Blackmail‽

Welcome back to Canadian Criminal Law 101, class. Today we're going to talk about blackmail - which is really just a flavour of "extortion". Once again, I remind you that I am not a lawyer and that I learned this stuff about an hour before writing about it, so there may be some errors here (which is why I link to things written by actual lawyers, to corroborate what I am telling you). If you are a criminal law expert and would like to correct me, please feel free.We've actually talked about extortion before - probably more than once, but my favourite example is the time Bill tried to extort money from the board of the International Plowing Match. Usually, Bill aims his efforts outward, but today, Bill is attempting to blackmail someone in his inner circle (or, at least, someone who used to be in his inner circle). Criminal Code 346 (1) - ExtortionExtortion (which includes blackmail) is an indictable offence. When we think about extortion, we often think about mob thugs taking money…