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Christie Blatchford: Bad logic behind light Caledonia sentence
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Christie Blatchford, National Post
Monday, Jan. 2, 2012
When in court in Cayuga, Ont., two days before Christmas, a young native man was sentenced to less than two years in prison for the near-fatal beating of builder Sam Gualtieri, something called the Gladue decision was cited by the judge.
It mitigated the sentence given the young man, a 22-year-old named Richard Smoke, who was convicted of an aggravated assault the judge described as “just a notch below culpable homicide.”
It had something of the flavour of the person who kills his parents and then throws himself upon the mercy of the court as an orphan: Mr. Smoke, went this logic, nearly beat Mr. Gualtieri to death because of the pain he had suffered as a native person in a racist culture and therefore should qualify for a lighter sentence.
For the record, Mr. Gualtieri, now 56, was in the fall of 2007 a nimble man who was building a house for his daughter Michelle in a subdivision called Stirling Woods in the nearby town of Caledonia, site of a native occupation that then had been on the boil for more than a year.
Stirling Woods wasn’t the occupied site; Douglas Creek Estates, less than a kilometre away, was. But though the worst of the violence was over, tensions were still high in the small town, and one September morning, native protesters had moved onto the Stirling Woods subdivision.
On Sept. 13, 2007, Mr. Gualtieri and three men from his work crew saw shadows moving inside the house he was building. He rushed in. By the time his workers arrived, Mr. Smoke was standing over Mr. Gualtieri, lying battered and bloody on the floor, with a two-by-four.
He was left with broken bones and a permanent brain injury, unable since the attack to work in construction.
R. v. Gladue was a 1999 decision by the Supreme Court of Canada which formalized the principles judges must use in sentencing aboriginal offenders in line with changes made just three years before to the Criminal Code of Canada.
Those changes, brought in under then Liberal justice minister Allan Rock, were fairly sweeping. Among other things, they codified for the first time the purpose of sentencing, acknowledged the failure of prison to rehabilitate offenders and ushered in conditional sentencing (where sentences are served in the community, not jail) and enshrined in law the notion that judges must pay “particular attention to the circumstances of aboriginal offenders” in order to correct the over-representation of natives in the justice system.
Ontario Superior Court Judge Alan Whitten had no choice but to take into account the Gladue decision, which has been cited hundreds of times since the high court ruling. Judges who don’t are rapped on the knuckles.
In fact, that’s how the Gladue case itself came before the Supreme Court.
Jamie Tanis Gladue was an aboriginal teenager when on her 19th birthday, Sept. 17, 1995, she stabbed her boyfriend Reuben Beaver — first with a paring knife, and then, chasing him some 60 feet down a hallway, with a large knife. The fatal stab wound, to Mr. Beaver’s left chest, penetrated his heart.
As Ms. Gladue made her way back to her apartment, a neighbour heard her say, “I got you, you f—ing bastard.”
She was drinking at the time, though five months’ pregnant with her second child; she had a blood alcohol reading of between 155 and 165 milligrams (well above the 80 usually considered the too-drunk-to-drive limit). She wasn’t afraid of Mr. Beaver; rather the opposite, the judge found, though he granted she was provoked by Mr. Beaver’s infidelity and by him telling her she was fat and ugly.
The trial judge noted that both victim and perpetrator were aboriginals, but they weren’t living on a reserve, rather in a townhouse complex in Nanaimo. He found there weren’t “special circumstances because of their aboriginal status and so I am not giving any special consideration to their background.”
Neither did Ms. Gladue’s lawyer raise her aboriginal status at sentencing; no other submissions were made on this issue.
Still, the trial judge took into account the young woman’s age, lack of a major criminal record (she had an impaired driving conviction), her supportive family and the fact that while on bail, she’d upgraded her education and gone for alcohol abuse counselling.
He hardly hammered her, but rather gave her a three-year sentence — on the light side, surely, given Ms. Gladue had killed a 20-year-old.
British Columbia’s Court of Appeal dismissed Ms. Gladue’s appeal of her sentence, and so, ultimately did the high court, which pronounced the sentence “not unreasonable” — after it spent 40-odd pages spelling out how the trial judge and the appeal court had failed to take into account “many of the relevant factors” Parliament had wanted judges to consider when sentencing aboriginal offenders.
These factors, the high court said, must be considered “even where counsel do not adduce this evidence,” or where the offender is unrepresented, and regardless of whether he lives on a reserve or in a city.
In Mr. Smoke’s case, the court was told his grandparents had residential school experience, that native students at his high school had been affected by racism during the Caledonia dispute and that the atmosphere in the community may have forced him into uncharacteristic behaviour: In other words, they made him do it and now they, not he, should pay.
During his sentencing, most of Mr. Smoke’s supporters refused to stand when Judge Whitten came into or left the courtroom. No one appeared to say a word to them about it.
Perhaps some day, they or their fellows will pay the Supreme Court the same courtesy.
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Monday, January 9, 2012
Never Too Late To Correct A Mistake
Message bodyTime to undo multiculturalism mistake
Salim Mansur
Yesterday at 8:00 PM
Forty years ago, in October 1971, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau introduced multiculturalism as an official policy for Canada.
