The curious case of the incurious justice minister
So federal justice minister Rob Nicholson isn’t the tiniest bit curious/concerned/appalled about what went wrong, and why, and what needs to be done to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Last week, the Supreme Court of Canada threw out Fenwick MacIntosh’s 2011 conviction on 18 charges of sexual assault and gross indecency, not because he didn’t do terrible deeds to at least four boys back in Port Hawkesbury in the 1970s but because the federal justice department, Canada Customs, Passport Canada, the department of foreign affairs, the RCMP and Nova Scotia’s Public Prosecution Service botched his case so badly MacIntosh’s rights had been violated beyond the possibility of a fair trial.
The minister sees no need for a public inquiry.
Really?
After the boys came forward with their allegations as adults in the 1990s, the RCMP investigated. Officers laid charges in December 1995. By then, however, MacIntosh had left Canada for a job in India.
It took the Mounties a full year and a half to alert Canada Customs to watch for him. It took another year for Nova Scotia’s prosecution service to ask Ottawa to ask India to send him home to Canada for trial. And then another five years — yes, five, count ’em! — for Ottawa to prepare the extradition request. And — hold it, we’re not even half done yet — another three years for Ottawa to deliver the request to New Delhi.
During this time, MacIntosh, a known fugitive from Canadian justice, got his passport renewed twice. When Passport Canada turned down one application, MacIntosh appealed. Passport Canada didn’t show up at the hearing and a federal court judge “temporarily” overturned its decision. Passport Canada apparently never followed up.
In fact, MacIntosh traveled back and forth between India and Canada on at least three occasions without even being questioned by authorities.
And yet, Rob Nicolson doesn’t believe there are any lessons to be learned from a full public airing of how this travesty of justice happened?
Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter has promised an “eyes wide open” inquiry into the province’s role in all of this, which is welcome. But given all of the federal agencies involved, it isn’t nearly good enough.
Copyright 2013 Stephen Kimber
Rehtaeh Parsons, the media and social media: it’s complicated
It’s complicated.
The Canadian Psychiatric Society, among others, publishes guidelines for reporting on youth suicide. Don’t put the word “suicide” in the headline, it says. Don’t give such stories undue prominence. Don’t describe the method. Don’t glorify the victim.
The guidelines are designed to reduce the very real risk of copycats.
We know many media outlets violated those guidelines while reporting Rehtaeh Parsons’ suicide.
We can’t know — yet — whether that will lead more young people to kill themselves. But we also can’t know whether the avalanche of publicity about this horrific incident will encourage as many or more parents to ask their kids the right questions before it’s too late, or give some troubled kids the courage to seek the help they need.
What we do know is that publicity about her case has triggered a much-needed public debate about youth sexual assault, cyber-bullying and teen suicide.
It’s complicated.
I, for one, worry about the mob mentality unleashed by publicity about Rehtaeh Parsons’ suicide. Too many people have been too quick to leap to conclusions based on too little real evidence. Too many people have been too willing to assume they know all they need to know to become judge, jury and executioner — of the justice system, of the school system, of the boys allegedly responsible.
And yet, I also have to acknowledge that same social media mobilization not only forced the reopening of the criminal investigation of Rehtaeh’s alleged sexual assault but has also sparked a broader review of how the system worked, or didn’t, and has even led to proposals for new laws, including how to deal with distributing intimate photos without permission.
It’s complicated.
Ask Adam Barnes. The 19-year-old Cole Harbour youth was among those “outed” as one of Rehtaeh Parsons attackers. Vigilantes distributed his photo online. Though he says he wasn’t even at the party where the assault allegedly occurred, Barnes now fears for his life. “I always have to worry about who recognizes me,” he told CBC News last week. “I always have to look out behind my back.”
In our rush to end online bullying and win justice for Rehtaeh, will we become the new bullies?
It is complicated.
Copyright 2013 Stephen Kimber
Russell MacKinnon should have gone to jail
What was he thinking? That he could baffle, buffalo, bamboozle past way too many inconvenient contradictions from too many witnesses with too little to gain to lie about what he’d done? That the law wouldn’t apply to him because he’d been an MLA and Liberal cabinet minister?
