Canadian polygamists sentenced to house arrest
OTTAWA: Two leaders of a fundamentalist Mormon community were sentenced to house arrest in the first real test of Canada’s 130-year-old ban on having more than one wife.
Winston Blackmore, 60, and James Oler, 53, were convicted last year of polygamy after much legal wrangling.
Blackmore was given a six-month conditional sentence to be served under house arrest while Oler received three months.
The pair had each faced a possible maximum five years in prison for marrying two dozen and five women, respectively – with whom they fathered more than 160 children between them.
There have been only two other convictions for polygamy in Canada, in 1899 and 1906. This latest case took two decades to get to trial.
Three special prosecutors had been appointed during that period to consider bringing charges against Blackmore and Oler, but had backed down over concerns that the law prohibiting polygamy violated Canadians’ constitutional right to religious freedom.
Those fears were assuaged in 2011 when the British Columbia high court ruled in a reference case that the inherent harms of polygamy justified putting limits on religious freedoms, clearing the way for charges to be laid in 2014 against Blackmore and Oler.
Blackmore had long defended his polygamy to reporters, at a summit organised by his wives, in civil trials in the United States and under oath in Canadian federal tax court in 2012, when he struggled to name all of his wives, missing one.
He described a tight-knit group in his community in Bountiful, British Columbia that grows, raises or hunts its own food, and runs a barter economy.
The community was founded by one of his ancestors nearly 70 years ago and practised polygamy unhindered until federal police launched an investigation in the late 1990s after receiving a complaint from a former member.