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Indigenous People

Taiwan shows off latest home-made armoured vehicle

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JIJI, Taiwan, June 16 (Reuters) – Taiwan’s military showed off its latest domestically produced armoured vehicle on Thursday, the CM-34 Clouded Leopard, at a remote manufacturing site in the mountains of the central part of the island.

Taiwan has been keen to demonstrate its resolve to defend itself should China, which claims the democratically governed island as its own territory, ever attack. Those fears have become more pronounced over the past two years or so as Beijing steps up military activities near Taiwan.

While Taiwan relies on the United States for many of its weapons, like fighter jets, President Tsai Ing-wen has been pushing for a greater emphasis on Taiwanese-designed and made armaments, the most high profile of which is new submarines.

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The eight-wheeled CM-34, which entered service in 2019, is armed with the Mk44 Bushmaster 30mm chain gun, made by Northrop Grumman (NOC.N) and with an effective firing range of 3 km (1.9 miles). It is designed to be highly mobile, operating in all weathers.

Facility chief Wang Wen-hung told reporters the plant in Jiji can produce six vehicles a month, and it has already delivered 173 of them to the military out of a total order for 305.

It is named after Taiwan’s clouded leopard. Though now believed to be extinct, the animal is revered by some of Taiwan’s indigenous people who consider it sacred.

The development of the vehicle has not been without problems.

Last year, several senior executives from supplier companies were jailed for fraud over procuring substandard parts, including some from China, for an earlier model, the CM-32.

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Reporting by Ann Wang; Writing by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Robert Birsel

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Can a Tiny Territory in the South Pacific Power Tesla’s Ambitions?

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Even with guardrails in place, natural resource extraction remains a sensitive issue in New Caledonia. Nickel prices are up by about 25 percent this year, reflecting the mineral’s importance in the campaign to move away from fossil fuels. But so far, that has not led to greater profits for miners.

Goro’s previous owner, the Brazilian mining giant Vale, was desperate to rid itself of the mine. Tensions over who would buy the nickel processing plant led to protests that forced Goro to shut for months, the kind of supply chain disruption that could be disastrous for Tesla. The conflict also triggered the fall of New Caledonia’s government earlier this year.

“In the history of nickel in New Caledonia, a battle exists between the multinational and the local populations, and there is also the colonial history,” said Mr. Mapou, who took power after the Goro conflict and is the territory’s first Kanak president. “With Tesla, with the new ownership, we have a compromise now that makes it possible to open the Goro plant, but it remains fragile.”

The coastal road to Goro, meandering past a bay studded with colorful coral, is littered with charred cars. The dozens of burned vehicles are detritus from the monthslong struggle that idled the mine and led to the collapse of New Caledonia’s government in February. And they are a visceral reminder of the tense politics that could stymie Tesla’s efforts to secure a steady supply of nickel.

André Vama was one of hundreds of Kanaks who barricaded the road with burning tires and vehicles this year, strangling the mine’s operations.

“From the start, we have been against this mine,” said Mr. Vama, who is a leader of a local environmental alliance. “This is our national patrimony, our assets, and the Kanaks, who are victims of history, are not in control of what should be ours.”

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British Columbia’s Flooding Is Worse Because of Climate Change

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The intense rains and heavy winds that descended last week on British Columbia, the Canadian province known for its mountains, coastline and majestic forests, forced 17,000 people from their homes, emptying entire towns and inundating farms.

Vancouver, Canada’s third-largest city, lost its road and rail links to the rest of the country, cut off by washed-out bridges and landslides.

It was the second time in six months that the province had endured a major weather-related emergency, and experts say the two disasters are probably related to changes in the climate.

British Columbia has been besieged this year by record-breaking heat, wildfires and floods. The disasters have killed hundreds — including three people in the recent rains — and caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. The impact has rippled across Canada after hobbling the province and the port of Vancouver, which is vital to the country’s economy.

record temperatures as high as 121 degrees Fahrenheit brought drought and uncontrollable wildfires. The heat, which was concentrated in the province’s interior, killed 595 people from June to August, and fire consumed an entire town.

North America’s first carbon tax. It has also taken physical measures. The port in Vancouver, he said, has been lifted by about three feet to accommodate rising sea levels.

But province’s mountainous nature, he said, limits what is possible and will make rebuilding a difficult and prolonged process.

“To try and make everything resilient is very hard,” he said. “We don’t have many options for routes coming through the mountains.”

