National Post (National Edition)
Humboldt trucker did right thing
Nixes possible defence, spares families trial
It took an ex-journo reader, Alan Coates, to say what I struggled to explain in my column a day ago about the Humboldt truck driver, Jaskirat Singh Sidhu.
The 29-year-old Sidhu pleaded guilty Tuesday to 16 counts of dangerous driving causing death and 13 of dangerous driving causing bodily harm for causing the catastrophic collision that nearly wiped out the Humboldt Broncos junior hockey team last spring.
As his lawyer, Mark Brayford, told reporters later outside the Melfort, Sask., courthouse, “Mr. Sidhu advised me, ‘I don’t want to make things any worse. I can’t make things any better, but I certainly don’t want to make them worse by having a trial.’” Brayford added, “He wanted the families to know that he’s devastated by the grief that he’s caused them …”
Within hours, reader Coates, who spent a career in the newspaper business with what is now the Waterloo Regional Record, wrote to ask, “Tell me the last time you heard this stark acceptance of responsibility from anyone in this nation?
“This is a tragedy — on every imaginable level.
“And yet, I feel a form of pride — maybe that’s the wrong term — that this particular citizen acknowledged his guilt, his inattention, his carelessness, that led to this horror, and stood up to face the court and accept whatever judgment may follow.”
I felt it too, weird as it was, something very like pride that a fellow citizen had the toughness and grace to do what was right, sparing the families of all those young people lost or hurt in the crash from a long trial.
He could have chosen to mount a defence.
As I explained in my column Wednesday, an engineering safety review found several flaws with the intersection — chiefly, that the sight lines for both northbound vehicles (the Broncos’ bus was heading north on Highway 35 to Tisdale) and west-heading ones (Sidhu was driving west on Highway 335) were compromised — where the crash occurred that a good lawyer, and Brayford is that, might have exploited.
It took another reader, Grant Brown, to point me to something that could have helped Sidhu’s potential defence even more — a 2008 Supreme Court of Canada decision called R v Beatty.
In July of 2003, Justin Ronald Beatty was driving eastbound on the Trans-canada Highway toward Chase, a village in the interior of British Columbia about 400 kilometres northeast of Vancouver.
As the trial judge put it in 2005, “One moment each vehicle was driving in an appropriate manner in their respective lanes, and the next moment Mr. Beatty’s vehicle had crossed into the westbound lane colliding with the oncoming vehicle.”
Tragically, the three women in the car Beatty hit were killed.
There was no explanation for what had happened: The weather was clear, sunny and hot; the road and Beatty’s pickup were in good repair; he wasn’t speeding and hadn’t been drinking.
Afterward, according to witnesses, he appeared “stunned,” and when asked by medics and police what had happened, said he didn’t know, but figured he must have briefly lost consciousness or was suffering heat stroke from working in the sun all that day.
The question for the judge was whether an act of negligent driving constitutes “merely a momentary lack of attention that would give rise to civil liability … or whether it should be elevated to the status of driving that attracts criminal culpability and sanctions under the Criminal Code.”
She found it did not, concluded that “he experienced a loss of awareness, whether that was caused by him nodding off or for some other reason,” and acquitted him.
The Crown appealed, and the appeal court reversed the trial judge’s decision, set aside the acquittals and ordered a new trial.
But the Supreme Court restored the acquittals, finding that while Beatty’s driving was objectively dangerous, the mens rea, or guilty mind, was absent. As the court said, “it is the manner in which the motor vehicle was operated that is at issue, not the consequence of the driving … this is an important distinction.
“If the focus is improperly placed on the consequence, it almost begs the question to then ask whether an act that killed someone was dangerous.
“The court must not leap to its conclusion about the manner of driving based on the consequence.”
At Beatty’s trial, there was evidence it would have taken his vehicle .00268 seconds to cross the double line and hit the oncoming car.
As there’s no agreed statement of facts about the Broncos’ crash yet — there are apparently drafts floating about, but the defence and the Crown have not yet finalized the statement — there’s not yet a comparable estimate for that one. That may come at Sidhu’s sentencing hearing later this month.
What’s certainly plain is that this is a world where avoidance of responsibility is the absolute norm, starting perhaps with what Prime Minister Justin Trudeau famously said when asked about his “Kokanee grope” of a young journalist 19 years ago (that is, “… the same interactions can be experienced very differently from one person to the next”) and including U.S. President Donald Trump, who has denied even denying responsibility (he denied he was responsible for “losing the House” to the Associated Press, then denied denying it).
When was the last time you heard anyone face the music the way Jaskirat Sidhu did, particularly when he probably had, as reader Brown suggests, pretty decent defence prospects?
As reader Coates said, “This man’s full acceptance of responsibility is both admirable and a catalyst for healing.”