Don’t let police take away your right to self-defence
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Summary
The right to self-defense has become a big issue in Canada, especially in the wake of recent high-profile cases involving self-defence and home invasions. In this episode, we talk to criminal defence lawyer Solomon Friedman about what the law actually says.
Transcript
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The right to self-defense. Is that something that we even have in Canada? It's become a
00:01:36.800
big debate of late after a couple of high-profile cases and after some comments by a chief of
00:01:42.900
police. Hello, I'm Brian Lilly and welcome to the Full Comment Podcast and today we're
00:01:46.580
going to delve into this issue. You may have heard of the story of a man in Lindsay who defended
00:01:51.760
himself with a kitchen knife after an intruder broke in with a crossbow. And you've most definitely
00:01:57.660
heard of the case of a man in Vaughan, Ontario, shot and killed by home invaders after putting
00:02:03.420
a gun to his four-year-old daughter's head. These are trying stories. They are difficult
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to listen to. They are difficult to deal with. But they have brought on a discussion about
00:02:13.060
self-defense and whether that even exists in Canada. Some people would claim, that's American.
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We don't have it. They would be wrong. But unfortunately, many people in high positions tend
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to help feed into that idea, including York Region Police Chief Jim McSween, who had these comments
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to say last week. As it stands, we know the best defense for most people is to comply. As you've
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just heard, a number of safety recommendations will allow for those that are victimizing members
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So what is the reality? What is the truth? What does the law actually say? For this, I turn
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to an old friend, Solomon Friedman. He is a partner at Friedman Mansoor Law. He is a law professor
00:03:05.860
at the University of Ottawa, criminal defense lawyer, and an expert in self-defense. Here is
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So, Solomon, when you heard Chief Jim McSween make those comments about be a good witness,
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about go hide in a bathroom somewhere, what did you think? I mean, my view is, yeah, for
00:03:24.080
some people that is the right answer, but that is not the only answer and it's not the answer
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for everyone. And to me, it just felt like it was the head of police saying, we're not really
00:03:35.180
interested in people defending themselves. We're willing to let criminals do what they want
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Yeah, you know, what struck me first and foremost was that it was terrible legal advice, okay?
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Not so much that it was bad life advice. In other words, if someone is in that, and it's
00:03:54.060
a horrifying scenario, we need to understand that, right? Because this has both, you know,
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legal but very much real life implications. It's a horrifying scenario. Your home gets invaded,
00:04:03.720
usually in the middle of the night. You've got strangers who are armed and making demands
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if they're not there just to do harm. But the legal response is not necessarily the same
00:04:14.260
as the practical response. And what really irked me listening to that, I'm obviously listening
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to it through lawyers' ears, which is there was no discussion about what is legal and what
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is not legal. So instead, you have the chief of police of one of the largest police services
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in the country essentially giving life advice. But when it comes from the chief of police,
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people think that it's legal advice. And the number of calls or texts that I got, whether
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it's from, you know, professional colleagues or friends or family saying, is that right? Is that
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the law? Is the law that I have to comply with a home intruder, an invader? And I say, of course,
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that's not the law. So that's number one, is that it's bad legal advice. What he said is not the law.
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So my take on it was that this was not just a response to the shooting death of Abdullah
00:05:08.940
Lim Faruqi in his home in Vaughan. This is the man who was shot during a home invasion
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while the thugs apparently had a gun to his four-year-old daughter's head. I mean, what father
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is not going to react viscerally in that? We don't know how he reacted, but we do know that in the end,
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the thugs killed him and left. But my thought was he is also responding to the ongoing debate
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in Canada related to the incident in Lindsay, Ontario, where a guy breaks into someone else's
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home with a crossbow and the man whose home it is defends himself with a kitchen knife and is
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therefore charged with aggravated assault, assault with a weapon. He was trying to justify that.
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But in my view is, and you've dealt with this in a lot of cases, you know, so listeners that don't
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know you might be saying, well, he's a criminal defense lawyer. He just defends these thugs.
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You've defended a lot of people on issues like this of defending themselves and then being charged.
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The idea that you cannot defend yourself is foreign, but cops and prosecutors do not like
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Yeah. You know, I, I, I'm thinking back now. Um, I, I represented, uh, an individual going on about
00:06:32.020
10 or 12 years ago. Um, it was a father and a son. Okay. Their home was invaded. They come onto the,
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sort of the scene of this individual who was totally hopped up on drugs. Uh, the father tries to
00:06:47.220
confront him. He gets the father in a headlock and he is choking him out. Um, and the son is who was a
00:06:54.160
young man, uh, got a knife and obviously in an effort to do nothing more than save his father's
00:07:00.460
life, stabbed this man to death. Okay. They were arrested by police. Uh, they were held. Uh, and
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ultimately, you know, and maybe there was some reasonably good lawyering involved as well. Um, it was a,
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it was a, uh, a drawn out process, but the police made the decision not to lay charges. Okay. Uh,
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what they did was absolutely legal. And in fact, if we go back to the practical advice side,
00:07:23.000
it was the right thing to do if this young man was going to save his father's life. Um, so
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self-defense is absolutely legal in Canada. It is a full defense to a charge up to and including
00:07:38.100
murder. In fact, it is so serious of a defense that once the individual establishes that that
00:07:47.060
defense is even remotely possible to use some, uh, legal terms here, air of reality, that it has an
00:07:53.120
air of reality. The crown has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that self-defense was not legally
00:08:01.080
engaged here. The trouble is though, with the police, that the police, and I'm seeing this more and more
00:08:06.620
in my practice, they often take a charge first and ask questions later perspective, sort of saying,
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look, maybe it's self-defense, maybe it's not, let the court sort it out. Uh, and in some ways,
00:08:17.320
by the way, for the people who are charged, even though many of them are acquitted, the process is the
00:08:21.860
punishment of itself, which then has the effect of deterring others from, from defending themselves.
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For someone who is charged, how long does that process take, this punishment that you're talking
00:08:30.820
about? It's years, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, I'll give you, if it's a murder case that can only be
00:08:36.340
tried in the superior court, the time limit that the Supreme court set from charge to trial is 30
00:08:42.960
months. It's two and a half years. That's, that's, that's a good, that's, that's the limit. So it
00:08:49.780
takes years to move through the system. And by the way, during those years, let's remember, you have
00:08:55.600
been publicly identified and branded as a criminal by the police and in the media. You are probably
00:09:01.920
living, if you're, you're lucky, by the way, if you're on bail, because you may be in custody.
