Losing faith in the justice system
COULD THEY REALLY BE THIS DELICATE, THIS ILL-INFORMED AND THIS INCAPABLE OF DISTINGUISHING MISCONDUCT FROM SERIOUS WRONGDOING? — CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD
My loss of faith was incremental, and came over years. For instance, in 1993, when I was working for the Toronto Sun, I got a taste of how ferociously judges and lawyers can turn on one another.
Walter ( Wally) Hryciuk was an Ontario Court judge, a very good one, but an oldschool guy. He was the kind of man whose wife gave him a joke light switch plate that when you flicked the light on or off, you were flicking a little penis, and he was the sort who thought it would be a laugh to hang the thing in his chambers at the Old City Hall courts.
Hryciuk was the subject of a complaint with the Ontario Judicial Council. A young female Crown attorney named Kelly Smith claimed that in a back hall of the Old City Hall courts, Hryciuk had grabbed her and French-kissed her.
The earlier complaint of another female prosecutor, Susan Lawson, was also brought forward. She was the victim of the penis light switch.
In the fall of that year, Jean MacFarland presided over a public inquiry.
This was Bob Rae’s Ontario — before he became a federal Liberal member of Parliament, then sage-at-large, and was still the earnest leader of the provincial New Democrats. His party won a majority in 1990, and set upon a course that embraced racial diversity and gender equity.
It was in that context that Hryciuk found himself accused of one count of sexual assault (the alleged French kiss with Smith) and one of making remarks of a sexual nature (for flicking the penis switch in his chambers and allegedly saying to Lawson, “You can flick my switch anytime”).
In a sixty-page document filled with feminist sanctimony and dogma, MacFarland found Hryciuk guilty and recommended his removal.
Smith and Lawson, the judge wrote, weren’t overreacting in their tearful testimony. When Smith testified she fell into a round of hysterical toothbrushing and was afraid of catching a “disease” from the alleged French kiss, she wasn’t being irrational, because, after all, “It is no secret that in this day and age, one of the ways certain diseases are thought to be transmitted is by bodily fluids including saliva,” and when Lawson said she was “terrified” by the one-two punch of the penis switch in Hryciuk’s chambers and his remark about it, she wasn’t being overwrought.
Are you freaking kidding me?
Remember, these were Crown attorneys, tasked with prosecuting, among others, rapists, pimps, flashers, fathers and uncles who forced sex upon their young daughters or nieces.
Could they really be this delicate?
The answer was more than two decades in the coming.
In the spring of 2015, a prosecutor friend asked me to take part in a panel discussion for Crown attorneys. I agreed and then forgot about it. At the time, the FHRITP phenomenon — the initials stand for “F--- her right in the p----,” which morons the planet over had taken to yelling at TV reporters — was much in the news, and CBC’s The National had just convened a panel to discuss this terrible business.
As I was ruminating on all this, what popped into my head was the Wally Hryciuk inquiry. And that, the day before the Crowns’ conference, is what I wrote as my column.
I mentioned Kelly Smith by name, but she wasn’t the focus of the piece. What was, as I wrote about Hryciuk’s alleged offences and the FHRITP craze, was that “there’s an ocean between sexual assault and a kiss, however unwanted, between harmful actions and hurtful words, however mean, and between rape and a tone of voice, however leering.”
As I was heading up to join the panel on stage, a woman approached me, shrieked that she couldn’t believe I’d written what I had on the day I was speaking to hundreds of Crowns, berated me and marched off.
Later, I learned she was Smith’s sister, and a fine prosecutor herself apparently, so good for her, for standing up for her sib.
I was just walking off the stage when a female Crown stopped me and said, “Christie, I think you should stay for this.”
I looked back over my shoulder to see a bespectacled little fellow, in a bow tie, standing with several others on the stage. He was James Cornish, Ontario’s assistant deputy attorney general for criminal law, and he was having a kumbaya moment with some of his Crowns.
Outside the room, I introduced myself asked if it were true that his remarks about himself and the government standing with all victims of sexual assault had been inspired by my column.
Cornish allowed that this was so.
“You might have had the courtesy to tell me beforehand you were going to do that,” I said.
Well, he said, I hadn’t told anyone in the ministry about my column beforehand.
“I don’t submit my columns to the government,” I snarled.
I had my answer: Crown attorneys and judges could indeed be as fragile as Kelly Smith and Jean MacFarland, and that delicacy is now sufficiently embedded in the bureaucracy that a deputy AG felt it appropriate to make a public display of it.