The delays in reopenings will most likely significantly affect all of Canada since Vancouver’s port connects the country to Asia, both for imports of consumer goods and economically vital exports of resources like grains and potash for fertilizers. While a rail line to the port in Prince Rupert in northern British Columbia remains open to the east, Professor Prentice said that the port could not physically handle all of Vancouver’s traffic on top of its normal operations.

While it may be possible to beef up the transportation network during rebuilding, Professor Prentice said that the only long-term solution remained dealing effectively with climate change.

Ms. Smith of Clean Energy Canada said that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government had a credible and ambitious climate plan but that the country had yet to rein in its oil and gas industry, particularly oil sands operations based largely in neighboring Alberta.

“We need to reduce the emissions from the oil and gas sector; it is one of Canada’s biggest challenges,” she said. “All of these other good policies, we need to see them implemented without delays. There’s a lot of inaction that gets disguised as flexibility, and we’re past that time.”

While the water has started to recede in most flood zones, it is unclear when evacuees will return home or abandoned cars will be returned to their owners. And more danger may be ahead for British Columbia. Forecasts predict another batch of heavy rain this week.

Winston Choi-Schagrin contributed reporting.

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Global Leaders Pledge to End Deforestation by 2030

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Leaders of more than 100 countries, including Brazil, China and the United States, vowed on Monday at climate talks in Glasgow to end deforestation by 2030, seeking to preserve forests crucial to absorbing carbon dioxide and slowing the rise in global warming.

The pledge will demand “transformative further action,” the countries’ declaration said, and it was accompanied by several measures intended to help put it into effect. But some advocacy groups criticized them as lacking teeth, saying they would allow deforestation to continue.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain was scheduled to announce the deforestation agreement at an event on Tuesday morning attended by President Biden and the president of Indonesia, Joko Widodo.

“These great teeming ecosystems — these cathedrals of nature — are the lungs of our planet,” Mr. Johnson is expected to say.

climate summit, known as COP26. Intact forests and peatlands, for example, are natural storehouses of carbon, keeping it sealed away from the atmosphere. But when these areas are logged, burned or drained, the ecosystems switch to releasing greenhouse gases.

If tropical deforestation were a country, it would be the third-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, according to the World Resources Institute, after China and the United States. Much of the world’s deforestation is driven by commodity agriculture as people fell trees to make room for cattle, soy, cocoa and palm oil.

even make rain, supporting agriculture elsewhere. They are fundamental to sustaining biodiversity, which is suffering its own crisis as extinction rates climb.

Previous efforts to protect forests have struggled. One program recognized in the Paris climate accord seeks to pay forested nations for reducing tree loss, but progress has been slow.

Previous promises to end deforestation also have failed. A United Nations plan announced in 2017 made similar commitments. An agreement in 2014 to end deforestation by 2030, the New York Declaration on Forests, set goals without a means to achieve them, and deforestation continued.

The same will happen this time, some environmentalists predicted.

“It allows another decade of forest destruction and isn’t binding,” said Carolina Pasquali, executive director of Greenpeace Brazil. “Meanwhile, the Amazon is already on the brink and can’t survive years more deforestation.”

Supporters of the new pledge point out that it expands the number of countries and comes with specific steps to save forests.

“What we’re doing here is trying to change the economics on the ground to make forests worth more alive than dead,” said Eron Bloomgarden, whose group, Emergent, helps match public and private investors with forested countries and provinces looking to receive payments for reducing deforestation.

The participating governments promised “support for smallholders, Indigenous Peoples and local communities, who depend on forests for their livelihoods and have a key role in their stewardship.”

have begun emitting more carbon than they store.

China is one of the biggest signatories to the deforest declaration, but the country’s top leader, Xi Jinping, did not attend the climate negotiations in Glasgow. China suffered heavy forest losses as its population and industry grew over the past decades, but more recently, it has pledged to regrow forests and to expand sustainable tree farming.

By China’s estimate, forests now cover about 23 percent of its landmass, up from 17 percent in 1990, according to the World Bank. Though some research has questioned the scale and the quality of that expanded tree cover, the government has made expanded reforestation a pillar of its climate policies, and many areas of the country are notably greener than they were a couple of decades ago.

Still, China’s participation in the new pledge may also test its dependence on timber imported from Russia, Southeast Asia and African countries, including large amounts of illegally felled trees.

In a written message to the Glasgow meeting, Mr. Xi “stressed the responsibility of developed countries in tackling climate change, saying that they should not only do more themselves, but should also provide support to help developing countries do better,” Xinhua news agency reported.

