A Lindsay, Ont., man facing criminal charges for allegedly injuring a home intruder is reportedly accused of using a knife in the attack.

A charge sheet filed by Kawartha Lakes Police Service on Thursday identifies the tenant in the Kent Street apartment as Jeremy David McDonald, 44,

CBC reported.

The court documents say McDonald is charged with aggravated assault and assault with a weapon after he “did endanger the life” of Michael Kyle Breen, 41, the man identified as the alleged intruder.

Police had

earlier reported

that they responded in the early hours of Monday morning to a report of an altercation between two males.

“Officers arrived on scene and learned that the resident of the apartment had woke up to find another male (intruder) inside his apartment,” police said. “There was an altercation inside the apartment and the intruder received serious life-threatening injuries as a result of that altercation.”

Police said the intruder was transported to a nearby hospital and later airlifted to a Toronto hospital.

McDonald, 44, was charged with aggravated assault and assault with a weapon, and released with a Sept. 25 court date in the Ontario Court of Justice in Lindsay.

Breen, 41, was already wanted by police for unrelated offences and was charged with possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose, break and enter and theft, mischief under $5,000, and failing to comply with probation.

The charges against McDonald drew much attention, with the

premier of Ontario

weighing in.

“You should be able to protect your family when someone’s going in there to harm your family and your kids,” Doug Ford said at a press conference on Wednesday. ”You should use all resources you possibly can to protect your family.”

He added: “So this criminal that’s wanted by the police breaks into this guy’s house. This guy gives him a beating, and this guy gets charged, and the other guy gets charged, but — something is broken.”

Also Wednesday, Kawartha Lakes Police Chief Kirk Robertson

issued a statement

noting that “the negative commentary about the officers and their actions is unjust and inaccurate.”

“It is important to remember that charges are not convictions; they are part of the judicial process, which ensures that all facts are considered fairly in court,” he said.

“

Under Canadian law, individuals have the right to defend themselves and their property,” he continued. “However, it is important to understand that these rights are not unlimited in Canada. The law requires that any defensive action be proportionate to the threat faced. This means that while homeowners do have the right to protect themselves and their property, the use of force must be reasonable given the circumstances.”

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The City of Toronto is rejecting a claim by the family of a man who died in an accident at the city’s Leaside Bridge last year, saying it did not have a “duty of care” and that in any case the City of Toronto Act prohibits lawsuits of this type.

The accident happened on Father’s Day 2024, when a man jumped or fell from the Leaside Bridge. The bridge, which spans the Don Valley at the southern end of Millwood Road, crosses over the Don Valley Parkway at a height of about 45 metres.

Harold Lusthouse, aged 76, was on his way to meet his daughter Tali Uditsky for a Father’s Day brunch when the man landed on the car he was in, “causing catastrophic and ultimately fatal injuries,” according to legal documents. Lusthouse died in hospital days later.

Lusthouse’s family subsequently filed a lawsuit against the city, complaining about the lack of a suicide prevention barrier on the bridge and seeking $1.7 million in damages as well as potential future legal costs,

CBC reported in May

.

“He was stolen away from us … as a result of the failure of the city to protect its citizens,” Uditsky told councillors in April, according to a CBC report.

But in a statement of defence filed with Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice last month, the city “denies the claim for relief … and denies all the allegations contained in the Statement of Claim, except as otherwise expressly admitted in this defence.”

While it notes that, “at all material times, the City had jurisdiction over the municipal highways known as the Don Valley Parkway and Millwood Road,” it adds: “The City denies that it owed Harold a private duty of care in the circumstances and, in particular, denies that it owed Harold a private duty of care to take positive measures to prevent the Accident.”

It concludes: “The fact that an accident is possible does not require a municipality, which must allocate finite resources, to take any and all conceivable measures to prevent such an accident.”

Part of the issue has to do with the lack of pedestrian barriers on the Leaside Bridge, of the type that were installed on the city’s Bloor Viaduct in 2003. The City has been mulling the addition of similar barriers to the Leaside Bridge for some time.

