The limited political fallout of the Bain verdict

Prominent sovereignists have not tried to exploit the case’s outcome

After several days of jury deliberations in the Richard Henry Bain trial, commentator YvesFrançois Blanchet, a former Parti Québécois minister and language hawk, asked whether the “political leanings” of the jurors would influence the verdict.

He didn’t elaborate. But since the trial was conducted in English, as the language of the accused, all 12 jurors had to be able to understand English, and presumably at least some of them were anglophones. And anglophones are hostile to the PQ, whose electionnight rally in 2012 was the target of what was obviously a politically motivated attack.

Anybody who thought anglos would be sympathetic to Bain doesn’t know the English-speaking community very well.

Anglos’ dislike of the PQ stops well short of rationalizing violence. I’ve never heard an anglo express anything but dismay at the murderous attack on the PQ election-night rally in 2012, the fact that it was an anglo who committed it, and Bain’s cry of “the English are waking up.”

As the jury deliberations continued, there were fears (or perhaps hopes, depending on one’s political leanings) that the jury would accept Bain’s defence of not criminally responsible on account of mental disorder (NCR).

The Bain jury, however, rejected the NCR defence, and found Bain guilty of seconddegree murder in the killing of stage technician Denis Blanchette — that is, murder that is not “planned and premeditated.”

To shield them from public pressure to reach popular verdicts, Canadian jurors are not allowed to discuss their deliberations. So we are left to speculate about how those in the Bain trial reached their verdict.

They might have negotiated a compromise between those wanting a verdict of NCR and those wanting one of first-degree murder. Or, as one expert speculated, the NCR defence might have created a reasonable doubt in the jurors’ minds that Bain planned and premeditated the murder of Blanchette in particular.

Some anglophones were among those dissatisfied with the verdict of second-degree murder. In an unscientific vox pop the day after the verdict, CTV Montreal asked its predominantly Englishspeaking audience whether Bain should have been convicted of first-degree murder instead. Sixty-three per cent of the 755 who voted said yes.

Since Bain’s attack, and as recently as two days before the jury reached its verdict, some sovereignists have tried to connect Bain’s attack to criticism of their movement in the Englishlanguage media. They have never presented any evidence, however, of a rational, cause-and-effect relationship.

Indeed, if there were such a link, there would have been more than a single attack in the more than 50 years since the advent of the modern independence movement, committed by a man preposterously dressed in a ski mask, bathrobe and slippers.

Since the verdict, however, prominent sovereignists have refrained from trying to exploit the case.

As the PQ’s Jean-François Lisée noted after the verdict, what was undeniably a “political attack” was an “isolated act” committed by a single individual acting

alone, without the support of any group, and hasn’t been repeated in the four years since.

Asked about the effect the attack would have on EnglishFrench relations, Lisée said Bain was “on the fringe of the Quebec tradition and the Quebec value of discussing democratically, peacefully, even questions that go to the heart of our identity.”

The only politician who appeared to use the case to try to score political points after the verdict was a federalist. “When you stir things up too much, sometimes things like that happen,” said Health Minister Gaétan Barrette, referring to political speech. The remark was widely interpreted as suggesting the target of Bain’s attack, the PQ, was somehow responsible for provoking it.

Barrette hastily apologized for the remark, but not before it had drawn attention away from the verdict itself. By Friday, three days after the verdict, the name Bain had disappeared from Quebec newspapers. It appeared that the media as well as the politicians had already turned the page.