle because to leave it on the ground would be illegal and unethical; to carry it several blocks would be unreasonably onerous. There need to be more trashcans downtown anyways, so discouraging people to use the ones that are there turns the City's aim of "cleaning the capital" on its head.

So, please, throw us a bone by taking down the prohibition signs on the trashcans, installing more trash cans - if they're not being installed because they're unsightly, then get a sculptor like Theo Pelmus to design them and make them into functional public art - before we pave paradise and put up another parking lot.

Access Denied: "Migration, 'Illegality', and Health: Mapping Embodied Vulnerability and Debating Health-Related Deservingness."

My acquaintances at Access Denied have a special issue this month: "Migration, 'Illegality', and Health: Mapping Embodied Vulnerability and Debating Health-Related Deservingness."

The Table of Contents for this interdisciplinary guest-edited collection is pasted below, and the full volume is accessible online athttp://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/02779536.


Congratulations, and please circulate widely.

Black History Month

My friend who is living in London and completing her PhD at LSE saw these in Walgreens recently. On the one hand, one could say that this was unconscious racism; on the other this was probably an oversight and a thoughtless, inconsiderate act rather than a malicious one. Slavery, racism, apartheid - these are travesties that ravage human history, and recent ones, too. They are also fresh wounds for some people on a daily basis. In the spirit of Black History month, let us work on challenging and vanquishing our prejudices, but also on vanquishing thoughtlessness and inconsideration.

First Conference Paper Accepted

I was notified yesterday that my submission, "Enforcing a Reasonable Expectation of Privacy in Public: Online disclosure and contextual integrity", was accepted to the Windsor Review of Legal and Social Issues' Canadian Law Students' Conference. The paper highlights fault lines between values of government transparency and personal privacy using the examples from the Prop 8 debate in California and the harassment of BNP supporters in the UK. It then argues that violating the contextual integrity of material posted online in such a way as to incite harassment falls within hate crime or human rights legislation and should be prosecuted accordingly, rather than inventing new laws to deal with technology that facilitates this kind of behaviour. 


The conference will be held March 15-16 in Windsor, ON, and I am looking forward to presenting my ideas.

New experiences, brighter futures

It has been 9 months since my last post. It was not a result of being too busy or neglectful or unstimulated, but the result of doing client work that required me to keep a lower profile. As a law student I am bound by solicitor-client privilege and regulated by the Law Society of Upper Canada.

The January semester was one of discovery for me. I discovered the thrill of international trade law. I took a 3 week course in International Trade Negotiation taught by the Centre for Trade Law and Policy housed in Carleton University. The first two weeks of the course covered substantive trade in goods and services as well as negotiation techniques. The last week involved a simulation with students at the University of the West Indies in Cave Hill, Barbados. I had heard about the course in December 2010 and saved my summer earnings and successfully registered by lottery in July. I took my friend, Alicia, who is not a law student and we stayed at the Almond Beach Club and Spa in St. James, a mere 8 minute bus ride (on a yellow, calypso-blaring bus - awesome way to start the morning!) to the University.

Jeanelle Clarke, Alicia Breck and Vanessa Davies after the negotiation

There have been a few TED talks that have resonated with me over the Fall semester and I crystallized their messages during this negotiation. The most influential was Sheryl Sandberg's talk about too few women leaders. Because of her, I consciously decided to "sit at the table" and "keep my hand raised". I was the only person on my team, the CARICOM (stands for Caribbean Community, a single market economic trading area) team, to put my candidacy forward for Chief Negotiator. Because I did so, my team sensed my leadership skills and unanimously supported me. The course was largely female-dominated and there are distinct social tensions that arise with female leaders. I eschewed them by supporting my teammates' ideas, listening supportively, giving credit where it was due, keeping them part of any strategizing I did and commending them at the end of each of the four days we were together. As a result, we worked better together which enabled us to make significant gains in our negotiation against the team representing Canada. I also employed similar strategies when dealing with the other Chief Negotiator, which defused tensions that arose in the plenary sessions. I was straightforward with concerns, we shared personal stories, I was not afraid to ask questions or seek clarification. It became apparent to me that "Canada's" Chief Negotiator was on our side and could meet many of our needs if we were to frame it creatively. So I went back to my team having cultivated trust on both sides in order to brainstorm better solutions.

