For child killer, retribution is the only response
TRUDEAU, OPPOSITION IN HEATED EXCHANGE OVER THE DEATH OF AN INNOCENT, LIMITS OF REHABILITATION
The debate in the House of Commons over the fate of the murderer of eight-year-old Tori Stafford was as bad-tempered and unpleasant as any in recent years.
Justin Trudeau, who had rushed back from the United Nations in New York to handle the government’s defence of the file, was increasingly flustered, as if secretly ashamed of the line he was peddling. He deserved to be.
Trudeau accused the Conservatives of playing “political games” over the decision by Corrections Canada to transfer one of the little girl’s killers, Terri-Lynne McClintic, to a minimum/medium security Aboriginal healing lodge in Saskatchewan. Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer said it was clear that officials had made the wrong decision and it was the duty of elected representatives to make it right.
At one point a clearly rattled Trudeau remonstrated with his backbench for heckling and apologized to the Speaker.
As one Conservative MP after another stood to recount the grisly manner of the murder, the prime minister asked them not to increase the level of graphic detail read into the official record. He looked more favourably on the intervention of NDP MP Sheila Malcolmson, who said the Conservatives’ “exploitation” of Tori Stafford’s death was “sickening.” That statement was greeted by a standing ovation by NDP and Liberal MPs.
The heated scenes in the House were preceded by a statement in the foyer by Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale, who said he has asked the new commissioner of Correctional Services, Anne Kelly, to review the case to ensure the law and correct policy have been applied. He pointed out that in 2013, his Conservative predecessor, Steven Blaney, had said ministers do not control the security classification of individual prisoners and that McClintic had been re-classified as a medium security prisoner under the Conservatives in 2014. For the Liberals, it was an exercise in damage limitation. Goodale had been asked about the case on CTV’s Power Play the previous evening and said prison management officials had determined that the transfer to the Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge for Aboriginal Women on the Nekaneet First Nation in southern Saskatchewan was the best way to rectify McClintic’s “bad practices” and keep the public safe.
For someone who is normally a safe pair of hands on sensitive files, it was a profoundly insensitive thing to say.
He compounded the error in the foyer before question period when he said he did not have the ability to reverse the decision.
Yet section 6 of the Corrections and Conditional Release Act is clear: The commissioner of corrections is “under the direction of the minister.”
While it is a necessary, indeed desirable, provision that the minister respects operational independence, the commissioner reports to Goodale. The concept of ministerial accountability, if it means anything at all, gives him the ability to reverse a decision on which, one suspects, more Canadians agree with the Stafford family than with the Department of Correctional Services.
Policy is not made in a vacuum and bureaucracies take their lead from their political masters. Trudeau’s inclination on crime is more often toward rehabilitation rather than retribution. In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, he mused on “root causes” and how it was essential to look at the motivating factors behind the attack.
Four years later, he decided to offer Omar Khadr compensation and an apology. Mercifully, he declined to “commit sociology,” in Stephen Harper’s memorable phrase, in the McClintic case. She had a troubled and desperate childhood. Abandoned by her birth mother and given to a stripper, she started taking illegal drugs by the age of 8.
But she has served fewer than eight years of a life sentence for a brutal murder and neither the Stafford family nor it seems the Canadian public are ready for her to spend the rest of her sentence in a healing lodge that has no fences around it, one that often has children visiting, according to local Conservative MP David Anderson.
Trudeau repeated that McClintic was designated a medium security prisoner by the Conservatives and remains one today. But even a cursory look at their respective websites makes clear the Okimaw Ohci Healing lodge, with its “open campus” concept, is a different kind of facility from the Grand Valley Institution in Kitchener, Ont., where McClintic was incarcerated. With its chainlink barbed wire fences, it’s clearly a place where the knives are locked up at night. No father or mother could not be moved by this case, which explains why emotions ran so high in the House.
But this was so clearly a bad decision, so at odds with Canadians’ sense of natural justice, that the Liberal response ought to have been less equivocal.
Tori Stafford should be 18 today. Her life was stolen by McClintic and her former boyfriend, Michael Rafferty, who was also sentenced to life.
For a crime like child murder, there is only retribution.