The statement notes: “When the Leaside Bridge was inspected in 2022, Transportation Services determined that state-of-good-repair work was likely to be required in or after 2028.

“Therefore, consistent with the report received by the Executive Committee of City Council, if or when a suicide prevention barrier were to be recommended by a feasibility study of the Leaside Bridge, the actual work to carry out the installation of a barrier would have occurred sometime after 2028.”

It adds: “In 2023, Transportation Services decided to undertake the feasibility study for the Leaside Bridge, and a feasibility study was commenced in or around this time.”

But Lusthouse’s death occurred before that study was completed, and before any planned state-of-good-repair work. The city

continues to move ahead

with the study.

“A family’s life is never the same after something like this happens,” Stephen Birman of the law firm Thomson Rogers

said in May

when the suit was filed: “But above and beyond that, this is an issue about public safety and how a municipality should respond to known dangers or hazards in the community.”

The city’s statement notes two section of the

City of Toronto Act

that it says prevent a lawsuit. Section 42 notes: “No action shall be brought against the City for damages caused by … the presence, absence or insufficiency of any wall, fence, rail or barrier along or on any highway.”

And section 390 states: “No proceeding based on negligence in connection with the exercise or non-exercise of a discretionary power or the performance or non-performance of a discretionary function, if the action or inaction results from a policy decision of the City or a local board of the City made in a good faith exercise of the discretion, shall be commenced against … the City.”

The statement notes: “The decision whether to erect a suicide prevention barrier along a City bridge is a clear instance of a policy decision, made by senior staff and involving a process which includes weighing competing interests, allocating finite public resources, and exercising judgement. It is a policy decision in the truest sense.”

If you’re thinking about suicide or are worried about a friend or loved one, please contact 9-8-8: Suicide Crisis Helpline by calling or texting 9-8-8 toll free. The service is available 24/7. If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, call 911.

• What we know about the 33-year-old mother who jumped to her death at Niagara Falls
• Toronto teacher fired for wearing blackface to school should get his job back, arbitrator rules

Two Ontario men accused of being the scofflaw pirates behind years of large-scale digital streaming of copyrighted movies and TV have been sentenced to five years in prison — not for piracy, but for contempt of court — unless they reveal passwords and accounts.

Some of the biggest entertainment media companies on the continent — Bell, Rogers, Disney, Paramount Pictures, Universal, Columbia Pictures and Warner Bros. — spent years chasing the digital pirates behind a bootleg service known as Smoothstreams, which was available globally from five user-friendly online platforms offering a vast collection of movies, TV and live sports since at least 2018.

Lawyers, private investigators, and technology specialists for the corporate giants began their hunt seven years ago, launching what is described as a “sophisticated, extensive, and resource and time-intensive investigation.”

They traced internet streams and servers, websites, payment processors and corporate records which, in the summer of 2022, led them to the homes of a Canadian father and son.

Ever since, Antonio Macciacchera, 73, of Woodbridge, Ont., and his son, Marshall Macciacchera, of Barrie, Ont., have been in a legal grapple, defying the might of global media heavyweights.

While it delayed the copyright infringement case against them for three years, their defiance has brought them expensive losses while doing nothing to disprove that investigators found their pirates.

The media companies estimated there were 2.5 million visits to Smoothstreams services in 2021 giving an estimated revenue of more than $1.5 million a year.

By most accounts, Smoothstreams did an adept job at content distribution. Subscribers paid monthly for online access to all sorts of TV channels and streaming content — live sports events were particularly popular — with customer payments allegedly processed by two Hong Kong-based companies and another in Panama.

Prices were cheap since the content wasn’t licensed or authorized. The service fed through various websites, including MyStreams, StarStreams and Live247, with its slogan: “Where all your streams come true!”

Customers loved it. One user described them online as the “gift that keeps giving.”

But after corporate officials, armed with court orders, arrived at the homes and a business of the Macciaccheras and unplugged at least 65 television receivers connected to 24 servers, viewers quickly complained of the abrupt end.