00:09:06.680
If you're not, you're probably living on very strict conditions, maybe house arrest, maybe you
00:09:12.060
have a GPS monitor, all because you are sort of in the crosshairs of the state because you exercised
00:09:17.960
self-defense. So absolutely the process is the punishment, both in terms of time, in terms of
00:09:22.780
conditions, but also in terms of the stigma of being charged with a really serious criminal offense.
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Yeah. I look, even a year of going through that is incredibly horrifying. Six months of going
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through that is horrifying. Nevermind 30 months. That is, that is ridiculous. So why is it that
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police and, and you know, you got to face off against crowns. Maybe you don't want to talk about
00:09:45.020
them, but to me it's crowns as well. It is this view that no, no, no, despite what the law says,
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and we'll get into how clear the law is in a moment, despite what the law says, we don't like
00:09:57.020
what the law says. And so we're going to put you through this process. You know, I think, I think
00:10:02.880
there's, there's a cultural element to this as well. Um, in the sense that, you know, we sometimes
00:10:08.520
hear different terms and it's really important to, to, to just attack them because there have no place
00:10:15.320
in this discussion, including by the way, uh, our friendly police chief, uh, he talked about people
00:10:20.400
taking the law into their own hands. And you sometimes see that also, uh, the phrase vigilante
00:10:27.240
justice or vigilantism. Okay. If you break into my home, it's not vigilantism for me to beat you out
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of there. Correct. And it's not taking the law into your own hands. In fact, what would be taking the
00:10:40.040
law into your own hands is after they, you know, they get your stuff or they're running away, you get in
00:10:44.780
the car and you fire up flashing lights and you go arrest them and you got a posse together. Like
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that's a different story. Now, by the way, there are rights of citizens to make arrests, but
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much dicier in that territory, but defending yourself is not taking the law into your own
00:11:00.280
hands. It is not vigilantism. So I think there's a cultural issue here. And you know, the trouble
00:11:06.320
with 90% of us living along the American border is that culturally, whether it's politicians or police
00:11:13.880
or prosecutors, we're always comparing ourselves to the American experience. And there's this sort of,
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you know, innate dislike of what happens in the United States. And we don't want to be like the
00:11:23.500
Americans. That's what they do in America. That's cowboy justice. When really the criminal code has
00:11:29.260
self-defense provisions, which by the way, are not new. They are ancient. They go back to the earliest
00:11:34.780
foundations of the English common law. They happen to be today codified in the criminal code, but this
00:11:39.740
is old common law stuff, the right to defend yourself, other persons, and your property. That
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is a longstanding right that now is in the criminal code. So it's not taking the law into your own
00:11:52.700
hands. But unfortunately, I think there's this sort of cultural bias where that first reaction is,
00:11:58.580
well, why didn't you comply? And we see it in the statement of the chief.
00:12:03.820
Well, I want to read you a statement that Chief McSween put out in response to some of the media
00:12:09.800
criticism that may have come from, I don't know, myself, my colleague, Joe Warmington,
00:12:15.240
anyone with a brain, lots of people on talk radio, but not Andrew Coyne. It states,
00:12:22.840
when I told citizens not to take matters into their own hands, it had nothing to do with politics or
00:12:28.080
concern over force used against the perpetrators of home invasions. It was suggested as a
00:12:33.800
tactic in the hopes of preserving lives, should citizens be confronted with an armed intruder.
00:12:39.320
When it comes to defending property, material items can be replaced, lives cannot. There is no
00:12:45.260
one piece of advice to offer citizens who are faced with an intruder in their home, but calling 911
00:12:50.100
immediately and avoiding engagement with the suspects has proven to be an effective course of action.
00:12:56.280
These situations are dynamic, chaotic, and difficult to assess in the moment. So that goes back to your
00:13:02.800
earlier point, that this was life advice. This was Chief McSween being dear Abby.
00:13:10.320
Which is not the place of a chief of police, right? It's not what one expects. It's also, by the way,
00:13:15.980
anytime a figure in authority says that the evidence says, right, the research shows, I say,
00:13:25.860
I want to see that research because there has actually been an enormous amount of research done
00:13:30.240
in the United States in particular about the links between things like stand your ground and castle
00:13:39.760
laws, which I'm happy to talk about in the United States, but also the prevalence of armed citizens
00:13:43.960
and the deterrent factor that that has on criminals from committing home invasions. So in fact, it actually
00:13:50.060
cuts the other way. If you tell everybody to comply, what that is actually telling criminals is you are going to have a free
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hand. It's funny. Uh, John Lott, the great researcher, the man behind the book, uh, that most Canadians would
00:14:02.660
scoff at, uh, more guns, less crime. It's true. Uh, I believe you know my bookshelf, by the way, in my
00:14:08.760
office, Brian, I've got a signed copy. I believe you know, John, as do I. Um, and John called me after he saw
00:14:14.880
what Chief McSween said and he said, we have to talk. Um, and he was going, he said, unfortunately, you don't have
00:14:21.460
the same data in Canada as we do in the States with their, um, uh, I forget the name of what it's
00:14:28.380
called, but they look at outcomes of crimes. And he was able to tell me what specific actions in
00:14:35.960
confronting intruders work in what don't. And he was able to say that, you know, especially for women
00:14:42.940
being attacked by men who are often larger than them, that hitting them with their fists is, yeah,
00:14:49.000
that's a really bad course of action, but pulling out a gun, you don't even have to shoot. Just
00:14:54.260
showing it is often enough to save their lives. But he said, just rolling over does not actually
00:15:01.820
lead to safer outcomes. And he disputed what the chief was saying there. Yeah. You know, it's,
00:15:07.600
it's, it's interesting because, uh, you know, and I, I've read that data and in fact, that
00:15:11.300
conversation, uh, refreshed my memory and it made me go back and look at some of those studies.
