What’s terror? Who’s a terrorist? And other aftermath questions…

It can’t happen here. It won’t happen here. It — almost — did. But what is “it”? And how do we protect ourselves against whatever it is? On Friday night, I was at Scotiabank Centre enjoying the Mooseheads-Shawinigan Cataractes Quebec Major Junior Hockey league game. During a commercial lull — the game was televised nationally as part […]

Bourque, Zahef-Bibeau, personal consequences and public accountability

There is little doubt re-watching video of Justin Bourque chillingly describe the targeted killing of their husbands, sons, fathers — “It’s sad,” Bourque explains blandly. “They might have had a wife and kids, but every soldier has a wife and kids, right?… It’s all about whose side you chose, and they chose the wrong one” […]

Jian Ghomeshi, Gerald Regan and the court of public opinion

What a wild, weird week! The bodies from the Parliament Hill shootings and the Quebec murder-by-car had not been buried, their meaning not yet processed, when the CBC announced last Sunday it was severing ties with its most famous radio host, Jian Ghomeshi, for reasons unspecified. By that evening, Ghomeshi had specified his version in […]

The girl whose name we know but now can’t say…

I can’t tell you her name. You know it already. She’s the teenaged girl who committed suicide after an alleged sexual assault at a house party was photographed and posted online, triggering months of cyber-bullying but no criminal charges against those allegedly responsible. She is the girl whose bereaved parents went public with her story […]

Crime and the young… discuss

Crime and the young. It’s complicated, far more so than any tough-on-crime Tory politician could — or would probably want to — capture. Consider last week’s police blotter. In Cole Harbour, a 17-year-old boy faces charges of possessing and distributing child pornography. In London, Ontario, a 19-year-old computer science student is charged with electronically breaking […]

Peter MacKay has never smoked dope. Pity

So Peter MacKay has never smoked dope. Perhaps that’s his problem. If, indeed, he’s telling the truth. Last week, the justice minister got his knickers in a knot when Liberal leader Justin Trudeau’s matter-of-factly disclosed he had — like 39 per cent of Canadians — enjoyed the occasional puff from a joint, most recently at […]

Feeling 'compassion fatigue' for Trevor Zinck

So… Trevor Zinck has “compassion fatigue.” His problem is not that he defrauded taxpayers of $9,000 by stealing money destined for charities, and sponsorships, and poured it down the bottomless drain of casino gambling. Nor is his problem that he suffers from an all-too-commonplace gambling addiction, which he needs to acknowledge and seek treatment for. […]

The hit man, the sexual assaulter, the courts and justice

It’s been an unsatisfying week for the be-seen aspect of that justice-being-done-and-being-seen-to-be-done shibboleth. The more we learned the more clear it is we still don’t know all we need to know about two high-profile court cases to satisfy ourselves justice has been served. Let’s start with the report of the Commission for Public Complaints Against […]

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 […]

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 […]