Uncandid Canada

“Hear, ye! Hear, ye! Let freedom ring out for all our brothers and sisters to the north!” The unlikely crier, Buffalo disk jockey Darren McKee, stands near the Peace Bridge that links New York State with Ontario, bellowing excerpts from a Washington Post article through a bullhorn to Canadians on the far shore. WXYT, a Detroit AM station, provides Canadians in neighboring Windsor with an hour-long reading of the same article. The show, seditiously dubbed “Radio Free Windsor,” has a loftier purpose, according to Michael Packer, WXYT’s director of operations: “It’s a reminder to the American side of the importance of freedom of the press.”

Such antics are also a reminder that Americans and Canadians are separated by more than a 5,527-mile border. The sniping is aimed at Canada’s attempts to halt local dissemination of U.S. press reports about one of the most shocking sets of murders in Canadian history: the brutal torture and slaughter of two teenage girls allegedly by an attractive, seemingly perfect young couple. To ensure a fair trial for defendant Paul Teale, 29, who is also charged with 50 sexual assaults, a Canadian court has banned detailed reporting on the murder cases and on the earlier trial of Teale’s wife Karla Homolka, 23. But now that information has seeped across the border via press accounts, fax machine and computer, the dispute is turning prickly as U.S. allegiance to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” brushes up against Canadian fealty to “peace, order and good government.”

The controversy first began to simmer last July, when Ontario Judge Francis Kovacs banned substantive coverage of Homolka’s trial and barred foreign journalists from his courtroom. Even after Homolka was sentenced to only 12 years for the barbaric deaths of two girls, the press could not report the obvious: that she had struck a plea. Canadian journalists who had attended the trial itched to write, as the Post eventually did, about how Leslie Mahaffy, 14, was hacked to bits and encased in concrete blocks, and Kristen French, 15, was held hostage for almost two weeks before her body was deposited in a dump. Yet no publication breached the ban.

Then two weeks ago, the Washington Post published a detailed account of the two murders and disclosed that there had been a third victim: Homolka’s sister Tammy, 14, who like the others wound up dead after Homolka and Teale reportedly drugged and sexually assaulted her. When the Buffalo News and the Detroit News and Free Press reprinted the Post story, Canadians streamed across the border to snap up thousands of copies. They took far fewer home. Canadian customs inspectors limited travelers to one copy and confiscated the rest.

The Post story broke the reticence of other U.S. news organizations — and the war began. When the New York Times carried a story last week, 600 copies were turned away at the border. (This TIME story will not appear in Canada.) U.S. TV networks and affiliates also got in on the act. While Canada’s cable operators blocked access to their 7.5 million subscribers, nothing could be done to prevent news reports from being beamed down to dishes from satellites.

Students, meanwhile, plugged into the Internet computer network, punching up alt.fan.karla homolka to get the latest. Last week officials at three large universities shut down students’ access to that Internet bulletin board.

Yet the harder Canadian officials struggle to hold back the tide, the more ridiculous the battle seems. “People are only talking about Teale because of the ban,” says Bob Levin, an American journalist who is an assistant managing editor at the Toronto newsweekly MacLean’s. “The ban has backfired.” Some Canadian journalists think a review of such restrictions is long overdue. Jim Coyle of the Ottawa Citizen says the ban is “based on the insulting assumption that the public is a pack of morons who would be irretrievably tainted should they know certain facts.”

But many Canadians point to differences between the two court systems. Brian Greenspan of the Canadian Council of Criminal Defense Lawyers observes that Canadian lawyers cannot vet prospective jurors as rigorously as U.S. attorneys, “so we tend to be more concerned about what people know.”

Several news organizations plan to appeal the ban on Jan. 31. Meanwhile, Canadians will have to wait to learn the extent of Teale’s alleged depravities — or stay tuned to points south.