(PEN Canada/IFEX) – The following is a 20 February 2003 PEN Canada media release: PEN Canada marks Freedom to Read Week with protests to Bill C-20 and to ongoing book seizures by Canada Customs The freedom to read is fundamental, as Canadians officially acknowledge every year with Freedom to Read Week, celebrated this year February […]
(PEN Canada/IFEX) – The following is a 20 February 2003 PEN Canada media release:
PEN Canada marks Freedom to Read Week with protests to Bill C-20 and to ongoing book seizures by Canada Customs
The freedom to read is fundamental, as Canadians officially acknowledge every year with Freedom to Read Week, celebrated this year February 23-28. But this freedom is predicated on another, the freedom to create, without which the freedom to read becomes a weak, watery thing.
PEN Canada marks Freedom to Read Week (February 23-38, 2003) by protesting Bill C-20 — an Act to amend the Criminal Code (protection of children and other vulnerable persons) currently before the House of Commons, as a direct and serious attack on the freedom to create.
In a letter sent today to the Minister of Justice, Martin Cauchon, and the Minister of National Revenue, Elinor Caplan, PEN Canada also protests ongoing seizures of book shipments to Little Sister’s Book and Art Emporium.
PEN Canada’s concerns about Bill C-20
Scrapping the artistic merit defence
By replacing the extant artistic merit defence against charges of child pornography with an as-yet-undefined concept of public good, Bill C-20 casts its net far too wide in its well-intentioned attempt to prevent the abuse of children, leaving the Criminal Code, if amended as proposed in Bill C-20, open to ludicrous misuse.
“Irrelevant motives” could allow for confiscation of family photos
With the further traditional common law stipulation that “the motives of an accused are irrelevant,” the bill could, for instance, allow the confiscation of any family album with photos of the bear-rug variety, and the prosecution of family photographers.
Right of harmless creation infringed
PEN Canada is also concerned that the wording of the bill captures, with its overly broad net, both adults who create work for their own use, and teens between the ages of 14 (the legal age of sexual consent) and 18 (the age beyond which there are no restrictions on sexual representations) who choose to make various sorts of records of their own legal sexual activity. Whereas the right of 15-year-olds to videotape themselves having sex is hardly a rallying point, we do not think that doing it, if the 15-year-old decides to, should be actionable.
PEN Canada’s concerns about ongoing book seizures by Canada Customs
Customs officers continue to seize books despite Supreme Court ruling
Although the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in 2000 in the case of Vancouver’s Little Sister’s bookstore that Canada Customs must prove within 30 days that any seized imported book, magazine, or video is obscene, the seizures by Canada Customs have not ceased, nor been justified nor consistent. In its decision, the Supreme Court reversed the onus of proof of the material not being obscene from the importer to Canada Customs having to prove that it was. As a result of the ongoing books seizures, Little Sister’s will return to court in a continuation of its old fight against censorship.
Writers’, booksellers’ and readers’ loss of freedoms
Finally, PEN Canada is extremely concerned about the effect on writers, bookstores and readers of having work so arbitrarily withheld. These detentions and seizures result in Canadians losing their freedom to read the works of these artists and to be exposed to some works of art, affecting our fundamental freedom of expression.