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Residential School Photos Show Canada’s Grim Legacy of Cultural Erasure

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OTTAWA — At times it was the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who came for them. Other times, it was a school van. However it happened, for generations, Indigenous families in Canada had no choice but to send their children to church-run residential schools established by the government to erode their culture and languages, and to assimilate them.

A national Truth and Reconciliation Commission declared in 2015 that the schools, which operated from 1883 to 1996, were a form of “cultural genocide.”

But the profound damage inflicted by the schools didn’t stop there. The commission cataloged extensive physical, sexual and emotional abuse at the schools, which were often overcrowded, understaffed and underfunded. Disease, fire and malnourishment all brought death and suffering.

Now, the national shame of the schools is again dominating the conversation in Canada.

Since May, new technology has enabled the discovery of human remains, mostly of children, in many hundreds of unmarked graves on the grounds of three former schools in Canada — two in British Columbia and one in Saskatchewan. Who they were, how they died or even when they died may never be fully known.

were forced to attend residential schools in a forced assimilation program. Most of these schools were operated by churches, and all of them banned the use of Indigenous languages and Indigenous cultural practices, often through violence. Disease, as well as sexual, physical and emotional abuse were widespread. An estimated 150,000 children passed through the schools between their opening and their closing in 1996.

  • The Missing Children: A National Truth and Reconciliation Commission, set up as part of a government apology and settlement over the schools, concluded that at least 4,100 students died while attending them, many from mistreatment or neglect, others from disease or accident. In many cases, families never learned the fate of their offspring, who are now known as “the missing children.”
  • The Discoveries: In May, members of the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation found 215 bodies at the Kamloops school — which was operated by the Roman Catholic Church until 1969 — after bringing in ground-penetrating radar. In June, an Indigenous group said the remains of as many as 751 people, mainly children, had been found in unmarked graves on the site of a former boarding school in Saskatchewan.
  • Cultural Genocide’: In a 2015 report, the commission concluded that the system was a form of “cultural genocide.” Murray Sinclair, a former judge and senator who headed the commission, recently said he now believed the number of disappeared children was “well beyond 10,000.”
  • Apologies and Next Steps: The commission called for an apology from the pope for the Roman Catholic church’s role. Pope Francis stopped short of one, but the archbishop of Vancouver apologized on behalf of his archdiocese. Canada has formally apologized and offered financial and other search support, but Indigenous leaders believe the government still has a long way to go.

    • “Something good has to come out of this,” Joey Desjarlais, 73, said outside the ruins of the Muskowekwan Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan, which he was forced to attend, as were his parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. “Our children need to learn about the residential school, what we went through and what went on in there but also to learn their culture, so at least they’ll get it back.”

    The image below shows girls working in the kitchen at the Bishop Horden Memorial School in Moose Factory, Ontario, around 1940.

    Boys at the Shingwauk Indian Residential School playing with handmade bows, and a game of table hockey, in the 1960s.

    Boys say their prayers in the dormitory at the Bishop Horden Memorial School in Moose Factory, Ontario, in 1950.

    Girls at a residential school in Fort Resolution, Northwest Territories, around 1936. It is estimated that roughly one-third of all Indigenous children were enrolled in the schools by the 1930s.

    Boys and girls, in their first communion outfits, posing at Spanish Indian Residential School in Spanish, Ontario, in the 1960s.

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    Hundreds More Unmarked Graves Found at Former Residential School in Canada

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    CALGARY, Alberta — For decades, the Indigenous children were taken from their families, sometimes by force, and housed in crowded, church-run boarding schools, where they were abused and prohibited from speaking their languages. Thousands vanished altogether.

    Now, a new discovery offers chilling evidence that many of the missing children may have died at these schools: The remains of as many as 751 people, mainly Indigenous children, were found at the site of a former school in the province of Saskatchewan, an Indigenous group said on Thursday.

    The burial site, the largest one to date, was uncovered only weeks after the remains of 215 children were found in unmarked graves on the grounds of another former church-run school for Indigenous students in British Columbia.

    The discoveries have jolted a nation grappling with generations of widespread and systematic abuse of Indigenous people, many of whom are survivors of the boarding schools. For decades, they suggested through their oral histories that thousands of children disappeared from the schools, but they were often met with skepticism. The revelations of two unmarked grave sites are another searing reminder of this traumatic period in history.

    Chief Cadmus Delorme, of the Cowessess First Nation.