00:15:16.220
Um, and, and they're, they're really eyeopening and it really comes down to, and we're going to,
00:15:21.640
we can talk about this later as we know, as we talk about criminal law policy generally and,
00:15:25.420
and what laws might be able to be put in place, can laws actually be directed to this kind of
00:15:30.500
behavior. But, uh, you know, I'm, I'm, uh, uh, uh, a believer in my experience in criminal law shows
00:15:36.680
me that there's very little in terms of legal deterrent that is going to deter individuals from
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committing this kind of crime. Like the person who's doing a home invasion is not like,
00:15:45.920
well, there's now a mandatory minimum of, of life in prison. Uh, before it was just 10 years,
00:15:51.740
I'm not going to go kick down that door, uh, trying to feed my addiction by stealing or robbing,
00:15:56.780
et cetera. Doesn't mean we shouldn't do those mandatory minimums, but it's, it's not necessarily
00:16:02.320
about that. Um, yeah, and I'm happy. It's a, it's a good discussion to have. It's an important policy
00:16:06.700
discussion to have, but what everybody who studies deterrence concludes is that one of the biggest
00:16:14.300
actual deterring factors to criminals is fear of being apprehended or of being harmed in the
00:16:22.540
commission of a crime. So you got to think about that for a minute, right? So things like police
00:16:26.560
presence. So it's not the sentence it's being caught or shot. Exactly right. Right. When, when,
00:16:32.080
when you're in that frame of mind, right? Remember your, your life's taken a certain path. If you're
00:16:36.940
kicking down doors and suburban GTA and performing home invasions. So, you know, jail, the possibility
00:16:43.700
of jail is rarely the immediate deterrent. The deterrent, however, is getting arrested at that
00:16:49.580
time or being shot. And that's what the data shows from the United States, that that actually has a
00:16:55.000
deterrent effect on criminal, on criminal behavior. So my worry is that when Chief Nick Sween is talking,
00:17:00.560
remember he's, he's speaking to two audiences and he might not even realize it. Audience one are the
00:17:06.100
innocent homeowners and whether the advice he's giving them is good or bad. We can debate that.
00:17:10.160
And I think it's generally, uh, might be poor advice, but he's also speaking to criminals.
00:17:15.560
They're listening. And what message did you just send? Exactly. When you kick that door down,
00:17:22.060
it's going to be easy peasy for you. Nobody's going to put up a fight. You are not going to be harmed in
00:17:27.680
the commission of this crime. You have a free reign to engage in this kind of dangerous and
00:17:32.320
antisocial behavior. Like to me, that is really troubling. Okay. Let's talk about what the law
00:17:37.440
actually states. And then about what conservative leader Pierre Polyev has suggested in terms of
00:17:44.120
clarifying the law. Um, I hear people say, well, we need castle law in Canada. And my response to them
00:17:53.360
is no, we don't. We have it. Am I wrong? It depends how you define castle law. If you define castle law,
00:18:02.160
as no obligation to retreat when faced with the threat of violence, you're absolutely right. We
00:18:09.420
have it. Okay. Um, what castle law in some jurisdictions means, um, and I think it is,
00:18:16.120
I think it would be helpful in Canada would be that if you commit a violent offense against an
00:18:23.220
uninvited visitor into your home, the presumption is that you are acting in self-defense unless the
00:18:29.420
crown can then rebut that presumption. In other words, self-defense gets put on the table
00:18:33.260
automatically. That's what happens in some other states. So just like there is no one version of
00:18:37.560
castle law, but I agree with you that if we're talking about no duty to retreat, you don't have
00:18:41.540
any duty to retreat. Okay. So let's talk about the, you said it was ancient, comes from the common law.
00:18:46.620
Yeah. Explain what it actually means and is required right now because too many Canadians,
1.00
00:18:53.640
Andrew Coyne, uh, believe that any self-defense is too American. You alluded to that earlier. Uh,
00:19:01.600
this is not reality and, and, and never has been.
00:19:06.220
No, not only is it not reality, but you almost certainly have a constitutional right to self-defense.
00:19:12.720
That is if the government tomorrow passed a law amending the criminal code and removing self-defense,
00:19:18.920
that would be found to be contrary to section seven of the charter because it would put your
00:19:23.800
life in jeopardy and it would be contrary to the principles of fundamental justice. So, uh, to say
00:19:29.500
that... I thought that section only defended bike lanes in Toronto. Uh, well, bike lanes, I think that
00:19:34.360
gets about 50% of the attention. Um, but, uh, as an actual constitutional litigator, I can tell you that,
00:19:40.660
uh, you have a constitutional right to self-defense. The, the government, that's my, my view. I think it's
00:19:46.120
well-supported by the jurisprudence. The government could not essentially amend out self-defense. So
00:19:52.160
let's start with that. So this notion that it, it's American, that it's foreign to us is nonsense.
00:19:57.600
It is part of that constitutional guarantee. It goes back centuries. Absolutely. It goes back centuries
00:20:02.320
in common law. Yeah. So section seven and now codified. Yeah. So, uh, since the earliest criminal
00:20:10.040
code in Canada, uh, there has been a self-defense provision and let's talk about what, uh,
00:20:15.980
today's criminal code allows for, right? So remembering that self-defense is a defense.
00:20:22.340
Okay. It is an answer to a criminal charge, and that can be a lot of criminal charges, anything
00:20:29.400
from murder and on down. And what is the defense? How does it work? So it has three elements to it,
00:20:36.400
right? The first element is that the person who acts in self-defense has to believe on reasonable
00:20:44.100
grounds, which means that their belief is reasonable. They don't have to be right, by the way. They just
00:20:48.180
have to be reasonable. That force is being used against them, another person, or that force is
00:20:54.220
going to be used. So that's also really important, by the way, self-defense doesn't mean you have to
00:20:58.480
hit me first. If you have a reasonable belief that a threat of force is being used, you're in self-defense
00:21:04.700
territory. So that's number one. So for example, this incident in Lindsay, if I'm staring down a guy who
00:21:12.380
is coming to my home with a crossbow, and I'm guessing that most listeners have never fired a
00:21:19.220
crossbow, they are incredibly precise and deadly instruments in the right hands. I would be terrified.
00:21:24.940
I would assume that they were going to shoot me with said crossbow. I would be within my rights to
00:21:30.720
attack in defense. Yeah, absolutely. So, and I'll just say this about the Lindsay incident. It's,
00:21:37.660
and I'll say this about any incident where all the evidence has not been aired in court,
00:21:42.780
tested by cross-examination, and ruled on by a judge or jury.
