O'Toole should speak out about Canadian on death row
Ronald Smith case shows need for all politicians to act, says Randy Boswell.
For the first time in 15 years, Montana has a Republican, pro-death-penalty governor; Greg Gianforte was sworn in last month. The state's House and Senate are also firmly controlled by pro-death-penalty Republicans.
Why does this matter to Canada?
Because the now rock-solid Republican state is moving quickly to resume executions of death-row prisoners after a 15-year pause — and that puts a Canadian citizen, Ronald Smith, more squarely in the crosshairs of capital punishment than at any time since his bid for clemency sparked a political firestorm in this country in 2007.
The Smith controversy highlighted a sharp divide between the Conservative party of then-prime minister Stephen Harper and the federal Liberal, Bloc Québécois, NDP and Green parties. Harper's government made it clear at the time that Conservatives didn't care if Montana put the Alberta-born Smith to death for the 1982 murders of two young Blackfoot Indian men, Thomas Running Rabbit and Harvey Mad Man, along a highway south of the Alberta-Montana border.
Canada's other parties, while acknowledging the horror of Smith's crimes, rallied around a principle: that because this country abolished capital punishment, the federal government should always resolutely insist — no matter what the circumstances, no matter where in the world — that no Canadian citizen be executed by another nation.
Montana last put a prisoner to death in 2006. Since then, an absence of political will and a host of legal questions around the state's lethal-injection protocols have combined to keep Smith out of Montana's execution chamber.
A practical obstacle has been Montana's inability to obtain supplies of an “ultra-fast-acting barbiturate” — the drug legally required to ensure a condemned prisoner doesn't suffer a cruel, torturous death. A European manufacturer of the drug has blocked sales to the U.S. to prevent its use in executions.
But this week, Montana's House of Representatives backed a proposal to change the wording of the state law to allow executions to proceed by injecting death-row inmates with any “substance or substances … sufficient to cause death.” Senate approval is also required.
Meanwhile, a competing bill is being pushed by state Democrats to abolish the death penalty. An open letter from 140 of Montana's “faith leaders” was issued this week in support of abolition because, they argued, “the death penalty is immoral. No crime justifies the taking of another life by the state.”
The abolition bid seems certain to fail given the state's current political power dynamic. Other legal challenges will be launched before an execution date is set for Smith, but it's clear that Gianforte — who said in 2016 he has “no philosophical objection to the death penalty” — can't be counted on to grant the Canadian killer a reprieve unless Canada lobbies hard for Smith's life.
Even that might not work.
But it would surely help if all of Canada's federal parties, including (indeed, especially) this country's Conservative cousins of the U.S. Republicans, spoke with a unified voice against any Canadian citizen facing capital punishment anywhere, and urged Montana to grant clemency in this case.
Obviously, Justin Trudeau must speak up. But Conservative Leader Erin O'Toole has an opportunity to distinguish his incarnation of the party from the one led by Harper or Andrew Scheer. O'Toole has been proclaiming loudly that he leads “a moderate, pragmatic, mainstream party” and isn't hostage to far-right, Trumpian forces like the ones on display in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6.
Unless O'Toole plans to openly promote the reinstatement of capital punishment in Canada, he should abandon Harper's approach of using the Smith case to send sympathetic signals to those Canadians who deeply crave a return to the death penalty and believe Conservatives might make it happen.
O'Toole should instead declare — on principle, and in keeping with a 2009 Federal Court ruling that the Harper government's “case-by-case” approach to seeking clemency was “unlawful” — that neither Smith nor any other Canadian should ever face execution in a foreign country without Canada's government trying to stop it.
With four Canadians currently facing death sentences in China, Smith and fellow Canadian Robert Bolden on death row in the U.S., and Canadians at risk in other countries where capital punishment remains legal, a clear pronouncement from O'Toole at the Conservative national policy convention next month — ahead of the next federal election, ahead of any change to Montana's law — could help save Canadian lives and give Canada a strengthened, more united voice internationally on this life-and-death issue.