“Saddest day 10 years of perfection gone — please come back soonest,” one customer posted to a Smoothstreams social media account. “Damn the end of an era?” asked another.

While users seem to have moved on, Antonio and Marshall Macciacchera have steadfastly refused to cooperate with court orders and legal demands through years of litigation, leading to them being stripped of their passports, ordered to pay the huge legal fees for the corporate lawyers going after them, and now sentenced to prison.

All without the copyright complaint against them being heard in court.

The media giants started their legal action against the Macciaccheras in June 2022 by asking a judge for secret orders against the pair. A judge granted injunctions to shut Smoothstreams down and issued Anton Piller orders, which are special authorizations that allow for the search, seizure, and preservation of evidence without the target of the orders knowing in advance.

Early in the morning on July 14, 2022, private investigators and lawyers arrived at the Ontario homes of the two men.

At the Woodbridge residence of the elder Macciacchera, Antonio answered the door of his large suburban home in his pyjamas. He refused to let anyone in and wouldn’t read the court order.

When a lawyer tried to explain it, he said he didn’t

“want to hear any more about law stuff”

but wanted to speak with his lawyer, according to a video of the interaction documented in court. He made the officials wait outside and the standoff lasted five hours before they gave up. Court heard he also went by the name Tony Roma.

At the younger Macciacchera’s home in Barrie, Marshall, a self-employed IT consultant, let the entourage in, but his cooperation was intermittent.

In the living room of his apartment in an eight-story building, officials found a rack of computer servers that were the source of four Smoothstreams channels, court heard. In a commercial property a five-minute drive away, they found what were described as the main servers — nine cabinets with at least sixty-five television receivers connected to twenty-three servers.

The servers were capturing TV content and retransmitting it to customers, court was told. While a tech worker unplugged the servers, a private investigator offsite watched Smoothstreams channels go black one by one.

Marshall Macciacchera refused, however, to answer key questions about the source of fifty unauthorized streams that remained online after the Barrie servers were disconnected, as well as questions about computer passwords and hosting, and refused to provide some financial details.

“Although Marshall consented to having the computer copied, he continued to refuse to disclose the password for his computer which would be needed to review the computer’s contents,” court heard.

During the raid, officials for the media companies told court, an unknown person going by the name Sam was remotely interacting with the infrastructure. Marshall refused to identify who it was.

It took officials much of the day, into the night and much of the next day to disconnect and inventory the servers.

In one of the earliest court decisions in the case, a federal judge said the companies had “an extremely strong prima facie case of copyright infringement” and that “content piracy is not a victimless crime.”

If the companies thought their case would then wrap up quickly, they were mistaken. The Macciaccheras fought them at every turn, but have been hit hard for their obstinance.

Within weeks of the raids, the media companies asked the court to charge the two men with contempt of court for not cooperating with the court orders.

Antonio Macciacchera said the bank account information the companies wanted were joint accounts with his wife, and privacy — and fear of marital repercussions — prevented him from doing what the court ordered. He was found guilty of civil contempt in 2023.

“Those who decide when and under what circumstances they will comply with a court order essentially take the law into their own hands. That cannot be countenanced in a society governed by the rule of law,” a Federal Court judge said in that decision.

At the 2024 contempt hearing for Marshall Macciacchera, lawyers for the company said that he “lied, concealed and attempted to conceal evidence” in response to the court orders. Marshall argued privacy, overreach, and decency interfered with the orders.

He too was found guilty of civil contempt, alongside two corporations he controls.

Antonio was ordered to pay $94,906 to the media corporations towards their legal costs in the contempt prosecution. Marshall was ordered to pay $375,312 in legal costs to the companies.

Neither bill has yet been paid, a judge said recently.

In February, the media companies asked the court to seize the two men’s passports before their contempt sentencing hearing. They feared the pair might flee the country.

Court heard that for the past 15 years Marshall has spent significant time in Thailand, where he has both a home and a fiancée. He refused to say where he lived, but said it was an apartment owned by someone from the United Arab Emirates and that he didn’t pay any rent for it.

