UPDATE: Elderly Census Resistor Acquitted

Tobias walks free.
Photo by Chris Young / The Canadian Press

Audrey Tobias, the 87-year-old Ontario peace advocate who faced 90 days in jail for refusing to complete the government's *mandatory* short form census, was acquitted yesterday of the charge by Ontario Court Judge Ramez Khawly, as reported by the National Post.

Don't get the wrong impression, though. The completely bogus and immoral law requiring Canadians to submit to probing government surveys hasn't been struck down. Justice  Khawly, who ruled in favour of Tobias all but admitted, with his ruling, that he was unable to find the accused guilty only because such a decision would not have been good PR for the government.

While the official ruling claims that the prosecution failed to adequately demonstrate Ms. Tobias's deliberate intent to violate the Statistics Act, Khawly admits that he was unable to rule in favour of the prosecution, essentially, because of who the accused was. He said,

"Did no one at Justice clue in that on a public relations perspective, this was an unmitigated disaster? Are they that myopic that they could not see the train wreck ahead? Could they not have found a more palatable profile to prosecute as a test case?"

In other words, Justice Khawly would really like to be able to imprison peaceful people who decline to complete questionnaires distributed door-to-door by intrusive government-hired solicitors. He only wishes government prosecutors would bring less sympathetic cases before him.

I wonder if Justice Khawly will take such a lenient stand should I end up before him, accused of the same "crime" as Audrey Tobias after I refuse to tick the government's boxes in 2016?