Alberta Justice has been caught with its pants down again. After its embarrassing failure to prosecute me for the grave crime of waving a walking cane in the air as I yelled at (alleged) vandals to get off my property, I filed Freedom of Information (FOI) requests with Justice Alberta to obtain the documents involved in my case. I wanted to look under the hood to see if there was evidence of what I suspect: that the police and prosecutors targeted me because of my public profile and political activities. After the investigating police officers on the scene found that nothing had happened, how is it that some other cop — Lindsay Audibert — who wasn't there and had never interviewed me, decided to come after me weeks later? Why was my case (a severely injured man waving a cane at alleged vandals) given top-priority for the prosecution over rapists and robbers?And even after they lost, they appealed, and they lost again. .That's an awful lot of legal firepower for a case that was self-evidently fictional to anyone with an understanding of the files.It also stinks, and so I filed FOIs to look under the hood, to which they refused to release a single scrap of paper.The government invoked 11 sections of the FOIP Act to do so.On a few points, they may or may not be justified, but it's impossible to tell without first seeing the documents.Others excuses were flimsy at best, such as protecting third-party information (like the names of the alleged vandals). That kind of thing can be easily rectified by redacting their names and addresses. In fact, that's what the government is supposed to do, and release the rest of the document.In one case, the Alberta government claimed that releasing the documents might "reveal technical information relating to weapons." Do they mean the blueprints for my wooden walking cane, which their evidence claimed was in fact a 12-gauge shotgun? Much to the embarrassment of Crown prosecutor Stephanie Morton, I insisted on entering my 12-gauge walking cane into evidence. Since it was proven in court that there were no weapons involved from beginning to end, it's difficult to fathom what "technical information relating to weapons" they could be referring to..Other dubious reasons Justice Alberta used to refuse the disclosure of my own documents include (but are not limited to), that the documents might:• "harm the security of any property or system, including a building, a vehicle, a computer system or a communications system."• "harm relations between the Government of Alberta or any of its agencies"In some areas, they have a case — such as legally privileged information — but not much. Justice Alberta is abusing exemptions in the FOI Act to prevent the release of possibly embarrassing information about the appropriateness of how they handled this case. Needless to say, I've appealed the denial to the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner. If I win, I should get the information in a year or two. Maybe. .Of course, the Alberta Minister of Justice Mickey Amery could just order the information released — with appropriate redactions for personal information, etc. — but his office declined to do that.I have been entirely acquitted, and the sad careers of Det. Lindsay Audibert and prosecutor Stephanie Morton have likely been set back a little, but justice has not yet been done. The waste of taxpayers' and my own time and money has not yet been answered for. The likely inappropriate use of the powers of the police and prosecutor continues to be hidden from public scrutiny.My walking cane may not have been a weapon, but information is. That's why I am not going to let this go.