    The recent unearthing of remains in Canada have reverberated globally, including in the United States, where this week the interior secretary said the country would search federal boarding schools for possible burial sites of Native American children. Hundreds of thousands of them were forcibly taken from their communities to be culturally assimilated in the schools for more than a century.

    a system started in the 19th century that took Indigenous children from their families.

    A National Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established in 2008 to investigate the residential schools, called the practice “cultural genocide.” Many children never returned home, and their families were given only vague explanations of their fates, or none at all. Canada had about 150 residential schools and an estimated 150,000 Indigenous children passed through the schools between their opening, around 1883, and their closing in 1996.

    The commission estimated that about 4,100 children went missing nationwide from the schools. But an Indigenous former judge who led the commission, Murray Sinclair, said in an email this month that he now believed the number was “well beyond 10,000.”

    1.7 million Indigenous citizens, who make up about 4.9 percent of the population, the finding of yet another mass burial site is a visceral reminder of centuries of discrimination and abuse, which has led to intergenerational trauma among survivors of residential schools and their families.

    “There’s no denying this: All of the stories told by our survivors are true,” Chief Cameron said.

    Florence Sparvier, 80, an elder of the Cowessess First Nation, said she attended two residential schools, including Marieval, the school where the unmarked remains were found.

    were forced to attend residential schools in a forced assimilation program. Most of these schools were operated by churches, and all of them banned the use of Indigenous languages and Indigenous cultural practices, often through violence. Disease, as well as sexual, physical and emotional abuse were widespread. An estimated 150,000 children passed through the schools between their opening and their closing in 1996.

  • The Missing Children: A National Truth and Reconciliation Commission, set up as part of a government apology and settlement over the schools, concluded that at least 4,100 students died while attending them, many from mistreatment or neglect, others from disease or accident. In many cases, families never learned the fate of their offspring, who are now known as “the missing children.”
  • The Recent Discovery: In May, members of the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation found 215 bodies at the Kamloops school — which was operated by the Roman Catholic Church until 1969 — after bringing in ground-penetrating radar.
  • ‘Cultural Genocide’: In a 2015 report, the commission concluded that the system was a form of “cultural genocide.” Murray Sinclair, a former judge and senator who headed the commission, recently said he now believed the number of disappeared children was “well beyond 10,000.”
  • Apologies and Next Steps: The commission called for an apology from the pope for the Roman Catholic church’s role. Pope Francis stopped short of one, but the archbishop of Vancouver apologized on behalf of his archdiocese. Canada has formally apologized and offered financial and other search support, but Indigenous leaders believe the government still has a long way to go.

    • In September 2017, Mr. Trudeau acknowledged the nation’s past “humiliation, neglect and abuse” of Indigenous people, and vowed in a speech at the United Nations General Assembly to improve their lives.

    Pope Francis has still not taken that step. By contrast, the leadership of the United Church of Canada, the country’s largest Protestant denomination, apologized in 1998 for its role in running the schools.

    Since the Kamloops announcement, Chief Cameron said, he has been traveling around the province, where farming and mining are major industries, looking at former school sites.

    “You can see with your plain eye the indent of the ground where these bodies are to be found,” he said in an interview Wednesday night. “These children are sitting there, waiting to be found.”

    Vjosa Isai in Toronto contributed reporting.

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    In Sweden’s Far North, a Space Complex Takes Shape

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    KIRUNA, Sweden — The path to the reindeer herder’s spring home took him across four frozen lakes and countless snowy hilltops. Arriving to a light dusting of snow, the herder, Aslak Allas, switched off his snowmobile, and the overwhelming silence of Sweden’s Arctic settled in.

    His reindeer, thousands of them, were nowhere to be seen. “They are very scared of noise,” Mr. Allas, explained, pointing to his vehicle.

    He then motioned toward the distant hills dotted with birch trees, their buds swelling with the warming spring sun. “Now, the noise coming from there, that will be something else,” Mr. Allas sighed.

    SpaceX. He and several competitors are planning to send up to 50,000 such satellites into space in coming years, compared with fewer than 3,000 out there now.

    While the United States, China, Russia and several other countries already have spaceports, Sweden’s would be the first orbital launch site for satellites in Europe — capable of launching spacecraft into orbit around Earth or on interplanetary trajectories. Currently, the intergovernmental European Space Agency launches its traditional single-use Ariane rockets from French Guiana.

    Several private European companies are designing spaceports in Europe to host a new generation of smaller rockets. Portugal is looking into building one on the Azores Islands, two remote sites have been allocated in Britain and Norway is upgrading its Andoya Space Center.

