‘He made me hate myself ’

She is the slight, 24-yearold complainant at the very heart of an inquiry that could see a Federal Court of Canada judge removed from the bench, and Tuesday she took the witness stand at the hearing into his conduct.

Judge Robin Camp, 64, whose handling of the sexual-assault case involving the young woman ignited a firestorm of controversy when remarks he made to her during the trial became public last year, is fighting to keep his $314,000-a-year job, arguing that, as his lawyer Frank Addario put it, “he has reformed his beliefs.”

The alleged sexual assault dates back to 2011 and allegedly occurred in a bathroom.

At one point during the trial, Camp asked her, “Why not — why didn’t you just sink your bottom down into the basin so he couldn’t penetrate you?” and, “And when your ankles were held together by your jeans, your skinny jeans, why couldn’t you just keep your knees together?”

This was in 2014, before Camp was elevated to the Federal Court and when he was still sitting in the Alberta provincial court.

He ended up acquitting the accused man, Alexander Scott Wagar, a decision that was overturned by the Alberta Court of Appeal last year.

Wagar is slated to be retried this November.

“What did he get from asking that?” the young woman, whose identity is protected by a publication ban, said as she read aloud from a statement prepared with a Calgary Police officer.

“What did he expect me to say?”

With the judge sitting with his lawyers just feet away from her, she said, “He made me hate myself, that I should have done something (to prevent the assault), like I was some kind of slut …

“I hate myself that I let that happen, that I let that judge speak to me that way.”

At the time, the young woman said, she had been homeless for several years and was “heavily into drugs,” repeating, she said, some of the same struggles her mother went through before her.

She identified herself as aboriginal, and said, “My mom had a very similar story, where she’s been assaulted and it’s just kinda overlooked. I struggle a lot about where my family has come from and been overlooked by the justice system.”

But, she said, she has come a long way since: Nineteen at the time of the alleged assault, she has “cleaned up my addictions and I got a job, so that’s really good.”

She is the only witness that Marjorie Hickey, the “presenting counsel,” who functions at the hearings as a sort of prosecutor, with a duty to present all the evidence both pro and con Camp, said she will call.

The bulk of the evidence, Hickey told the five-member panel, will come in the form of an “agreed statement of fact” and various documents.

Hickey told the panel members that the question for them is “not whether Robin Camp’s shortcomings can or have been remedied, but whether public confidence in the judiciary can be remedied without his removal.”

She made it clear the inquiry is not to consider only his comments in the Wagar trial, but “how his comments impact” upon the independence, integrity and impartiality expected of “the judiciary, writ large.”

Camp quickly apologized when his remarks became public and is expected to apologize here again. His lawyer said that while “he will admit some of his thinking was infected by myths,” he is an empathetic and good judge, and that punishing him for the failures of the justice system would be wrong.

Addario said Camp has undergone counselling, mentoring and training with three experts — a judge, a psychologist and a professor who is an expert on the law of sexual assault.

But the judge landed himself smack in the middle of one of the most heated and divisive political issues in modern-day Canada — how the criminal justice system, and judges and lawyers themselves, treat alleged victims of sexual assault.

In fact, it’s become a bit of a societal whirlwind, with forces demanding change from the best-defended and least transparent institution of them all — the judiciary and the justice system its members run.

This issue has fully engaged or enraged the public since the highly publicized trial of former CBC star Jian Ghomeshi (he was acquitted of all charges involving three complainants and settled a fourth charge with a peace bond), the tide of allegations against comedian Bill Cosby, and the Twitter phenomenon #BeenRapedNeverReported.

That the Canadian Judicial Council, for the first time in its history, has granted intervener status to a group of feminist organizations and sexual-assault centres, will ensure that the inquiry, as the committee’s ruling put it, “may have a broader impact on the conduct of sexual-assault trials in future and — whatever the outcome — they will contribute to society’s discussion about gender equality and how the justice system responds to sexual assault complaints.”

Formally, Camp is alleged to have displayed “an antipathy” toward rape-shield provisions of the law; engaged “in stereotypical or biased thinking” about sexassault complainants; relied on “discredited, stereotypical assumptions;” made a rude or derogatory remark about the trial prosecutor; and made comments “tending to belittle or trivialize” the complainant’s allegations and women generally.

The inquiry will decide whether he “has become incapacitated or disabled” from continuing as a judge.

The committee is composed of three senior judges and two lawyers — or, as the young woman endearingly put it when she thanked them for hearing her, “You guys.”