Late last night I promised to say why possession of Dick Tracy comics in Canada is an indictable offence carrying a penalty of a two year jail term. I discovered this yesterday while trying to find examples of newspapers that carry the strip.
Some background is that the Supreme Court of Canada found (last year?) that Canada’s prostitution laws were unconstitutional. According to a senator interviewed by the Ottawa Citizen newspaper the goverment’s new prostitution bill, passed last fall, carried over some outdated provisions from the 1950s.
Back in the 1950s, E. Davie Fulton (a former minister of justice) introduced a bill that outlawed crime comics as being against the morals of children. It passed unanimously. When they devised the prostitution bill, they put the provisions to outlaw prostitution in the section of the Criminal Code that deals with public morals, and repeated “crime comics” in each one of these sections. Doesn’t it seem bizarre that when somebody reads the Criminal Code (they will) see it’s illegal to have a Dick Tracy comic book in the same provision that prostitution is in? Follow the link for a video and a little more on this.
Late last night I promised to say why possession of Dick Tracy comics in Canada is an indictable offence carrying a penalty of a two year jail term. I discovered this yesterday while trying to find examples of newspapers that carry the strip.
Some background is that the Supreme Court of Canada found (last year?) that Canada’s prostitution laws were unconstitutional. According to a senator interviewed by the Ottawa Citizen newspaper the goverment’s new prostitution bill, passed last fall, carried over some outdated provisions from the 1950s.
Back in the 1950s, E. Davie Fulton (a former minister of justice) introduced a bill that outlawed crime comics as being against the morals of children. It passed unanimously. When they devised the prostitution bill, they put the provisions to outlaw prostitution in the section of the Criminal Code that deals with public morals, and repeated “crime comics” in each one of these sections. Doesn’t it seem bizarre that when somebody reads the Criminal Code (they will) see it’s illegal to have a Dick Tracy comic book in the same provision that prostitution is in? Follow the link for a video and a little more on this.