It pays well, but minister of public safety isn’t one of Ottawa’s more enviable cabinet positions. Never mind the risk of terrorism, endless protests on Canadians streets, a leaky border and a new Trump administration demanding action on said border; if I were Dominic LeBlanc, I would lie awake at night just wondering what madness Canada’s justice system might have in store for me the next morning.
To wit: At time of writing, news is that family members of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French will — repeat, will — be allowed to make in-person statements at Paul Bernardo’s parole hearing, in the matter of Bernardo having kidnapped, raped and murdered the two teenagers in 1991 and 1992,
The Parole Board of Canada’s (PBC) original answer had been that they could not attend, according to the Mahaffy and French families’ lawyer Tim Danson. The government told him it couldn’t guarantee everyone’s safety at an in-person hearing at the La Macaza Institution — a medium-security prison north of Montreal that the wise owls at Correctional Service Canada (CSC) decided was best suited to Bernardo at this stage in his sentence last year.
If I were public safety minister, that’s the sort of thing my overanxious brain would come up with in a nightmare. But it’s real.
“Other than a bald reference to the PBC being ‘unable to ensure safety and security of all hearing attendees,’ we have not been provided with any further details,” Danson said in a statement.
There were of course howls of protest when Bernardo was transferred from Millhaven to La Macaza. Marco Mendicino, public safety minister at the time, called it “shocking” and “incomprehensible.” It seemed likely at the time that CSC might magically revisit their decision, as they did after some absolute lunatics in the department’s employ in 2009 transferred Terri-Lynne McClintic, the savage and very Caucasian murderer of eight-year-old Tori Stafford in Cambridge, Ont., to a zero-security Indigenous “healing lodge.”
But no, the “shocking” and “incomprehensible” decision with respect to Bernardo stood.
Among the myriad objections raised about the move, I don’t recall anyone mentioning that it would make it impossible to safely hold a parole hearing … because that would be even crazier than the transfer itself. Anyone can visit an inmate at La Macaza, assuming the inmate is willing to see you. Are visitors taking their lives into their hands? Either it’s not safe, or someone was fibbing when they said it wasn’t safe.
But such is the state of criminal justice in this country: it’s always full of grim surprises. If Bernardo were to be arrested today instead of in 1993, it’s far from certain whether he would even be tried quickly enough to prevent the charges against him being quashed.
“More than 580 criminal cases in Ontario were stayed for unreasonable delay from … 2016 through the end of 2023,” CBC News reported recently. Since 2020, it found, the majority of criminal cases haven’t resulted in a courtroom verdict.
“Of (the) cases stayed,” CBC reported, “145 were sexual assaults and one was a homicide. Last year 59 sexual assault cases were stayed because of delay in Ontario.”
That’s absolutely mental. But we eventually caught Bernardo, and we sentenced him appropriately, at least as Canadian sentencing goes. But he’s now eligible for parole, as is everyone sentenced in Canada, and this necessitates a sort of intellectual contortionism: It would be uncivilized and counterproductive not to offer even the worst of the worst a faint hope at release; but don’t be silly, we’re told: of course he’s never going to get out.
It’s outrageous enough to ask your average Canadian to stomach that. To ask the Mahaffy and French families to stomach it, knowing they’ll have to show up every time Bernardo is up for his supposedly impossible parole — because they know very well it’s far from impossible — is downright diabolical.
One of the leading theories of Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S., and of the Democrats’ loss, is that a critical mass of Americans was sick to death of being fed complete nonsense and expected to nod along: that middle-school-aged girls should be presumed able to share a bathroom peacefully with middle-school-aged boys; that privileging certain groups in hiring and university admissions doesn’t negatively affect the chances of other groups; that teachers should keep students’ gender-related secrets from their parents; that we don’t really need police and prisons.
The Bernardo situation speaks to a specifically Canadian absurdity that long predates all of those: Everyone agrees that some people obviously deserve never to be let out of prison, yet we’re supposed to care more about their hypothetical “faint hope” of release than about the victims’ families who have to oppose it … or preferably just give up the fight and accept that the justice system has it all under control.
It’s not a reasonable thing to ask. Because it’s not a functional justice system.
National Post
[email protected]
Get more deep-dive National Post political coverage and analysis in your inbox with the Political Hack newsletter, where Ottawa bureau chief Stuart Thomson and political analyst Tasha Kheiriddin get at what’s really going on behind the scenes on Parliament Hill every Wednesday and Friday, exclusively for subscribers. Sign up here.