On Friday—after four days of a scheduled five-day trial and in the middle of his own credulity-stretching testimony—Russell MacKinnon caved, signed a hastily cobbled together one-page written statement of agreed facts and copped to a plea of a breach of the public trust.
By the end of the day and after an apology that wasn’t—“I would like to apologize for allowing the matter to come this far”—MacKinnon managed to walk away from it all with no jail time. Just a ruler-to-the-knuckles eight-month conditional sentence.
Huh?
Let’s recap.
In 2006, MLA MacKinnon submitted $3,400 in receipts for work done by constituency secretary Nicole Campbell. The problems: Campbell never did the work and never received the money. MacKinnon did.
He also submitted $7,500 in receipts for work done by George MacKeigan, his executive assistant. Again, MacKeigan never saw the cash; MacKinnon kept it.
Four years later—after an auditor general’s report triggered an investigation that led Canada Revenue Agency to issue T4A slips to MacKinnon’s former aides for the payments they’d never been paid—the whole sordid mess unraveled.
At that point, MacKinnon doubled down on his deceit, showing up on the doorsteps of his former aides with cash peace offerings to make his wrongs right.
Even after that didn’t wash, MacKinnon still had the audacity to take up valuable court time with his far-fetched versions and that-never-happened stories.
Until late Thursday when his wife, NDP MLA Michele Raymond, and his lawyer, Joel Pink, decided Judge Felix Cacchione wasn’t buying the soap MacKinnon was selling.
“You watch your client, you watch the body language of the judge and you try to make a determination as to how the judge is reacting to the evidence,” Pink explained later.
Deal time.
Russell MacKinnon should have gone to jail.
Not so much for what he did. But for what he didn’t do. Apologize. And take real responsibility for his actions.
He didn't. Pity.
Copyright 2013 Stephen Kimber
What would the Former Mike Duffy say to Now Senator Mike?
The old Young Mike Duffy would have been all over it.
A Senator playing fast and loose with parliamentary rules of residence, claiming as his full-time home a modest bungalow of a summer cottage that hasn’t seen a snowplow in a year’s worth of winters.
A Senator pocketing more than $30,000 for the inconvenience of residing in rustic, rural Cavendish, P.E.I., 1,333 km (as the Google crow flies) from his Senate workplace at 111 Wellington Street in Ottawa—while actually bedding down in a comfortable Ottawa suburb.
Not to forget the spectacle of a Senator—having been caught with his fingers in the fudging and futzing jar—applying for a fast-tracked Prince Edward Island health card in order to make wrong appear right.
The former Mike Duffy would have been in his element.
One has to—almost—feel sorry for the old New Mike Duffy, now being brought low by all those new Old Mike Duffys.
Young Mike Duffy launched his career in the mid-1960s as a deejay—the “Round Mound of Sound”—at Amherst radio station CKDH. After discovering his nose for news, Duffy moved on to then-Halifax station CHNS where his gleefully non-partisan, neither-fear-nor-favour scoops from City Hall and the provincial legislature earned him an enviable reportorial reputation, which earned him a position in CBC’s parliamentary bureau, which earned him his own star billing at CTV, which…Well, that’s where things soured.
Duffy began to believe his own publicity hype—and in his own self-worth. He lobbied for his Senate appointment and, when he landed it in 2008, assumed himself entitled to his entitlements. Including $900 a month to live part of the year in Ottawa where, of course, he has lived virtually all of the years since the 1970s.
New Mike Duffy, of course, is less than amused by his latest turn of misfortune, chiding reporters after a speech in Halifax last week to do some “adult” work instead of bothering him with trivial matters about where he lives and how much he claims for not living there.
Sorry Mike. Those who live by the microphone sometimes get hit on the head with it on their way out the door.
So long, Senator.
Copyright 2013 Stephen Kimber
Still no Desmond Day… or any day to honour African Nova Scotians
Another February. Another African Heritage Month. Another plaintive plea—from me and a few lonely others—for an official day to honour Viola Desmond’s contribution to the human rights movement in Canada.
