Praise be, the judge is now ‘ healed’
Hearing not permitted to know how, why
No one j umped up and whacked Robin Camp on the forehead and cried “Healed!” but they might as well have done.
The 64- year- old Federal Court of Canada judge, here fighting for his $ 314,000- ayear job at a Canadian Judicial Council hearing, now has been pronounced reformed by no less than a judge with a specialty in gender equity, a feminist law professor and a psychologist with expertise in trauma and sexual violence.
Respectively, Manitoba Queen’s Bench Judge Deborah McCawley, professor Brenda Cossman and Dr. Lori Haskell have testified that Camp is remorseful for his mistakes, was a keen student eager to learn more about the history of sexual assault in the justice system, willing to challenge his own biases and assumptions and that he has emerged from his journey of self- exploration a new and improved man.
All were called by Camp’s lead lawyer, Frank Addario, and either were paid out of the judge’s own pocket or worked for free — as McCawley did, despite j oking that at first she was so skeptical of Camp that she said, “I wondered whether I could do this (or would I be) wasting his money.”
All said they were deeply troubled by the comments Camp made during a 2014 sex assault case, in which he infamously asked the complainant why she couldn’t have kept her knees together to thwart her alleged as- sailant or why she didn’t lower her backside into a sink to avoid him.
Camp heard the case before he was elevated to the Federal Court, when he was sitting as an Alberta provincial court judge. He ended up acquitting the accused, Alexander Scott Wagar, a decision that was overturned on appeal. Wagar will be retried this November.
And each of the three women also took pains, during their evidence, to tell the CJC panel that they weren’t defending Camp’s remarks. As Cossman put it once, “I want to be clear I’m not in any way defending these comments.”
And both McCawley and Haskell hinted at i ntimate personal experiences Camp may have described for them during their mentoring or counselling sessions and which may have played a role in the sort of thinking that led to what he said at the original trial.
McCawley, for instance, told the panel that at their first meeting, she warned the judge “that he might need to bare his soul, and he did….” But, as presenting counsel Marjorie Hickey asked her once, “You’re not prepared to discuss how he bared his soul to you?” and McCawley replied, “That’s correct.”
A little later in her crossexamination ( presenting counsel is the CJC’s latest name for the de facto prosecutor), Hickey asked for “the why” of where Camp went so wrong.
“I knew he needed to get some help and that I wasn’t qualified to help with that,” McCawley replied.
Haskell, as a veteran psychologist who has also taught judges and prosecutors about the effects of sexual violence on women, and how trauma may affect a victim, was the one of the trio who was qualified to help Camp in that regard.
And indeed, she testified Thursday, their sessions — a total of about 13 clinical hours that began last fall — were both about the neurobiology of fear and trauma and about psychotherapy.
The latter, she said, “was much more of the psychological realm” and involved her “asking a lot of personal questions” or, as she once put it, “What is it about your life experience that led you this way?”
She said that “we had very in- depth discussions, we looked at the problematic things he said during this trial, and we explored them.”
But, Haskell, too, told Hickey that these were personal conversations, subject to doctor- patient confidentiality.
In fact, with Camp due to take the witness stand Fri- day, his lawyer wanted some guidance from the panel t hat his client won’t be asked any questions about what’s called his “judicial reasoning” in the Wagar trial.
Addario as s ured t he five- member panel that he is claiming no medical or psychological reason for Camp’s remarks in the trial, and after consulting with his fellow members, chairman Austin Cullen, the Associate Chief Justice of the British Columbia Supreme Court, returned to say the panel was agreed that Camp wouldn’t be asked to explain his thought process.
This is in accordance with what’s known as “the MacKeigan pr i n c i p l e ,” which refers to a 1986 Supreme Court of Canada case that found that to require a federal judge to explain his or her decisions would violate the principle of judicial independence.
( Ian MacKeigan was one of the Nova Scotia judges who overturned t he notorious conviction of Donald Marshall, but in part blamed Marshall himself for it. When a royal commission later tried to compel those judges to testify, they appealed successfully at the Supreme Court.)
And there you have it: Robin Camp will get to testify that he’s a new and changed man, but no one will ever be able to ask him about the forces that formed what was once called here his “flawed thinking.”
“Healed” will have to be good enough.