Antonio, court was told, also has close ties aboard. Although he is a Canadian citizen, he was born in Italy, about halfway between Rome and Naples, and often returns to visit family.

Both men said they wouldn’t flee, but the court agreed to the danger and ordered them to turn their passports over at the start of their sentencing hearing for contempt this June in Toronto.

At that sentencing, even the Macciaccheras said they deserved jail time, although they imagined far less than the judge. They were representing themselves by this stage, saying they had no more money for lawyers.

Marshall told court he should only be incarcerated for one week for each of three “clear failures” to comply with court orders. Antonio said he should only be sentenced to 30 days of house arrest. Both men said those sentences should then clear the slate, and they should not face any other consequences.

Paul Crampton, Chief Justice of the Federal Court, who presided over their sentencing, had apparently had enough.

“It appears that some copyright pirates make calculated decisions to breach court orders, after assessing the pros and cons associated with doing so. Some of those pirates even brazenly continue their contemptuous actions after being found in contempt,” Crampton wrote in the opening of his latest decision against the Macciaccheras this week.

“In the face of such defiance of its orders, it behooves the Court to impose penalties designed to maximize the potential for instilling respect for its orders and the rule of law.”

Crampton chastised the pair for their “brazen, defiant and open contempt” for the court.

He ordered Marshall Macciacchera jailed for an initial period of six months for his failure to comply with court orders. After that, his imprisonment was to continue for five years, less a day, or until he complies, whichever comes first.

That’s the maximum prison term allowed by law for contempt.

Antonio Macciacchera was sentenced to four months, and then he also is to roll into a five-year, less a day, sentence, or until he complies with the court orders, in his case for banking information.

“By continuing their contempt, Marshall and Antonio have displayed blatant defiance of the Court’s Orders and have prevented the Plaintiffs from advancing their underlying action for copyright infringement

,” Crampton wrote.

The men were given 14 days to get their affairs in order before incarceration.

The Macciaccheras could not be reached for comment. Their recent lawyer was away and did not return a request for comment.

Guillaume Lavoie Ste‑Marie, a Montreal-based lawyer for the media companies, said, on behalf of his clients, that illegal internet content providers like Smoothstreams

 are “a critical threat to the creative industry.

“These illegal services impact creators and rights holders across the industry, resulting in thousands of lost jobs, and causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.

“The Federal Court’s recent decision sends a clear signal that it’s aware of the harm caused by illegal platforms and that appropriate penalties will be issued to ensure its orders are respected.”

• Email: ahumphreys@postmedia.com | X: AD_Humphreys

Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our daily newsletter, Posted, here.

An Ontario man who vanished for three years after being found not criminally responsible for calling the German consulate in Toronto in December 2016 to say a terrorist attack was going to take place that coming weekend in Berlin has been released even though the hospital where he was being treated says he represents a significant threat to the public.

The Ontario Review Board ordered Stephen Clements’ detention at the Southwest Centre for Forensic Mental Health Care in April 2022, where he was to live in approved accommodations in the community. But several weeks later, when hospital staffers tried to contact him, they discovered that he was no longer there, had quit his job and sold his cell phone. A warrant was issued for his arrest, but it wasn’t until this past April that police caught up with Clements after they fielded a call from the Sarnia Public Library complaining he was harassing a staffer there.

The review board conducted a hearing last month where it sought input from the same hospital that ordered Clements’ detention in 2022.

”It was the hospital’s position that Mr. Clements continued to represent a significant threat to the safety of the public and that the necessary and appropriate disposition was a continuation of the current detention order,” minus the parts that allowed Clements to live in the community, according to a recent decision from the review board.

Doctors weren’t alone in their concerns, according to the decision. “Counsel for the attorney general supported the hospital position.”

Despite opinions from medical professionals and the ministry responsible for administering the justice system, the board set Clements free.

