It is a pleasure again to try to devise some Canada Day-weekend thoughts as I soldier through my fifth year of being prevented by the vagaries of American justice from setting foot in Canada. Since I have received an unprecedentedly heavy correspondence about my legal travails, which have also been covered in this and other newspapers, I would like to express again, as I did in court in Chicago last week, my unlimited gratitude to the very large number of people who have encouraged my family and me through this difficult time. As most readers of this column know, I was accused under 17 criminal counts in the United States in 2005, tried in 2007 and convicted on four counts, sent to prison in 2008, and released on bail after 29 months in 2010 when the Supreme Court of the United States unanimously vacated the four counts of conviction. In one of the many quaintnesses of American justice, having excoriated the lower court judges for misinterpreting the law, the high court sent the vacated counts back to the subjects of its tongue-lashing to assess the gravity of their own errors.
Given this arrangement and the personalities in question, I never had any confidence that the case was over, and the appellate panel chairman managed to disinter two of the spurious counts, which, predictably, the Supreme Court, having made its constitutional point and not being a trier of fact, declined to take back for further review. The appellate panel chairman recommended and the prosecutors (who began the case six years ago demanding my imprisonment for life and fines and restitutions so immense they would have impoverished my family) demanded the reimposition of the original sentence, never mind, again in another U.S. prosecutorial foible, that I had effectively been acquitted of the principal remaining counts. The prosecutors wished me to be sent back to prison for over four years, with the possibility of release for good behavior after a little over three years.
I assumed that I would be sent back to prison, for close to the practical minimum, as release would have been widely interpreted as an acknowledgement that the prosecution was unfounded, and more than nine months would have been seen by clear-headed observers as a compounded outrage. If the excavated and resuscitated counts had been charged at the outset alone, without the other 12 to 15 counts that were irretrievable, they would have been thrown out like dead mice, even from the Chicago courthouse, a monument to the invincibility of the American prosecutor and to the material results of generations of boiler room Chicago bossism.
I will surrender to the Bureau of Prisons in about eight weeks, shortly before the publication of my book mainly on the subject of these travails, for a victory lap of seven to eight months. It is a little like going back to boarding school, albeit with rather exotic fellow-residents, but also without being caned on the behind all the time as was the lot of Canadian private schoolboys in the 1950s. I am looking forward to seeing my prison friends again, and to a rigorous diet, a regime of active muscle tone, reading and writing.
Of course, America has not ceased to be a great country, and there is, as many have noted, classic drama, diluted by farce, that I, a notoriously emphatic champion of America for decades, should be in this position. It has been very difficult, until fairly recently, but it has been interesting. And as I believe in God, regard life as a privilege and almost all challenges as opportunities, I shall try to extract some sensible message from these eight tempestuous years. Release should occur in March, and I will leave the United States forever, all passion spent. Its greatness survives, certainly, despite chronic misgovernment, but my affection for it has faded. And it is my honour, as a last gesture to a relationship that is ending, to dramatize slightly the putrescence of its justice system.
This brings me, most happily, to the subject of Canada Day, 2011. I regret to have to write that I have also discovered in this mundane Odyssey that Canada, too, has its share of obtuse judges. But it does not actively encourage pre-trial media lynchings; requires a plausible test before charges are laid and not just the mockery of the grand jury; has reasonably even and impartial procedural rules; the defence speaks last in trials; acquittals are not immediately reversible for sentencing purposes; few prosecutors revert to the private sector in Canada, and very few become politicians; and most judges are not, as they are in the United States, ex-prosecutors. And in Canada, the prison and prosecution industry is not a Frankenstein Monster that incarcerates 1% of all adults as in the United States (only about one-sixth of that, in Canada), or more African-Americans of university age than there are in university, as in the United States. And in Canada, the number of people with “a record,” (even if for impaired driving 10 years ago, or being disorderly at a fraternity party 30 years ago), is not 15% of the entire population, as it is in the United States (47 million people, none of whom is eligible, for that reason, to enter Canada, even on a family holiday to look at the Calgary Stampede).
Canada is not a prosecutocracy amok in a carceral state, and the United States, no matter how fervently tens of millions of Americans may stand, hand over heart, singing their splendid anthems on Monday, is. Above all other things, if I were in Canada this weekend, and a Canadian citizen, I would celebrate the country’s good fortune in having 33 million relatively well-adjusted people in a mighty treasure house of a country, a steadily more geopolitically enviable condition as the developing world, led by China, India, Indonesia, and Brazil, four of the five most populous countries, with 40% of the world’s population, consistently put up six to 10% annual economic growth rates, and buy Canada’s resources. Canadians can also celebrate their good fortune that there was never an economic justification for slavery in Canada; that its only close neighbour has not been militarily aggressive, and that it has the official languages of two of the world’s very greatest cultures.
And in addition to serendipitous events of history and geography, Canadians can celebrate that Canada has never been on the wrong side of a war, morally or in its outcome, has always fought courageously when engaged, has a fine background in international relations and distinguishedly motivated alliances, and has been one of the best governed countries in the world, under both of its traditionally leading political parties, and with some input from other parties, for 15 years.
I shall quietly celebrate those things today in the magnificent city of New York, and will look forward to celebrating them in Canada on Canada Day weekend, 2012. The night will end, and the Babylonian Captivity with it; next year in Toronto.
National Post
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