00:21:46.220
We don't know all the details. We just don't know, right? Which is why I know I got asked to
00:21:51.040
comment a lot on it, and I was really reluctant to comment on that case, because I have no idea if
00:21:56.440
the knife was used with a crossbow raised, or the crossbow was wrestled away and the homeowner's
00:22:02.440
like, you know what? You so-and-so, I'm going to get this knife, and I'm going to show you what
00:22:06.340
happens once I have you defenseless, or somewhere in a spectrum in between those things. I just don't
00:22:12.600
know, okay? But, you know, when you talk about the law, so absolutely, that that would seemingly
00:22:17.840
engage a belief on reasonable grounds that force is being used. So that's number one. You have to
00:22:23.720
have that belief. Number two, the act that you are engaging in has to be for the purpose of defending
00:22:32.520
yourself, right? So you don't now just get a free hand to break any law. The act has to be for the
00:22:39.420
purpose of defending yourself. So to give you an example, let's say you have somebody has broken
00:22:45.620
into your home, okay? And they, you have reasonable grounds that force is being used against you.
00:22:52.860
That's true. But what you do is you, let's say you see their car in the driveway, you go slash the
00:22:57.760
tires. So that criminal act, slashing someone's tires is a criminal act. It's not for the purpose of
00:23:02.120
defending yourself, right? The act has to be for the purpose of defending yourself. And then the
00:23:07.880
third thing, and this is the trickiest part, because number one and number two are almost
00:23:12.660
givens in every self-defense case. The third element is the trickiest, which is your actions
00:23:20.240
have to be reasonable in the circumstances. And until, by the way, the Harper amendments to the
00:23:27.440
self-defense provision in 2012, that's where the section ended.
00:23:31.200
Let's take a break right now and come back and talk about the Harper amendments, because that is
00:23:35.620
part of the pushback against what Pierre Polyev is saying. And people saying, well, the law's already
00:23:40.300
been clarified. I was there for it. I watched it from beginning to end, and I don't think a lot of
00:23:46.700
people get it. So quick break, back in a moment with Solomon Friedman.
00:23:49.940
This is Tristan Hopper, the host of Canada Did What? Where we unpack the biggest, weirdest,
00:23:55.340
and wildest political moments in Canadian history you thought you knew, and tell you what really
00:24:00.180
happened. Stick around at the end of the episode to hear a sample of one of our favorite episodes.
00:24:05.780
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00:24:12.080
Well, if you don't want to get shot or beaten up, don't break into people's houses.
00:24:16.100
I don't know. This sounds like pretty good advice from Alberta Premier Danielle Smith to me. You
00:24:21.480
don't want to get shot, don't break into somebody's home. Although, you know, there's a whole debate
00:24:25.420
about whether you can actually use firearms. But Solomon, let's talk about the 2012, I believe it
00:24:32.880
was, amendments to the criminal code. That all started with a bill that was actually originally
00:24:40.020
suggested by now Toronto mayor, then NDP MP, Olivia Chow, and Liberal MP, Joel Volpe.
00:24:50.140
And it was called the Lucky Moose Bill. And this is named after a grocery store, I believe it's on
00:24:55.000
Dundas Street, downtown Toronto. Guy was tired of habitual criminals sneaking in and stealing from
00:25:01.420
him. And so one day he just stopped him and tied him up and the cops charged him. And no,
00:25:07.480
it's self-defense. That prompted a huge debate around self-defense. And at that point, the NDP,
00:25:15.100
the Liberals, the Conservatives all said yes. Now, it didn't pass as a private member's bill,
00:25:20.380
election happened, so on. But the Harper government picked it up after the election,
00:25:24.280
passed it, and they clarified it. What did they clarify back in 2012? Because in my mind,
00:25:30.840
what was happening then is what's happening now is policing prosecutors are saying,
00:25:35.660
I know the law seems pretty clear to you, but we're going to take a different view of it and
00:25:41.560
we're going to do what we want to do. That was my feeling then. That's my feeling now. What did the
00:25:46.560
Harper changes clarify? Yeah. And I think in particular, we now have 13 years of hindsight.
00:25:53.620
And my conclusion is that they didn't clarify anything at all. And it didn't actually change
00:25:59.180
the way that self-defense operates in our courts. So having tried cases before the amendments and
00:26:04.160
after, but let's, let's talk about them a little bit. And it's really funny. I'm really glad you
00:26:07.060
brought up the Lucky Moose context because this is what happens, Brian, when you've been around for a
00:26:11.280
while. You realize- You remember things. You remember things and you realize there is nothing new under
00:26:16.260
the sun. And this is no exception to that. So that, that was David Chen. David Chen was the shopkeeper,
00:26:21.820
the proprietor of Lucky Moose, and it galvanized- You have a better memory than me.
00:26:25.900
I just, you know, like, I think, Brian, to be perfectly honest, I think that I have appeared
00:26:29.960
on a show of yours, you know, 13, 14 years ago, and we've talked about this.
00:26:35.460
Yes. I just, I just, I got a feeling that that happened. So the, you know, and that led to this
00:26:41.640
sort of uproar and the same discussion we're having now, which is, you know, are police charging
00:26:47.480
people appropriately? Are prosecutors prosecuting? Are people being wrongly convicted?
00:26:51.820
And so this is what happened, all right? And, and, and we'll, we'll get, we'll come back to
00:26:56.300
exactly where we left off before the break, which is the third element of the self-defense analysis
00:27:02.000
is, was the act that was committed reasonable in the circumstances? And prior to 2012, like so much
00:27:11.140
of our law, by the way, the details and the explanation was left to the common law, which means
00:27:18.780
it was developed through case law. Judges would apply that. They would say, well, this is reasonable.
00:27:25.660
This isn't reasonable. Some of those judges would get overturned by the court of appeal.
00:27:29.360
Maybe that would get overturned by the Supreme court. And over generations, the law gets clarified
00:27:33.960
that way. All right. Um, and judges in their decisions would say, how do you know an act is
00:27:39.200
reasonable? Well, you look at this factor, you look at this factor, how big were the people?
00:27:43.580
What were their weapons used? Uh, what was the threat of violence? All this sort of thing. Okay.
00:27:49.660
Yeah. If a seven-year-old comes into my home with a knife and I shoot them, uh, you know,
0.99
00:27:55.720
Correct. And, and different if, uh, if a man comes in, you know, without a knife, if a guy's
00:28:01.560
just banging on the front door, if they're inside the home, um, or, or for example, if it's
00:28:07.260
somebody who, you know, to be extremely violent, right? All you're right. There's all of these,
00:28:12.000
all of these things factor in. So what this amendment did basically was they got some
00:28:18.700
law student or parliamentary intern to go search the case law to find all of the factors that judges
00:28:27.640
have previously considered in assessing the reasonableness of an act. And they just listed
00:28:32.420
them in the criminal code. That's it. That is actually what was done. So for me, as a lawyer,
00:28:37.840
someone who understands how the common law works, it wasn't necessary in the first place.