CARICOM Ambassador and negotiation coaches in the classroom at UWI Cave Hill, Barbados

This was an incredible learning experience: I gained experience managing people, creating and pursuing a vision, learning which negotiating tactics to avoid and employ, and balancing priorities in our mandate. Representing the underdog in a negotiation is an upward battle, but by employing the right tactics we made significant gains. On the last day of the negotiation, we presented our Economic Development Agreement to the Ambassador of CARICOM and their Agriculture representative. They took notes and asked excellent questions about how we pitched and balanced our priorities. They were impressed with the overall structure of the agreement. Real life free trade negotiations between Canada and CARICOM are stalled, and CTPL and the Department of Foreign Affairs have asked the students to report back about our creative solutions and problem solving skills. We all learned so much in a short week and I have emerged with new friends and colleagues. Here is a press release about the Economic Development Agreement we concluded.

Hey, Rapunzel, what's your Facebook (TM) status?

California is considering a bill that would give parents access to their children's Facebook (TM) pages. From the article, I think there are more weaknesses than strengths to the proposed bill. I agree that the security settings should default to most secure. I have a list of weaknesses however. 

First, parents would supposedly have to ask Facebook to remove content only and it appears to only deal with text, not photos or apps (personally, the idiotic apps and comments my eleven year old cousin disseminates reflect more ridiculously than her atrociously spelled updates). Would the override extend to the "Account" in addition to the "Page"? Could a parent be able to manipulate more than just content? There is also no mention of whether or how the parent's reach would change once the child would become of age, whether Facebook monitors the child's coming of age, or whether the content is completely destroyed or merely cached & stored on a FB server (potentially outside the parent's own jurisdiction, ie California). Facebook also sounds like it would be surrendering its proprietary rights over the posted content to parents, which is inconsistent (and unfair) to the proprietary rights it maintains over other users' content. Finally, there does not seem to be a mechanism (other than charging someone with fraud) to prevent one from posing as a parent to gain access to another's Facebook page.

This raises interesting questions about Lisa Austin's individual right to self-presentation (Austin 2010)* as well as invasions of privacy and trespass. As we've seen, torts of invasion of privacy are recognized in some circumstances and not others and court orders impeding accessing an individual's Facebook page have been upheld. I think it may be recognized in this case, although the arguments for child safety may stymie them. I think some of the comments make good points about the need to be an involved parent, but one who doesn't need to rely on indirect channels to parent their kids. What I do find troubling is the automatic assumption that children deserve reduced privacy. I come from the perspective that treating kids with dignity, respect and integrity ensures positive communication that would render moot the need for asking Facebook for more control. I guess I also think that the steps taken depend on the age of the child/adolescent. 

Photo credit: Rapunzel in the castle from Johnny Gruelle's illustration for the Gutenberg Project, Wikimedia Commons 2011. The image is fitting because Rapunzel was trapped by her witch-mother in a castle and told the world was a scary place to be and that the only person she could trust was her controlling mother. Unfalsifiable, clearly.

* Lisa Austin, "Privacy and the Private Law: The Dilemma of Justification," (2010) 55 McGill L J 165 at 203.

Summarizing history

On February 10th, I volunteered to report on history as it unfolded in an Ontario Superior Court of Justice courtroom on a freezing cold Ottawa afternoon.

The Canadian Centre for International Justice (CCIJ) canvassed the University listserv for volunteers to follow and report on the Mungwarere Trial. Jacques Mungwarere was charged with committing genocide during the Rwandan Genocide. He was located near Windsor, ON, in 2009. Following the prosecution of Desire Munyaneza, he is the second person to be prosecuted in Canada under the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act (Department of Justice).

The first week was an intense week of procedural motions and on Monday, February 11th, the Crown was scheduled to move for an indictment. It was an exciting opportunity to witness the practice of international law firsthand and to apply (and learn the French equivalents of) some of the legal terms I learned over the last few months. Students listened to the proceedings in pairs and then prepared a summary. It was a great learning and mentoring opportunity that also enabled me to contribute to the CCIJ's important work.