Seventeen years later, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and the Progressive Conservatives turned Trudeau’s policy into the Multiculturalism Act of 1988.
In other words, it was not merely Trudeau but Canada’s political elite, supported by the intellectual and media elites of the country, who adopted without much questioning a policy that was, at best, dubious and deeply flawed as the law of the land.
Canada was the first of the advanced liberal democracies in the West to turn multiculturalism — an idea without philosophical substance — into official policy.
Four decades later, some of those democracies — Germany, Britain, France, the Netherlands — have openly expressed regrets as their elected leaders publicly admitted the failure of official multiculturalism in securing social harmony, or advancing national interest.
In my recently published book — Delectable Lie: A liberal repudiation of multiculturalism — I discuss at some length why this policy reflected an act of bad faith on the part of Trudeau and company, and how it continues to be detrimental to the vitality of a liberal democracy.
The bad faith resided in the ridiculous proposition that all cultures are equal. This is the keystone of multiculturalism as an idea, and it is untenable.
Individuals are born equal or, as the American Declaration of Independence states as self-evident truth, “all men are created equal.”
Inequalities then among individuals born equal result from circumstances (natural or man-made) and history, and how such inequalities might then be dealt with emerge as part of an ongoing political discussion.
But cultures — by definition, culture represents the shared values, beliefs and customs of a collective — are not and never have been equal.
The inherent bad faith of multiculturalism’s proponents is in obscuring the historical reality of cultures being unequal and frequently engaged in conflict.
It is absurd to argue the culture of the Huns was equal to that of the mighty Roman Empire, even in its decline.
It is equally absurd to state in our time that the culture of the Saudi Arabs — or the Taliban, or Muslims from Pakistan, Iran, Somalia etc. — is in any way equal to and deserving of equal respect as the culture of an advanced liberal democracy, such as Canada, before it was smitten by the dogma of multiculturalism.
Common sense recoils from such an absurd proposition. It takes someone with a college degree to accept silliness of this nature as higher knowledge.
In fairness to Trudeau, it should be noted, that late in life when invited by the speaker to visit Parliament in Ottawa and meet with some parliamentarians, the former prime minister expressed his misgivings about multiculturalism.
Trudeau was asked to comment on how, as a result of his policy, most new immigrants ranked their ethnic-based cultural identity ahead of Canadian identity. He indicated his sadness, admitting this is not what he had wanted.
Four decades later, most Canadians will be relieved if their political leaders have courage to do the right thing when it comes to multiculturalism, which sits as a suffocating weight over their liberal democratic culture, and have it repealed from Canada’s statutes.
Salim Mansur
Yesterday at 8:00 PM
Forty years ago, in October 1971, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau introduced multiculturalism as an official policy for Canada.
Seventeen years later, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and the Progressive Conservatives turned Trudeau’s policy into the Multiculturalism Act of 1988.
In other words, it was not merely Trudeau but Canada’s political elite, supported by the intellectual and media elites of the country, who adopted without much questioning a policy that was, at best, dubious and deeply flawed as the law of the land.
Canada was the first of the advanced liberal democracies in the West to turn multiculturalism — an idea without philosophical substance — into official policy.
Four decades later, some of those democracies — Germany, Britain, France, the Netherlands — have openly expressed regrets as their elected leaders publicly admitted the failure of official multiculturalism in securing social harmony, or advancing national interest.
In my recently published book — Delectable Lie: A liberal repudiation of multiculturalism — I discuss at some length why this policy reflected an act of bad faith on the part of Trudeau and company, and how it continues to be detrimental to the vitality of a liberal democracy.
The bad faith resided in the ridiculous proposition that all cultures are equal. This is the keystone of multiculturalism as an idea, and it is untenable.
Individuals are born equal or, as the American Declaration of Independence states as self-evident truth, “all men are created equal.”
Inequalities then among individuals born equal result from circumstances (natural or man-made) and history, and how such inequalities might then be dealt with emerge as part of an ongoing political discussion.
But cultures — by definition, culture represents the shared values, beliefs and customs of a collective — are not and never have been equal.
The inherent bad faith of multiculturalism’s proponents is in obscuring the historical reality of cultures being unequal and frequently engaged in conflict.
It is absurd to argue the culture of the Huns was equal to that of the mighty Roman Empire, even in its decline.
It is equally absurd to state in our time that the culture of the Saudi Arabs — or the Taliban, or Muslims from Pakistan, Iran, Somalia etc. — is in any way equal to and deserving of equal respect as the culture of an advanced liberal democracy, such as Canada, before it was smitten by the dogma of multiculturalism.
Common sense recoils from such an absurd proposition. It takes someone with a college degree to accept silliness of this nature as higher knowledge.
In fairness to Trudeau, it should be noted, that late in life when invited by the speaker to visit Parliament in Ottawa and meet with some parliamentarians, the former prime minister expressed his misgivings about multiculturalism.
Trudeau was asked to comment on how, as a result of his policy, most new immigrants ranked their ethnic-based cultural identity ahead of Canadian identity. He indicated his sadness, admitting this is not what he had wanted.
Four decades later, most Canadians will be relieved if their political leaders have courage to do the right thing when it comes to multiculturalism, which sits as a suffocating weight over their liberal democratic culture, and have it repealed from Canada’s statutes.
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