00:28:42.080
The trouble is police often didn't know about them. Maybe some crowns weren't familiar with
00:28:46.220
all of them, but they existed in the law. Nothing new happened in that provision. All of the factors
00:28:51.700
were ones that were already recognized in the case law. And instead now, but it should have informed
00:28:56.780
pre-charge. It should have informed the police and prosecutors, but I don't think it has.
00:29:03.240
Brian, I'm going to tell you what I told you 13 years ago when we talked about this.
00:29:06.740
I said, the law is not the problem. Policy is the problem. Parliament does not have to pass any laws.
00:29:16.140
What has to happen are the provinces who are responsible for the charging decisions of police.
00:29:21.740
They need to amend the policy handbooks of the police services and of their crown attorney's offices.
00:29:29.020
Because every province and in the jurisdictions where it's federal prosecutors, like the territories,
00:29:34.620
they have desk books, policy manuals for prosecutors. And it has their policies on every
00:29:40.480
type of offense, from domestic violence to sexual assault to major crime to homicide.
00:29:44.840
The policy needs to change. And guess what? The policy never changed. So of course,
00:29:50.160
the charging practice and the prosecuting practice never changed.
00:29:53.400
That's something that Conservative MP Larry Brock brought up. When Pierre Polyev held his news
00:30:00.040
conference to talk about this, Larry said, the provinces and territories could deal with this
00:30:05.200
right away. Just send out a note. Stop doing this.
00:30:08.160
That's exactly right. Amend the policy. And like I said, they have policies on every type of offense.
00:30:13.240
They have policies on defenses. They have policies on how they prosecute,
00:30:17.160
what charges they lay. You know, it's actually interesting. A possible remedy. Ontario has an
00:30:23.540
interesting system. So unlike British Columbia and Quebec, for example, in Ontario, the charges
00:30:30.520
themselves, criminal charges, are not vetted by prosecutors before they're laid. Police lay them,
00:30:36.300
then prosecutors decide what to do with them. There's a pretty good argument that in Quebec and British
00:30:42.340
Columbia, where prosecutors actually have to approve the charge before it gets laid in court,
00:30:47.300
you end up with a much more legally consistent and legally accurate charge form, that the charges
00:30:57.200
themselves tend to comply to the law to a much greater degree. So that's something, by the way,
00:31:01.800
it's been called for in Ontario. But policy is what drives all of this, not the law.
00:31:10.060
So, okay, a couple of things. One, I'm not opposed to the law being clarified once again, just,
00:31:16.820
and I say that just as someone who watches bill after bill get passed, that is nothing but a
00:31:21.620
clarification of bills previously passed. So the argument that, oh, well, it was done in 2012,
00:31:26.540
so we never need to touch it again. That doesn't wash with me. And if they want to clarify it,
00:31:30.880
that's good. But that's been a lot of the knocks against Polyevs. But I understand what you're
00:31:35.200
saying. And I think, yeah, there should be a push on that. And, you know, the next time Premier Ford
00:31:40.740
brings this up, I may raise this issue and say, well, it is up to you. But, you know, I may have
00:31:48.980
whispered his name a couple of times, but, you know, a certain columnist in the Globe and Mail
00:31:52.440
is denouncing the idea that we would further clarify the law of saying, well, we don't want
00:31:56.740
to be like the Americans. And that Polyev's stand guard legislation, proposed legislation,
00:32:05.200
would go further than the Americans. I don't really care what the Americans are doing. I care
00:32:10.240
what our law is. I care what our traditions are. And our traditions and our law uphold this ability.
00:32:17.360
Yeah. And, you know, it's interesting that the case law bears that out. I don't know if you
00:32:22.920
remember, actually, I'm sure you do remember, because we talked about it also. So you remember
00:32:26.600
everything we talked about. But you remember the Ian Thompson case in Ontario. Yeah. Down in St.
00:32:31.560
Catherine's area. This is a man whose home was surrounded by thugs and firebombed with him
00:32:37.540
inside it. And he happened to be a licensed firearms owner and a target gun instructor and a gun
00:32:43.900
instructor. And he defended himself with a revolver. And that dragged through the court.
00:32:49.440
He didn't even shoot them. He fired over their heads.
00:32:53.980
Still charged. And ultimately, completely vindicated. Completely vindicated. So, which tells you,
00:33:01.220
I think that most of the time, and I know the defense lawyers love to gripe about judges and
00:33:06.760
complain about rulings that we get. But I actually think that most of the time judges get this right.
00:33:11.120
I think that they do apply the law of self-defense well, and that people who are entitled to acquittals
00:33:17.040
get acquittals. But once again, I'll come back to where we started this conversation.
00:33:21.140
That's really cold comfort. When you've lost your reputation, you've lost your business,
00:33:25.380
maybe you've been detained, lost your firearms, your family and friends think you're a criminal,
00:33:30.360
your name is splashed across media. Right? It's always very interesting, by the way.
00:33:34.460
I ask people about this when they say, well, what's the real stigma? Like, I say, can you tell me the
00:33:39.440
names of the people who firebombed Ian Thompson's house? No, you can't. Nobody remembers them.
00:33:45.480
I'll admit this is someone in the media. You rarely, if ever, publish that someone isn't guilty,
00:33:53.480
unless it's a big profile one. So, you know, the police blotter that every newspaper has that,
00:34:00.780
you know, runs on local TV where you just say, oh, so-and-so was charged. The high profile cases,
00:34:06.240
of course, there's an announcement they were acquitted, found not guilty, what have you.
00:34:11.120
But the average person who gets their name splashed through the media doesn't get that.
