PSA: How private prosecutions work in Canada

This video, taken from a Manitoba Court Services public service announcement, details the procedure to be followed when laying an information before a judge. The video continues with the stages of a private prosecution. Here we are mainly interested with the initial stage, known as Laying the Information.

The justice system in Canada is by now fairly uniform, except in Quebec, so what applies in Manitoba applies in other provinces. A useful reference is found at www.criminalnotebook.ca, which is updated by a Crown Prosecutor in Nova Scotia by the name of Peter Dostal. Mr Dostal provides references to leading case law for every section of the Criminal Code of Canada (CCC), which lists and categorizes the offences, and documents the procedure to be followed in the courtroom.

We are concerned here with Section 504 of the CCC, "Laying of an Information". Mr Dostal, who practices law in Nova Scotia, provides notes and case law on this section at ref. [1]. The video is simply a verbalization of the same procedure from a Manitoba point of view.

The reason that we are interested in this arcana is because of the documentation (which appears elsewhere in my collected videos) of an aggravated assault by an official while in the course of performing a Covid-19 swab test on a 5-year old girl, who sustained visible injuries to her eyes and nasal haemorrhage in the event.

It is my opinion that the deep nasopharyngeal swab procedure is an assault. The 5-year old girl who was victimized by an officer of the state provided visible evidence of aggravated assault.

The whole procedure can be mitigated by a shallow nasal swab but it seems that the only way to send a message to the authorities is through the penal system. If a witness to or a victim of an aggravated assault Lays an Information against the offender, this will cause other test officials to defect from the state because they calculate that the risk of prosecution is too great. And that will be when the state realizes its error and moves to correct it, because the Crown Prosecutor is notified and must therefore take action, if only to squelch the dissentient observer that laid the Information in the judicial realm.

[1] http://www.criminalnotebook.ca/index.php/Laying_of_an_Information