    Esrange Space Center will be a testing ground for Europe’s first reusable vertical rocket in 2022, and it can conduct engine tests as well.

    Swedish Space Corporation, which manages the site, is offering launch services to private ventures wishing to send satellites into space.

    “We are a bit of a unicorn in the space business,” said Philip Pahlsson, vice president for strategy and innovation of the Swedish Space Corporation, referring to the government ownership of the site. “But we do plan on being the awesomest company in the government’s portfolio.”

    being moved, as the city is slowly sinking into the excavated caverns below.

    A 50-foot rocket stands at one of the main intersections, a testament to Sweden’s space ambitions. Space is woven into the fabric of the city.

    The Swedish Institute of Space Physics is based in Kiruna, as is the Space High School for gifted teenagers. The space engineering program at Lulea University of Technology, also in Kiruna, attracts Ph.D. students from across Europe. An enormous satellite receiver dish, sticking out from the woods in a vast white valley, serves as a geographical landmark.

    Esrange has many of the attributes of other space ports — high fences and warning signs, and some used rockets on display. But it also has a church, a visitor center and the Aurora hotel, named for the northern lights that color the winter skies. Snow is everywhere, of course, and reindeer roam the terrain (no one knows how they get past the fences), but astronauts and moon landers are nowhere to be found.

    Themis, after an ancient Greek Titaness who was the personification of divine order.

    On this day, the main activity consisted of engine testing by two fiercely competitive German space start-ups, Rocket Factory Augsburg and ISAR Aerospace Technologies.

    the fastest pod in Elon Musk’s competition for ultra-high-speed transport in hyperloop, or travel in a vacuum tube. That caught the attention of Bulent Altan, a former vice president at Space X, who decided to back Mr. Fleischmann and his friends.

    Sami are the last Indigenous people of Europe and live in Finland, Sweden, Norway and Russia.

    In 2019, after an appeal by his district, Mr. Allas managed to block some of the expansion plans for the base, and now his sights are set on the coming noise pollution.

    “They might say we need to launch or else we lose our customers, but reindeer herding has been around here long as you can imagine,” Mr. Allas said, adding that a legal battle seemed inevitable. “For us, the Space Corporation is the oldest intruder of our lands, but we have much older rights.”

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    Pamela Kraft, 77, Dies; Arts Magnet and Champion of Indigenous Rights

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    In 2012, the NGO Committee on Spirituality, Values and Global Concerns recognized her efforts, awarding her its “Spirit of the U.N.” award.

    Influenced by the shamanic teachings of Carlos Castaneda and others, her activism could veer toward the mystical, which somehow seemed appropriate, given Ms. Kraft’s interests in all things magical and colorful growing up.

    Pamela Ann Kraft was born on Oct. 31, 1943, in Dover, N.J., to William Kraft, an Army veteran who worked at Picatinny Arsenal in Wharton, N.J., and Ida Kraft, a homemaker. As a child, Pamela loved making art and taking flights of fancy — she used to say that she believed her mother and aunts had been witches in a previous life.

    Her creative interests led her to study fine art at Douglass College, a women’s college affiliated with Rutgers University, where she received a bachelor’s degree in fine art in 1965.

    At Douglass, Ms. Kraft became a friend and muse to the artist Robert Watts, a professor there who introduced her to Fluxus, the international anti-art movement that balanced a revolutionary ethos with a spirit of cheeky fun and that attracted such artists as George Brecht, Nam June Paik, and Yoko Ono. Ms. Kraft appeared in multiple film and photography projects by Mr. Watts, including “89 Movies (Unfinished)” (1965), which was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970.

    Before long, Ms. Kraft made her way to New York City, settling in a spacious loft on West 28th Street in Manhattan’s flower district and working as a waitress at Max’s, a star-studded nexus of the city’s rock and art scenes.

    “That first time I walked into Max’s it was like a strange dream of the most wonderful people that you loved in the art world all sitting in the same restaurant,” Ms. Kraft was quoted saying in the 1998 book “High on Rebellion: Inside the Underground at Max’s Kansas City,” by Yvonne Sewall-Ruskin. “It was a dream come to life. You had a sense of the absurd given to you in material form.”

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    Taiwan Court Upholds Laws Restricting Hunting

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    TAIPEI, Taiwan — Taiwan’s Constitutional Court on Friday upheld several key provisions of two laws that restrict hunting, in a setback to the island’s Indigenous rights movement.