00:34:20.120
And I'll say this also, by the way, on defense, the defense lawyers play a role in this too. I,
00:34:24.580
as a matter of practice, if there has been a story that my client was charged and the media,
00:34:29.060
for whatever reason, didn't follow the acquittal, I go back and contact every journalist who wrote a
00:34:33.500
story and ask that they either update the original story or write a new story. And the media is quite
00:34:37.880
responsible when it's brought to their attention. But the trouble is, it's often not brought to
00:34:41.380
their attention. Yes. Just often we don't know. There are so many criminal courts going on. I want
00:34:46.860
to spend the last few minutes that we've got talking about political response to this. And
00:34:53.080
Prime Minister Mark Carney on Friday did talk about updating the criminal code. And he said a few
00:35:00.480
things that surprised me because the Trudeau Liberals brought in a bail reform package back in 2019
00:35:10.000
that was a disaster. It followed the same philosophical pattern as places like New York
00:35:15.380
State and other progressive jurisdictions. And I just want to point out that New York State and other
00:35:20.060
progressive jurisdictions in the United States saw the same horrific results as we did with repeat
00:35:25.160
violent offenders going through a revolving door. And, you know, Democrat Governor Kathy Hochul in New York
00:35:32.420
did a full reversal on that. We did a very partial one on specific cases. But, you know, guys who are
00:35:40.080
doing carjackings with guns, who are caught, charged, let out on bail, and then do it again, still get bail
00:35:49.800
because of the way the criminal code is written in due to Bill C-75. So I want to play a clip of Mark
00:35:57.140
Carney. He was asked about keeping people in the country, you know, in terms of keeping high quality
00:36:04.980
people in the country and, you know, boosting the economy. And he started talking about quality of
00:36:10.400
life and he started talking about crime and the need to crack down on crime. And here's what he had to
00:36:16.460
say, which I wasn't expecting from him. This government is committed to reforming the criminal
00:36:23.080
code to ensure that organized crime, gang crime, crime with handguns, home invasions, auto theft,
00:36:31.280
that the individuals who participate in those crimes pay the price they should with consecutive
00:36:37.620
sentencing, that they are not in a position where they commit a crime one day and they're
00:36:43.300
arrested and then out on bail the next. So bail reform being at the heart of it. We're committed
00:36:50.300
to having more officers at our border, a thousand more border agents, more RCMP, committed
00:36:56.300
to working more closely with the provinces. And I'll give you a specific example with respect
00:37:00.300
to the last. We've been working with the Council of the Federation, all the provinces, on bail
00:37:06.300
reform. We will be legislating on that, proposing legislation, I should say, to the House on
00:37:12.300
that next month. I met with Premier Ford this morning as part of an ongoing conversation about
00:37:21.140
how we can address these issues, what the federal government needs to do on the criminal code. I agree
00:37:27.000
with Premier Ford on these issues and that's why we're moving on them. What the province and the
00:37:33.000
municipality can do in terms of policing more effectively. So we're working very closely.
00:37:37.260
Solomon, were you surprised to hear that from the Prime Minister?
00:37:41.980
I was surprised, you know, that those are not liberal talking points, traditionally.
00:37:47.460
They come from the other side of the political spectrum. And I'll say this, and you know,
00:37:52.040
Brian, you and I have disagreed over this. And one of the wonderful things about speaking to
00:37:56.520
someone like you, as open-minded and thoughtful, is you can have really polite and interesting
00:38:00.540
disagreements. I think this is the wrong end of the policy problem. If you're talking about
00:38:06.660
sentencing, bail is an interesting one. We could talk about bail. I think there is something to talk
00:38:10.880
about bail. Once you're talking about consecutive sentences, number of sentences, you really admit,
00:38:16.220
I can't solve the problem. So maybe on the back end, I can punish the people who are doing this,
00:38:21.440
but I can't do anything about the problem. I think like, you know, I live in Ottawa and I have seen
00:38:27.380
downtown Ottawa degenerate into a pretty scary place. And all of that, by the way, has been
00:38:34.120
fueled by government policy. You know, drug distribution centres, we see what happens. We
00:38:39.320
see what happens when petty crime is ignored. We see what happens when essentially there's no
00:38:44.160
enforcement whatsoever of the kind of public order offences that there used to be. The police have
00:38:49.140
just given up, just given up completely. You mentioned Ottawa, and I used to live there as well.
00:38:55.180
That's how we got to know each other. But when I left 580 CFRA in January 2019,
00:39:02.300
that's a station that I had worked at off and on since 2002. And I knew the byword market very well,
00:39:09.020
but I never had to step over people openly shooting heroin or fentanyl into their arms. The way I did is
00:39:15.600
I was leaving some of my last radio shows at 10 p.m. at night before I moved down to Toronto. And it
00:39:22.920
it degenerated horribly, only gotten worse during the pandemic. And that is due to government policy.
00:39:30.880
Right. And look, I want to be very clear. Like, you know, drug addiction is something that I would
00:39:35.140
never wish on my worst enemy. It is a horrible affliction. It deserves our compassion. It deserves
00:39:43.540
But you walk down in the byword market and you have random people who are high on drugs,
00:39:49.000
yelling at you, threatening to stab you, threatening you. Like that happens all the time. And it is
00:39:54.440
just totally ignored because progressive social policy dictates that you can't do anything in
00:40:00.580
any way to deal with our neighbors who use drugs. Right. Not fentanyl addicts who are stabbing people.
00:40:05.580
Before I left, the police have been instructed just to ignore open drug use and problems around
00:40:11.760
it. If it was anywhere near the safe injection sites and the like. And by the way, this is a
00:40:16.360
tourist area, an economic engine for our nation's capital that is steps from Parliament Hill. But
00:40:22.160
so what is your philosophical issue with consecutive sentences, though?
00:40:27.380
So my understanding of the research is that increasing sentences has no deterrent effect
00:40:35.860
on criminal behavior. So once again, if you want to get to the root of the issue and say,
00:40:41.440
how can we stop people from doing this? Sentencing does nothing to deter criminal behavior.
00:40:47.320
So philosophically, that's it. So really what you're ending up, it's sort of at the end of the
00:40:50.320
day, you're saying that doesn't mean there is there's no power in it. It's important,
00:40:54.140
number one, that people who are a danger to the public be kept away from the public.
00:40:59.460
That's a pretty good reason to have prison. What I would say on the other side, and, you know,
00:41:03.560
I, you know, I may be a libertarian when it comes to firearms. I mean, but I do have this soft,
00:41:09.440
maybe we'll call it a little progressive side to me. And that is what I would like to have
00:41:13.960
in the world that I live in is a world where people who go into prison come out better than they
00:41:20.320
went in. That is actually what would make the public safer. Right. And that's well to do that,
00:41:25.900
you'd have to have things like drug treatment programs and therapy and spend a lot of money
00:41:30.940
instead of handing out needles, which is what people are advocating for, or in some instances
00:41:36.640
happening. Well, and I'd say this, by the way, I think like, and then, you know, I'm not an expert
00:41:41.840
on the penitentiary system. I know a little bit from my work as a criminal defense lawyer,
00:41:45.320
but it's a university for criminals, Brian. People go in there. They're probably, you know,
00:41:51.340
had a, had a BA in crime. They leave with a PhD because that's the environment that it is.