On Nov. 8, 1946, Desmond, a pioneering black businesswoman from Halifax, found herself stuck in New Glasgow overnight. She decided to see a movie. The Dark Mirror, starring one of her favorite actresses, Olivia de Haviland, was playing at the Roseland Theatre. She sat, by chance, in a whites-only section. Informed she would have to move, Desmond refused. She was dragged from the theatre, clapped in jail, hauled before a magistrate, tried without benefit of a lawyer, summarily convicted of failing to pay a one-cent (!) amusement tax and fined $20.
Although an appeal of her conviction ultimately failed on a technically, Desmond’s spontaneous, principled stand helped energize the not-over-yet fight for equal rights in this province —nine years before Rosa Parks equally symbolic refusal to sit in her “proper” place on a bus is credited with sparking the American civil rights movement.
Desmond’s importance has belatedly begun to be acknowledged. In 2010, the Nova Scotia government publicly apologized and officially pardoned her for her “crime.”
That same year, a Tory backbencher introduced a motion in the legislature to make Nov. 8 Viola Desmond Day. The bill passed second reading.
And then…
Nothing.
African Nova Scotian Affairs Minister Percy Paris disappeared the bill into the black hole of “community consultation”—not on how best to honour Desmond but on the generically correct issue of “how to establish a lasting form of recognition that would honour the contributions and experiences of African Nova Scotians.”
No one seems quite certain what happened after that, except there is still no day to honour Desmond… or any other African Nova Scotian civil rights pioneer.
“We have an apology, a pardon and a Canada postage stamp,” notes Ron Caplan, the Cape Breton historian who published a book about Desmond written by her sister and continues to champion the idea of a Viola Desmond Day. “We have two books and we even have annual celebrations of a Viola Desmond Day at [Toronto’s] Ryerson University.” But we still don’t have our own, teachable-moment Viola Desmond Day here in Nova Scotia.
It’s past time.
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Copyright 2013 Stephen Kimber
The Ryan case again: it’s justice but is it just?
“You obviously have something against Nicole Ryan,” declared a reader of my column last week. In it, I’d questioned the Supreme Court’s decision not retry Ryan on charges she’d hired a hit man to kill her husband. “I'm not sure what it is,” the reader continued, “but it was extremely distressing to deal with the fact that you’re now on the side of the abusers.”
That reader certainly wasn’t alone in extrapolating wildly from what I wrote.
I shouldn’t be surprised.
The case raises complex, emotionally-charged issues about spousal abuse, and the ways in which the courts deal with men and women in relationships who are accused of crimes against one another.
While some women’s advocates saw my merely asking why the courts had branded Ryan “violent, abusive and controlling” without ever having heard his version of events tantamount to supporting abusive men, men’s rights crusaders bulled past my caveats (“I don’t know whether to believe Michael Ryan’s counter-claims…”) and declared all men “victims of abuse as they endure false allegations by disgruntled ex’s and a gender-biased judicial system.”
While those debates are worth having, this specific cases raises specific questions requiring specific answers.
There is, for example, the question the court itself raised: how did the RCMP respond—and not respond—to Nicole Ryan’s pleas for protection from her husband? Provincial Justice Minister Ross Landry is wrong to insist the RCMP be allowed to investigate itself, even initially. We have too much history of police protecting their own to have faith in an internal review.
Then there is the question the decision itself raised: how can the Supreme Court conclude the trial judge shouldn’t have allowed Ryan’s lawyer to argue “duress”—the basis for her initial acquittal—but then decide not to order a retrial?
The answer seems related to my initial question: how could the courts brand Michael Ryan violent, abusive and controlling without having heard his testimony?
If he is all of those things, of course, then clearly Nicole Ryan has "suffered enough."
But without having heard directly from Ryan—and being able to cross-examine his testimony—how can the court decide that this non accused, this "intended victim" is guilty of the most heinous allegations.
Senior Crown Attorney Peter Craig is right. It isn’t the Crown’s responsibility to protect the reputation of non-accused individuals—even intended victims—caught up in criminal cases. Their job is to make the best legal case.
But when the courts themselves draw damning conclusions about the reputation of someone who is not accused based on that very lack of testimony, we need to ask, is it just?
Copyright 2013 Stephen Kimber
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About
STEPHEN KIMBER, a Professor of Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax, is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He is the author of one novel -- Reparations -- and seven non-fiction books.
Buy his books at Amazon.