You be the judge

Federal Court Justice Robin Camp and his wife Maryann arrive at a Canadian Judicial Council inquiry in 2016.

We have observed the takedown of a Canadian judge in the name of improving our judicial system. However, this public humiliation will have the opposite effect.

Federal judge Robin Camp resigned recently after a majority of senior federal judges across the country recommended his removal. These senior judges concluded the judge, whose impugned “knees together” comment is now well known, “acted in a manner that seriously undermined public confidence in the judiciary.”

There was no evidence of actual undermining of anything. The spectacle did show the effectiveness of gender advocacy. The witness, individual accusers, commentators, attorney general of Alberta (who instigated the review), federal justice minister and majority of members of the Inquiry Committee are women.

The steady one-sided drip of public commentary by activists throughout the investigation sealed the outcome. The simplistic, but perilous, “#I Believe You” campaign ran alongside. It calls all sexual assault complainants “survivors.” When told “believing is sweeping across Alberta” and “believing is a powerful defence against sexual assault,” it was easy to forget this is about an errant judge.

Other judges were named and shamed for similar transgressions. Years ago, a Quebec judge’s “aggravating lack of sensitivity” — he commented during a trial that some women could “sink to depths to which even the vilest man could not sink” — forced his resignation. Most took that as a throwaway comment, exasperation of the female accused’s extreme violence in the evidence paraded before him.

Consent is virtually always the central factual issue in sexual assault trials, where there are only two mutually loathing witnesses. Many provisions in the criminal code address consent, which is complicated, dynamic, nuanced and case-specific. All judges must be free to ask questions to discern it. They must clarify, test and understand contradictory evidence. They assiduously weigh witness credibility.

The danger of gender politics driving this overhaul of law and judicial system is that pickets and protests instill in judges fear of public ignominy and career forfeiture. To question anything complainants say will provoke the wrath of feminists who anoint all female complainants as survivors who must be believed.

This judicial fear will haunt the mists of consent and create a presumption of guilt. Legal presumptions of innocence and reasonable doubt, which legitimately belong with accused persons, will bend to complainants. More innocent men will be convicted and jailed up to 10 years.

For 12 years, I served as a Justice of the Peace. I saw genderinspired injustice and it most assuredly is not something to which we should want to return. The caseload primarily involved conducting bail hearings for individuals charged with fresh offences. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, police forces followed a politically driven zero tolerance policy in domestic conflicts. If a woman complained about a man, that man was invariably arrested and charged. And presumed guilty and dangerous. legislation was enacted. Women could simply call the police and claim they feared a man. The man did not know of any application for such an order. So he could not participate or defend himself in the process. Emergency protection orders were almost always granted at the woman’s request. Order in hand, police showed up and forcibly and instantly removed the man from the home on little more evidence than the woman saying she “did not feel comfortable with him around.” I recall numerous cases where women used emergency protection orders to blackmail, settle arguments, defeat child access orders or break up with their boyfriends.

These laws and enforcement were profoundly sexist and unfair. Police did not question their role in that callous gender-biased system at the time. While today police show greater objectivity, I am disquieted by contemporary calls by activists to re-engineer, re-educate and re-sensitize the judges — read male judges — to render them more compliant to their worldview.

Activists make it less about fairness and culpability of the accused in the trial than about the dignity and power of women. What is implicitly at play here is an enthusiasm for more responsibility on, and convictions of, men. They want a return to the days when a call to the police led inexorably to an unjust process for the man, regardless of the facts and merits of the case. Sexual assault can easily be the major new source of wrongful convictions if we allow judges, like police before them, to be hectored and shamed to favour one side.

A chilly wind now blows through the Canadian judiciary. We are told male judges are out of touch and just do not “get it.” Women who have not judged, or even tried, a sexual assault case are instructing judges how to run their trials. There is a feminist thumb on the scale which seeks to reshape Canadian criminal law and the judicial function that developed over centuries — consent, merits, truth and justice notwithstanding.

More than the occasional wayward judge in the occasional case, this is the most serious threat to public confidence in the judiciary.