00:41:55.740
Right. And that, by the way, makes us all profoundly unsafe. So once again, if you're just
00:42:01.560
talking about, we're going to lock someone up for longer, if you're not locking someone up for life,
00:42:05.840
like they're a dangerous offender, there are people like that, they're only coming out,
00:42:09.260
generally speaking, worse than they went in. Okay. Look, we've got a court system that has struck down
00:42:15.140
a bunch of mandatory minimums. I don't think that we ever had really harsh mandatory minimums in
00:42:19.940
this country, but we've had some struck down for like your third offense on a gun crime, you're going
0.98
00:42:24.940
to get three years. I don't think that's a horrible idea. But our courts strike them down using
00:42:30.560
what they consider reasonable hypotheticals. I think that's absolute garbage. I think that we do
0.99
00:42:36.520
need to have some mandatory minimums. I don't believe in three strikes and you're out and we're
0.86
00:42:40.660
locking you up for life. That goes too far and doesn't have any effect. Is there any effect in
00:42:47.000
terms of denunciation and keeping dangerous people out of general society? Yeah. And those are really
00:42:54.460
important sentence and principles. So, you know, one of the things that can also be done, and this is
00:42:59.820
an important one, is to give judges other tools that they can use when it comes to community
00:43:08.100
supervision, when it comes to probation. One of the problems that when people get out often, they have
00:43:13.080
very limited support and supervision, right? Because you have to remember, and I say this to people and
00:43:17.920
it's hard for people to hear, particularly for conservatives, which is 99% of people who go into jail
00:43:23.280
are going to come out. And we have to deal with that effect. Now, if they come out with no support,
00:43:29.680
then they go back exactly to the life that they went to previously. And if the courts had tools
00:43:35.080
where they could have exercise further control, so I'm a big believer in things like probation,
00:43:40.460
things like community supervision, but if you don't fund those properly, they're useless. And if you
00:43:45.560
don't give judges actual tools that have teeth, where you can pee on probation for longer periods of
00:43:50.500
time. So, you know, when I started practicing that, that length was two years, now three years,
00:43:55.420
I think that people, they should have longer supervision orders, right? Where they have real
00:44:00.300
mandatory, very challenging things, whether it's drug testing, whether it's, you know, unannounced
00:44:06.580
visits. But to do that, you got to pay money for these probation officers, police officers to be
00:44:11.220
enforcing that. So I think that just saying, oh, we're going to give you a consecutive sentence,
00:44:15.620
and we have consecutive sentences, by the way, in the criminal code for criminal organization
00:44:18.980
offenses, for terrorism offenses, for other kinds of offenses, there are consecutive sentences.
00:44:24.100
But the violent crime problem in this country just keeps getting worse. So I would advocate for
00:44:28.480
doing, you know, not just doing the same thing, but trying something different.
00:44:32.240
Let me ask you about bail before we let you go. Bill C-75, I mentioned it earlier, it was adopted,
00:44:42.520
seemed to be something that came out of the academic world, oh, we should just, you know,
00:44:46.160
give people bail all the time. Yeah, most people should get bail. Most people should not be held
00:44:51.540
in prison until their trial. But repeat violent offenders, I don't think fall into that category.
00:44:57.840
How do we deal with this in a reasonable way? I've talked to friends who are JPs, and, you know,
0.98
00:45:05.920
there was one case, I could tell you the address that this happened at, and you would be like,
00:45:10.520
I'm not surprised, you know, repeat violent offender found with a loaded gun in their car,
00:45:17.480
up on the dashboard, out on bail on existing gun and violent criminal charges, denied bail,
00:45:25.860
overturned by, you know, a higher court. And so even if people are denied bail, the higher courts say,
00:45:34.540
no, they've got to have bail. Where do you draw the line? And how do you do it? And I get all the
00:45:41.660
arguments that people like Doug Ford and other premiers need to build more prisons, because
00:45:46.360
growing population, we haven't done that. More crime, we haven't done that. But where do you draw
00:45:51.960
the line legislatively? Because Prime Minister Carney has said he will give a review. So let's say you're
00:45:57.380
in a briefing with Mark Carney. What do you tell him on this? Yeah, so I like to start from the beginning,
00:46:04.300
which is the supreme law in Canada. So the supreme law in Canada is the Constitution. And part of that
00:46:09.800
Constitution is the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms says everyone has
00:46:13.460
the right to reasonable bail. Okay, so we have to start there. So there is a constitutional right to
00:46:18.480
reasonable bail. What does reasonable bail mean? So the courts have said, for example, it means that you
00:46:25.420
can't make a rule that for certain offenses, bail is impossible to attain. Okay, so there's no offense
00:46:31.460
that you can say it's impossible that you get bail. So you might want to ask yourself, well, why is that
00:46:37.380
fair? Yeah, well, but what is this reasonable bail all about? And you hit the nail on the head, which is
00:46:42.940
if we really believe in the presumption of innocence, like really believe in it, not pay lip service to it,
00:46:48.320
then if someone's presumed innocent, then in most cases, they are not going to be detained before
00:46:54.120
the state has an opportunity to prove that they're guilty. So I actually see, and you know,
00:46:59.400
you're, I'm not, I'm not avoiding the question directly. I'm saying that there are other elements
00:47:03.960
to this, this solution. So one of the problems comes back to the first thing we talked about.
00:47:07.340
What did we talk about? We said how trial in the Superior Court, the Supreme Court set a limit for 30
00:47:11.800
months. Okay, if trials only took four months to get to, three months to get to, you know that in,
00:47:20.860
in, in California, you can be charged with any offense under the sun. You got a right to trial
00:47:25.400
within 90 days. In 90 days, the state has to be ready to go and prove their case against you.
00:47:31.460
All of a sudden, by the way, the bail dynamic shifts because the, the downside is not somebody
00:47:36.360
sitting in detention for a year or two years or three years, right? So that's, that, that's a big
00:47:42.120
problem that we have a massive backlog, which means we have to free people because A, we don't have the
00:47:47.420
resources to hold them. So you're talking about resources. The provincial detention centers are
00:47:51.720
bursting at the seams. So practically speaking, we actually can't really detain more people than
00:47:56.300
we're detaining. Now there's 100% an issue where individuals who are charged with very serious
00:48:03.820
violent offenses get out on bail for those and then commit other serious violent defenses.
