National Post (National Edition)
Remove judge, inquiry urges
Outrage after ‘knees together’ remark at trial
The Federal Court of Canada judge notorious for asking a teenage sexualassault complainant why she couldn’t just keep her knees together or “skew” her pelvis to foil her alleged attacker should be removed from the bench.
The unanimous recommendation to dump Judge Robin Camp came Wednesday from a five-member inquiry committee of the Canadian Judicial Council after a week of hearings in Calgary in September.
The 64-year-old Camp made headlines not for his conduct on the Federal Court, but for his mishandling of a 2014 sexual-assault trial in the Alberta provincial court about a year before his elevation to the higher court.
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He faced six main allegations, each with multiple parts and all related to remarks he made during the course of the trial — some to the young complainant, some to the Crown attorney who tried valiantly to remind Camp of the state of the law, and some to the accused, Alexander Scott Wagar, whom Camp acquitted with the fatherly admonition that he and his friends be “far more careful” and “far more gentle” with women to “protect” themselves.
But as troubling to the panel were the judge’s comments about now-aged amendments to the Criminal Code (one dates back to 1983) that recognized historical inequity to women in the law and better protected female complainants from discredited stereotypes and the unfair questioning that flowed from it.
At various points in the trial, Camp called that legislation “very, very incursive,” said it prevents otherwise permissible questions “because of contemporary thinking” and that it operates “for better or worse,” and offered the view that no one would argue “the rape shield laws always worked fairly.”
As the committee put it at one point in its 112-page report, Camp’s comments “share the same theme” — his naked disdain “for the evolution of the law of sexual assault … as a product of what he dismissed as ‘contemporary thinking’ …
“It clearly is part and parcel of his resistance to changes in the law meant to protect vulnerable witnesses, to promote women’s equality and to bring integrity to the way in which sexual-assault cases are dealt with by the justice system.”
It’s not, the committee said, that judges must never criticize the law; indeed, constitutional issues may require them to do so.
But Camp’s remarks — for instance, that the rape shield laws “hamstring” the defence — were gratuitous and “stemmed from a limited understanding of what he was so quick to criticize,” the committee said.
“His comments showed disdain for the law” and worse, “an antipathy” to it, even a wistful longing for the legal pendulum to “swing away from the reforms back to the former ways,” when all female complainants were expected to physically resist an attack and to complain immediately afterwards.
Indeed, the report is filled with instances of Camp’s “disdain,” “flippant language,” “harshness” toward the young complainant, and remarks that “belittle and trivialize” the nature of her allegations.
Camp testified in his own defence at the hearing.
There, he was full of apologies and remorse, and spoke glowingly of the course of re-education he had embarked upon with three female experts (a counsellor, a feminist lawyer and a judge who acted as his mentor) in an effort to reform himself.
The three women all testified, too, to his eagerness to learn, his open mind and genuine contrition.
But in his own testimony, the committee noted, Camp showed “he is not as remediated as he professed.”
Where once he’d acknowledged he had sexist attitudes and biases, he now preferred to consider his thinking merely “old-fashioned.” He went out of his way to lecture the committee that boys and men could also be sexually victimized and subjected to stereotypes, which is true of course, but was hardly relevant in the circumstances.
Most alarmingly, even when he offered an apology to the complainant, Camp described her to the committee as a “fragile personality,” a remark that echoed in the room as astonishing condescension, given the struggles the young woman has endured and the grit she demonstrated to testify not just at the original trial, but also at the hearing.
Quoting the decision of another CJC inquiry committee, the panel said that of course judges are “entitled to their own ideas and need not follow the fashion of the day or meet the imperatives of political correctness.
“However, judges cannot adopt a bias that denies the principle of equality before the law and brings their impartiality into question.”
In sum, the committee said, Camp’s most galling failure was his “failure to grasp what is at the core of the judicial role: the imperative to act with impartiality and in a way that respects equality according to law.”
The committee upheld 17 of 21 allegations in full, two in part, and dismissed only two.
Camp has 30 days to make written submissions arguing to keep his $314,000 a year job. The report will then be considered by the full CJC, which is composed of chief judges and associate chief judges from across Canada.
A decision could come as early as January. The CJC has only twice before in its 45-year history recommended the removal of a judge, and both times, the judges resigned before the matter went to a vote in Parliament.