Over the last two instalments, comments have been made about six British Columbia youths - children really - who died in a fiery car crash. The first one revealed how they met their death and the second one centred on the funeral of the first of the six to be buried. Today, an excerpt from From Short Pants to Striped Trousers: An Ordinary Life in Turbulent and Changing Times in Vancouver by Wallace Craig, a retired BC provincial court judge. His comments fit perfectly into what this scribe feels is partly a cause of the death of the six children referred to previously.
Justice Without Law and Order
Now that I am no longer a judge, I feel compelled to reflect on justice and law and order in Vancouver. To do so is to wonder about the significance of changes rooted in the '60s and '70s: old-fashioned expectations about private and public morality worn down by emerging self-indulgence; civility, politeness and self-discipline shouldered aside by a growing number of loutish, loud-mouthed practitioners of in-your-face speech and body language; and particularly, the growing trend in families to allow teenage children "too much too soon," their only rite of passage being a driver's test at age 16, with the remainder of their supposed coming-of-age taking place in public schools where discipline has become a student option rather than an enforceable expectation.
In my long look back to law school in 1951, so necessary to understand the present, I see a ghostly host of lawyers and judges who lived through or grew up in the Great Depression and the Second World War believing that the criminal law and the criminal justice system must produce law and order, and that violent behaviour was anathema.
Today we have a new generation of lawyers and judges, too many of whom, it seems to me, see no evil in criminal behaviour and violence, extrapolating into the assessment of an offender and his criminal act the notion that deep down he is like the rest of us and that his redemption will be lost if he is punished by being sent to jail. In all courts in British Columbia there is a growing trend of assiduous concern for the plight of the guilty, in some cases characterisation of the perpetrator of a crime as a victim alongside his chosen victim. Punishment is being avoided, even if doing so exacerbates the plight of the victim and lessens public confidence in the criminal justice system.
Assiduous concern for a convicted person is not the invocation of mercy as part of the sentencing process - rather, it is a gross distortion of the role of the courts and an avoidance of the due regard and purpose of the criminal law being, at least notionally, to protect law-abiding citizens. Our judges frequently fall back on two propositions in allowing evil acts to go unpunished: first, that there is no consequential deterrent value in jail sentences and that the virtue they find in the offender will be lost if he is put in jail; and, second, that "the criminal justice system was never designed or intended to heal the suffering of the victims of crime." This reference to victims of crime was put another way recently - "… that a criminal law sentence, whether it be in youth court or adult, was never designed to heal suffering."
I say that the measure of a sentence should never intensify what for many victims has been a life sentence imposed on them by a criminal. Each victim is the luckless surrogate of the rest of society, and the suffering of each victim of crime haunts all of us because we know that but for the grace of God, it could have been us. Each time a criminal is coddled, the predators among us take comfort.
If a jail sentence cannot be avoided, this same generation of judges will resort to equating a lengthy sentence to an act of vengeance and retribution in which they will not participate. Too often do trial judges shy away from jail sentences actually measured against the ferocity of criminals. Those judges who are not afraid to grasp the nettle of sentencing know that even though they have listened to witnesses and considered the gravity of the facts, a sentence measured against the cruelty of the offender will be viewed on appeal as harsh and excessive unless it falls within ordained limits set by the Court of Appeal.
Yet we are confronted with increasingly serious acts of individual or gang violence, trafficking in hard drugs and property crime. If the reality in Vancouver is that crime pays and is without punishment, and I believe it is, then the criminal justice system is truly a tattered scarecrow.
I question whether our judiciary knows or cares about the Skid Row of downtown Vancouver, where virtually all commercial premises are now equipped with heavy duty bars and steel closures, a last resort in a losing war against rampant property crime. It is a terrible metaphor: decent citizens behind bars while rogues they fear prowl about on probation or while serving sentences in the community.
Retired judge Wallace Craig is to be commended for his bold comments based on years of service on the bench facing the very things he writes about.
There is no doubt that it was the era of Prime Minister Trudeau ['60s and '70s] with its liberalism approach to every serious situation in Canada that spawned the difficulties that this country - in particular Vancouver - now faces. In addition to the losing battle against crime, communities across the country must put up with the laxity in sexual preferences with emphasis on the right of homosexuals to promote their lurid, contemptible act in full view of public. The so-called gay parades that seem to be increasing annually are proof positive that society has sunk to a low ebb. Homosexuals are free to practice their perverted version of sexual intercourse in the privacy of their own homes. They need not flaunt it with parades. In my opinion, the troubles of this country began when Trudeau and his Liberal government moved Canada toward communism via the so-called Charter of Rights and Freedoms [in my book that ill-conceived piece of junk should more correctly be termed the charter of rights and wrongs (I purposely do not capitalise the title as I feel strongly that to do so brings discredit to the words used in that title)]. This country, despite what some left-leaning, namby-pamby cry baby liberals might think to the contrary, did just fine without a socialist death sentence being imposed on the country by a few misguided fools who call themselves Members of Parliament.
Canada needs more solid, sensible judges such as Wallace Craig.
After having read the above excerpt, I know that he is far too smart to consider politics but were he to take a run at the sordid political arena, he would make a wonderful prime minister, or if not, a damned fine justice minister.
Bob Orrick is a private tutor of English grammar, literature, poetry and Canadian history to off-shore youngsters. His pupils hail from such places as Taiwan, China, Japan, Hong Kong, Korea and Venezuela. He was previously in international marketing, was a ministerial assistant to a provincial cabinet minister, spent a few years as a reporter then editor of a community newspaper and enjoyed a career in the Royal Canadian Navy.
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