00:48:10.020
That is without a doubt a problem. And we see it happening, right? What I worry about though,
00:48:18.360
and by the way, this is what's going to happen. I can tell you, and you can have me back on
00:48:21.380
six months from now and you'll say, you're right. There's going to be a review. There's going to be
00:48:26.100
a lot of discussion. And if there's anything passed, it will be symbolic and meaningless.
00:48:32.200
That, that is what's going to happen out of, out of Prime Minister Carney's review,
00:48:35.000
right? Because legally there are, there are restrictions to what you can do to limit people's
00:48:40.960
access to bail, because you have people who are innocent who get charged with offenses,
00:48:44.360
sometimes even serious offenses. Uh, and you can't have those people detained pre-trial.
00:48:49.420
What I, my view is, I'll come again to the same thing I said when it comes to sentencing.
00:48:55.620
There are alternatives to detaining people pre-trial, but they are really expensive and they require
00:49:03.540
resources, right? Um, uh, a number of jurisdictions in the United States, they have real bail supervision
00:49:09.560
programs, right? So the trouble is bail, if it's just bail and you get out, you don't have a lot
00:49:15.100
of supervision. So there's some GPS monitoring in Canada, but they're really, the police do not
00:49:19.120
have the resources to monitor, um, alleged offenders who are on bail. And notice I said alleged offenders
00:49:24.420
because they are only alleged offenders. Um, but once again, those are things that cost money. My worry
00:49:29.380
is every time the criminal code gets amended and it gets amended over and over again. I have in my
00:49:34.800
office, I have criminal codes from the fifties. I got a good library. Yeah. Every once in a while,
00:49:38.140
you get a really old offense and it's good to go pull out the annotated criminal code from the fifties.
00:49:41.660
Every year, the criminal code gets thicker and thicker and thicker because governments love adding
00:49:46.140
to it because the criminal code doesn't cost any money to amend. Now it has huge costs, financial and
00:49:51.660
social downstream, but it doesn't cost any money when the real solutions from what we started talking
00:49:56.600
about this, whether it's addressing drug addiction or how about actually addressing mental illness in
00:50:00.960
our community, right? The prevalence of individuals who have untreated mental illness and nobody wants
0.96
00:50:06.740
to go anywhere near that because it's expensive and, and, and resource intensive. It costs money
00:50:12.060
to do those things. It costs money to have actual programming in jail as opposed to just warehousing
00:50:17.040
human beings. It costs money to supervise people when they're out after they've completed a sentence.
00:50:21.700
It costs money to supervise people when they're on bail. So the government always does the easy
00:50:25.480
thing. Let's just pass another law. Let's make another mandatory minimum. Let's make another
00:50:30.180
consecutive sentence. And in my view, those are bandaid solutions and they don't get at the root
00:50:34.600
of the issues. You're taking me to, uh, one of my views of, uh, the phrase that I hate hearing from
00:50:41.220
politicians all the time. Some horrific event happens and they say, we need to make sure this can
00:50:46.020
never happen again. Well, in those types of circumstances, there's nothing that they can do
00:50:51.780
to make sure those things don't happen again. It, what you're talking about is there are things
00:50:57.180
that they can do, but they don't want to do them and they don't want to fund them.
00:51:01.900
That's exactly it. And if, and if we keep going down that circle, so the don't want to do them is an
00:51:05.780
interesting one because they don't want to do them is they're politically unpopular, uh, particularly
00:51:10.060
where the, of these progressive views that certain subjects are untouchable. Like just so you know,
00:51:14.900
when you say safe injection site and you can say that to any criminal lawyer, we are a, you know,
00:51:19.180
small L liberal bunch. We believe in freedom. We believe in Liberty, but you talk about safe
00:51:25.000
injection sites. They're handing out drugs to people. Those people, the research clearly shows
00:51:29.280
they are selling those drugs and buying more powerful drugs. Who are they selling the drugs
00:51:33.740
to? Who are they selling the Dilaudid to? They're selling it to kids who don't qualify for these
00:51:37.700
programs. They're selling to teenagers, high school students. The research in BC is outrageous.
00:51:42.000
And then they're buying fentanyl. So that's what we've done basically in, in the name of what
00:51:46.560
progressivism and compassion. That's not compassion. That's abject cruelty. And it has
00:51:50.920
all these terrible downstream effects when it comes to violent crime. It's so once again,
00:51:55.800
that the hard to do means maybe we have to challenge, uh, some of these previously untouchable
00:52:01.180
political third rails. I don't know how they got that way, by the way, they weren't that way when
00:52:04.140
I started practicing law. Um, and that just makes me feel old, but now that there's just, this is
00:52:08.880
received truth. It's nonsense. And it, and it results in a, in a, in an unsafe community. And it's
00:52:14.460
something that we should take on and we should elect politicians who are brave enough to take
00:52:18.600
it on. Uh, unfortunately, uh, that does not seem to be the pattern we've been following the past
00:52:22.840
decade. All right, Solomon, whether it's, uh, having you back on the podcast or not, I will check back
00:52:27.760
with you six months after prime minister Carney's review and changes to bail have come in. And
00:52:32.840
unfortunately, I fear you will be right. Thanks so much for the time. My pleasure. Thanks for having
00:52:37.240
me. Full comment is a post-media podcast. My name's Brian Lilly, your host. Kevin Libin is the
00:52:42.980
executive producer of this program. This episode was produced by Andre Proulx. Theme music by Bryce
00:52:48.120
Hall. Please make sure that you hit subscribe on whatever platform you listen to us on and share
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00:52:59.740
Here's that clip from Canada did what? I promised you.
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00:53:11.960
So, um, although, although abortion was sort of accessible, it really wasn't. But then 1988
00:53:20.960
rolls around and what's the law on abortion then? Suddenly there wasn't one. Literally no restrictions
00:53:28.640
existed in 1988. Abortion went from heavily restricted to completely unrestricted almost
00:53:35.520
overnight. There was no referendum on this. There wasn't even an act of parliament. This whole thing
00:53:41.820
is due to a somewhat surprised decision out of the Supreme Court of Canada. And it came about in large
00:53:47.580
part because of one man, a Canadian doctor who had been relentless about running illegal abortion clinics
00:53:53.240
since the 1960s and was determined to overturn the laws prohibiting the practice. Along the way,
00:53:59.580
he endured multiple arrests, constant raids, a jail term, a firebombing of his clinic, an attack by a
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fanatic wielding garden shears, the approbation of virtually his entire profession, and frequent death
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