Ottawa Delay

January 7, 2010 permalink

In the provincial offence prosecution of Ottawa children's aid by John Dunn, CAS again pulled out its favorite weapon: delay. The matter has been adjourned to February 11.

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Thursday, January 07, 2010

CAS Charges - 1st Appearance - Adjourned Feb 11, 2010

Note: The Pros and Cons of this Outcome so far

• Cons: CAS Not Held Accountable for illegal activity yet again
• Pros: Letter gets to members at no cost to requestor (think fifty+ photo-copies of two or more page letter, stamps, envelopes etc.)

Society counsel appeared at court today for first appearance on the charges against them and their Executive Director Barbara MacKinnon under the Corporations Act. Once at court, Society counsel requested to speak to the Crown regarding the matter. The Crown invited John Dunn into the room as well in order to ensure fairness of the process to all parties.

CAS Counsel finally discussed their reason for why they are choosing to violate the provision of the Corporations Act which enables any person to request a list of the members by refusing to furnish the list. The reason stated by Society counsel was that they feel John Dunn would use the list of members to bombard them with e-mails which are unrelated to the actual purpose for the request because of the fact that he has had continuous communications with the Society on many issues.

John Dunn clarified the fact that he has sworn an affidavit to only use the list for purposes connected with the Corporation as allowed under the Act and only for that one purpose each time a request is legally made and that the members are protected by law from him abusing the use of that list.

John Dunn's ultimate purpose in requesting the list is not just to have the list itself, but for the purpose of communicating with the members so that he can ask them to call a meeting of the Board members to vote on a by-law amendment.

Since this is, and always has been John Dunn's intended and expressed purpose for requesting the list of the Society's members as opposed to just prosecuting the Society for violating the Act, regardless of how much John Dunn feels the Society should be prosecuted for this violation of the Act, a long discussion was held for the purpose of letting Society counsel go back to his client (the Society) for the purpose of obtaining instruction as to whether they will again resolve the matter as was done for the similar request in February of 2007.

In that matter, the resolution of the problem was to have the Crown receive the list of members from the Society in the form of pre-printed, postage-paid envelopes with the addresses of all members printed on them, and for John Dunn to send his letter of advocacy to the members.

The letter of advocacy would be sent to the members in the hope of having them agree to request the Board of Directors to call a meeting of the members as allowed under section 295 of the Corporations Act, for the purpose of having them vote on amending the Society's By-Laws to create a new class of members, other than the existing regular and honorary memberships, that would include former wards of that Society, regardless of where they live, so that they can have a legally protected voice in the affairs of the Society since they are the people who lived under it as children and would have an interest in bringing changes to that Society's policies and practices.

The Society's Counsel requested an adjournment of approximately one month to which John Dunn agreed, setting the next appearance at court for the matter to be spoken to as February 11, 2010, 1:30pm in Court room 2010.

Posted by afterfostercare at 3:33 PM

Source: Foster Care News