    Although the court struck down some parts of the laws — including a rule that would require hunters to apply for permits — it declined to overhaul the restrictions altogether, stating that Indigenous hunting culture had to be balanced against the need to protect the environment and wildlife.

    “The Constitution recognizes both the protection of Indigenous peoples’ right to practice their hunting culture and the protection of the environment and ecology,” chief justice Hsu Tzong-li said on Friday. “Both fundamental values are equally important.”

    Conservationists and animal rights activists welcomed the decision. In March, 57 animal rights groups in Taiwan issued a joint statement, arguing that protecting hunting culture was not comparable to guaranteeing the right to hunt freely.

    offered a formal apology to Indigenous peoples for centuries of “pain and mistreatment,” and said that she would take concrete steps to rectify a history of injustice.

    The rights movement has lately centered on Mr. Talum’s case, which many activists see as linked to broader issues of Indigenous land rights and self-governance. They say that the government’s laws restricting hunting are unnecessary since Indigenous hunting culture is already circumscribed by a complex web of taboos and rituals.

    Experts said the ruling on Friday reflected the government’s lack of understanding of Indigenous culture.

    “This explanation restricts the Indigenous right to hunt from the cultural perspective of non-Indigenous peoples,” Awi Mona, a professor of Indigenous law at National Dong Hwa University in the eastern city of Hualien said in an interview.

    Taiwan’s Supreme Court had dismissed Mr. Talum’s appeal in 2015, but in 2017 it granted an extraordinary appeal to have the case referred for constitutional interpretation. Mr. Talum did not serve any jail time.

    “This outcome was a little unexpected,” Hsieh Meng-yu, Mr. Talum’s lawyer said in an interview after the court ruling was announced. “We thought the Indigenous rights movement would keep moving forward — we didn’t think that there would suddenly be this decline.”

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    The Growing Frustration Over Pandemic Restriction Cheaters

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    Tied to that is an apparent frustration and anger toward people who break or bend the rules. Anti-mask protests that have popped up in many parts of the country, particularly in Alberta, don’t appear to have advanced their cause with the general public and, in some cases, appear to have also been spreading racist messages. And there’s little obvious sympathy for the 536 air travelers who have been fined 3,000 Canadian dollars each for dodging the mandatory quarantine period in hotels that is required at entry.

    This week, some of that anger and frustration spilled over into a sentencing hearing in Vancouver. The case involved a man who defied restrictions in British Columbia by turning a penthouse apartment into a makeshift nightclub, complete with topless dancers and a dancing pole. When the police entered on Jan. 31, there were 78 people squeezed inside.

    according to the CBC.

    She didn’t stop there as she sentenced him to 11 days in jail, which included the 10 he had already served while waiting for bail; 18 months probation for violating two parts of the Public Health Act; and 50 hours of community service. He was also fined for breaking liquor laws by running an unlicensed bar.

    “What you did, sir, is comparable to individuals who sell fentanyl to the individuals on the street who die every day,” she said. “There’s no difference. You voluntarily assumed a risk that could kill people in the midst of a pandemic.”

    brazenly broken lockdown restrictions during the pandemic, the actions of Mr. Movassaghi, who pleaded guilty, stood out.

    The police began receiving complaints about large and loud parties at Mr. Movassaghi’s apartment, even though lockdown rules in British Columbia allowed people to entertain only one other person outside the household. No one, however, would open the door for officers who, among other things, observed one night the delivery of about 100 McDonald’s hamburgers.

    After they finally obtained a search warrant and got inside, the police found menus for “Granny’s Exotic Bar” listing drinks priced from 26 Canadian dollars to 1,500 dollars for a bottle of liquor. A prosecutor told the court that lap dances were offered for 46 dollars.

    The police fined people at the party a total of 17,000 dollars as they arrested Mr. Movassaghi.

    Mr. Movassaghi’s lawyer and brother, Bobby Movassaghi, told the court that it was merely a party that had gotten out of hand after guests brought uninvited friends along.

    Judge Gordon dismissed that argument, saying that when she hosts a party: “I don’t have stripper poles. I don’t have chairs around for people to watch. I don’t charge admission. I don’t charge for liquor. I don’t have point-of-sale devices attached to my cellular telephones.”

    (Bobby Movassaghi did not respond when asked for comment.)

    As for Judge Gordon’s move into the realm of the hypothetical, Isabel Grant, a professor at the Peter A. Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia, told me that “it’s very unusual for a judge to comment on liability for a crime that was not before the court.”

    nytcanada@nytimes.com.

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