“In our view the evidence is at best speculative with respect to a potential for serious harm as a result of conduct criminal in nature,” it said in a decision dated Aug. 12. “The board finds that the evidence does not support a conclusion that Mr. Clements represents a significant threat to the safety of the public and accordingly is entitled to be discharged absolutely. Although it may well be in Mr. Clements’ best interest to engage with mental health professionals to clarify a potential mental health diagnosis, that is not the test we are required to apply.”

The decision comes as Canada grapples with the wider issue of how we manage people found not criminally responsible and whether they are being released to the public too soon.

For his part, “Clements indicated that in his view there was no evidence to establish that he constituted a significant threat to the safety of the public and that he was accordingly entitled to be discharged absolutely.”

The five-person panel deciding his fate heard that in February 2019 Clements was found not criminally responsible on charges of making a terrorism hoax and obstructing police.

When he contacted the German consulate in Toronto Dec. 16, 2016, warning of an imminent terror attack in Berlin, “Clements said that he was acting as a facilitator, as he had received this information from a member of a terrorist cell who wanted out,” said the review board decision.

When the Integrated National Security Enforcement Team, Canada’s counter-terrorism outfit, contacted him on Dec. 17, 2016, he “did not seem very coherent” and declined to provide any information about the alleged terrorist hoax. They arrested him.

“On Dec. 19, 2016, while Mr. Clements was in remand custody, a terrorist attack occurred in Berlin causing 12 deaths and dozens of injuries (approximately 50),” said the review board decision.

“A search of Mr. Clements phone and email account on the same day did not show any evidence of foreign communications that would indicate knowledge of the terrorist attack in Berlin.”

When Mounties interviewed him three days later, Clements “advised that a ‘higher power’ had told him about the attacks. He endorsed hearing voices that only he could hear. Both Jesus Christ and the devil spoke to him. He heard the voices first approximately one week before he contacted the consulate,” said the decision.

The decision notes his “current diagnosis is schizophrenia spectrum disorder.”

The psychiatrist who treated Clements just before last month’s hearing pointed to a hospital report that referred to his “history of violence” as well as the seriousness of the terrorism hoax. “He noted that Mr. Clements ‘likely’ suffers from a major mental disorder but the diagnosis has not yet been clarified. He advises that Mr. Clements has no insight into the need for treatment for future risk of violence although on a day-to-day basis he does well.”

A former director of the Rivercity Vineyard Church and Community Centre in Sarnia, which runs a shelter, indicated Clements had been actively involved there as both a volunteer and in a paid position for years. She “described no mental health or management concerns whatsoever concerning Mr. Clements. To the contrary, she described him as an ‘amazing worker’ with a ‘great heart.’”

She called Clements a “puppy dog,” explaining that that he “has been stable for the entirety of the time he has been at the shelter. He has his own private room and there is no limit on how long he may occupy that room so long as he continues to help at the shelter.”

The review board heard that since he was arrested and hospitalized in April, Clements “has been pleasant and sociable with staff and peers. His thoughts were clear and organized” and his “behaviour was not ‘obviously bizarre.’”

Clements testified that “since no one contacted him after the board hearing in April 2022 he thought the matter was concluded,” said the decision, which notes he then went to Halifax for more than a year before returning to Sarnia.

The review board didn’t buy his story about not knowing he had been ordered detained by the hospital. “The only reasonable inference to be drawn is that Mr. Clements was aware of the disposition but was refusing to be bound by it.”

It examined Clements’ “serious history of mental health and substance abuse issues, his lengthy criminal record, including assault, break and enter, and failures to comply, his (previously) paranoid and aggressive behaviour while in detention at the respondent facility, his resistance to treatment, including medications, his moderate to high risk scores on risk assessment tests, his breach of hospital rules, including attempting to abscond, and his lack of insight into the index offence, his condition and his need for treatment.”

It also accepted his psychiatrist’s opinion that Clements “posed a significant threat to public safety based on these factors.”

But board members had “serious concerns” about the conclusion that Clements has a “history of violence.”

“Although there is no doubt that the index offence was extremely serious with a potential for at a minimum serious psychological harm to individuals, there is little outside of that to support a finding that Mr. Clements has a ‘history of violence’ which significantly undermines the opinion of the hospital with respect to significant threat.”

Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our daily newsletter, Posted, here.

OTTAWA — The commission tasked with reviewing judicial compensation says that $414,900 per year isn’t enough to keep the bench attractive to top applicants and recommends the government increase judges’ salaries by at least $28,000.

“The current salary and benefits paid to judges are inadequate,” reads a report by the commission reviewing federally appointed judges’ compensation that was tabled in the House of Commons Wednesday.

“An increase to the judicial salary is required to ensure outstanding candidates continue to be attracted to the judiciary.”

The report recommends boosting judges’ salaries by $28,000 for regular provincial superior and appellate courts as well as federal courts, $30,000 for chief justices and $36,000 for the chief justice of the Supreme Court, all retroactive to April 2024.

Most federally appointed judges currently make $414,900 (except members of the Supreme Court who make $494,100) and chief justices earn about $40,000 more. Their salaries are indexed annually following the industrial aggregate, which generally exceeds the Consumer Price Index.

The commission also recommends increasing the salary of associate judges from 80 per cent to 95 per cent of a regular federally appointed justice.

The report was sent in July to Justice Minister Sean Fraser, who has four months to decide how he will respond to the recommendations impacting over 1,200 judges. The suggested raise would cost the government over $34 million.

The decision is far from simple for Fraser as Prime Minister Mark Carney looks to cut the federal government’s salary and operating costs.

Carney has asked each department to cut their budget by 15 per cent in the next few years amid growing concern over government spending.

In a statement, Fraser’s spokesperson, Jeremy Bellefeuille, said the minister was reviewing the report and would respond in due time.

The commission’s report focuses on a single issue at the centre of a months-long battle between the government and the judiciary: is judges’ annual compensation enough to keep attracting top legal applicants to provincial and federal courts?

As National Post reported in July

, judges’ associations argued magistrates needed a $60,000 raise retroactive to April 2024 to maintain the appeal of a job that is increasingly struggling to attract “outstanding candidates.”

The federal government countered that judges’ salary and benefits — including “one of the best retirement plans in Canada” — did not require a $60,000 “bonus” to keep the job attractive.

Ultimately, the commission’s conclusion fell squarely in the middle. Whereas it agreed with judges that the salary is too low to continue attracting top applicants in the long run, it also found that $60,000 was too much.

“The Commission agrees with the Judiciary that the significant gap between judicial salaries and the private sector comparator warrants an increase to the current judicial salary; however, we do not agree with the amount of the increase proposed by the Judiciary,” reads the report.

“Our recommendation is intended to be fair to the judiciary and to the taxpayer, to strike the right balance between the two, and to be in the public interest.”

The key concern highlighted by both judges’ associations and the commission’s report is that too few “highly qualified” private-sector lawyers are applying to become judges.

That could ultimately lead to a dearth of necessary skills and expertise on the bench in the long term, concluded the three-member Judicial Compensation and Benefits Commission chaired by lawyer and businesswoman Anne Giardini.

The diminishing interest also means vacant positions will be harder and take longer to fill, risking another “crisis” like one in 2023 when the judicial vacancy rate sat at nearly 10 per cent.

“While a shortage has been averted for now, the pressures of rising private sector incomes are such that the ability to maintain an adequate level of private sector appointments to fill judicial vacancies is of ongoing concern. We are persuaded that the effects of past shortages are continuing to rebound within the justice system,” reads the report.

“So while the pool of individuals in the last 4-year period was more than adequate to fill all the positions, we see clear warning signs that salaries are going to be a factor leading to highly qualified private sector lawyers electing not to apply to the judiciary.”

The commission said it was particularly swayed by comments by Ontario Superior Court Chief Justice Geoffrey Morawetz detailing his struggle in convincing private sector lawyers to join the court.

National Post

cnardi@postmedia.com

• Judges say they need a $60,000 raise to attract top talent. The government disagrees
• ‘Very difficult’ to be a Canadian judge and it’s ‘deteriorating,’ says Supreme Court chief justice

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