Thousands of people are complaining about Judge Gregory Lenehan: Morning File, Friday, March 3, 2017

Tonight, Jesse Brown brings his Canadaland to Halifax for a live taping. Brown will be talking with me and King’s College journalism prof Terra Tailleur. The show at the Marquee starts at 7pm, but doors open at 6pm. Entry cost is $10, with all proceeds going to CKDU. Iris and Tempa will be hawking Examiner swag, and we’ll all stick around later for hijinks. It should be great fun.

News

1. Gregory Lenehan

“A Nova Scotia judge is facing a firestorm of criticism after declaring ‘clearly, a drunk can consent’ as he acquitted a Halifax taxi driver of sexually assaulting a female passenger who was so intoxicated that she urinated on herself and passed out in the back of his cab,” reports Robyn Doolittle for the Globe & Mail:

The Canadian Judicial Council — which last year, through a committee, recommended that Alberta’s Justice Robin Camp be removed from the bench after he asked a rape complainant “why couldn’t you just keep your knees together?” — has received multiple complaints against Justice Lenehan since his Wednesday verdict.

The council, which deals only with the conduct of federal judges, has referred those individuals to Nova Scotia’s Office of the Chief Judge. A spokesperson for the Nova Scotia judiciary said Chief Judge Pamela Williams plans to recuse herself from hearing any complaints on the matter. (The Globe has learned Chief Judge Williams and Justice Lenehan used to be married.) The Chief Judge can be replaced by the Associate Chief Judge, or another provincially appointed judge chosen by the Chief Judge, a spokesperson said.

As I reported yesterday, the Nova Scotia Judicial Council says that, before yesterday, it had not received a formal complaint about a judge in the last 15 years. I worry that potential complainants are shuffled off through an “informal” complaint resolution process that doesn’t leave a public record trail, but I don’t have solid evidence to back that up.

But yesterday, many people said they have filed complaints about Lenehan with the Judicial Council, and a change.org petition calling for action against the judge has 7,586 signers as of this morning.

Other reaction includes:
• “Community Services Minister Joanne Bernard says she shares the outrage mounting in response to a Nova Scotia judge’s comment that ‘clearly a drunk can consent,’” reports Michael Gorman for the CBC.

• “The mayor of Halifax doesn’t think Bassam Al-Rawi should drive a cab in this city, but he stopped short of criticizing the judge who acquitted him,” reports Zane Woodford for Metro:

“Whether he was guilty or innocent from the judge’s point of view, and I don’t question judges, there’s enough evidence for me to say that I don’t want somebody like that driving a taxi in this municipality,” Mayor Mike Savage said in an interview.

Savage said that’s his point of view “as both a mayor and a father,” and he thought the municipality’s taxi licensing department made the right call in taking away Al-Rawi’s licence when he was charged. But he didn’t criticize the committee that reinstated it.

“I wasn’t privy to the evidence the appeals committee had, so I can’t really judge from their point of view,” he said. “I can just give you my point of view, and certainly supported from what we heard that came out of the trial.”

• The city issued a statement on the matter yesterday:

The recent Nova Scotia Provincial Court decision dealing with the case of former taxi driver Bassam Al-Rawi is one the municipality takes quite seriously.

Paramount for the municipality is ensuring public safety while citizens are travelling in municipal taxis. To that end, a full review is now underway into the status of Mr. Al-Rawi’s licensing privileges.

On May 27, 2015, the municipal taxi licensing office suspended Mr. Al-Rawi’s licence. This decision was overturned in August, 2015 by the municipal Appeals Standing Committee. The standing committee attached two conditions to Mr. Al-Rawi’s licence. He was only permitted to drive between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., and he was also required to have a camera installed in his vehicle.

However, in September 2015, Mr. Al-Rawi was unable to meet a requirement of the Taxi and Limousine By-Law (T-1000), resulting in his licence being deemed “non-operational.” Specifically, Mr. Al-Rawi was unable to provide the municipality’s taxi licensing office with a business name for whom he would be driving. Therefore he is not permitted to operate a taxi.

It should be noted this by-law requirement is in place for all taxi vehicles.

Mr. Al-Rawi’s taxi licences have been non-operational since that time.

When Mr. Al-Rawi’s taxi licences were originally suspended on May 27, 2015, he received a letter from the taxi licensing office, indicating his licence privileges would be reviewed at the conclusion of the criminal proceedings. Municipal staff is now undertaking that review.

2. Police and sexual assault

Doolittle, the Globe & Mail reporter, raises the issue of the police response to the alleged rape in Bassam Al-Rawi’s cab:

Court heard that the woman had hailed the taxi about 10 minutes before the officer arrived and that the driver had parked in the city’s south end, which was in a different direction from the woman’s home. Earlier in the evening, she had been out with friends downtown. Some time after midnight, she was denied entry to Boomers Lounge for being too drunk.

Scott Rozee, one of the owners, said neither the police nor the Crown’s office has ever tried to formally interview him or his staff about the woman’s state, although they learned about it informally from a police officer acquaintance.

Doolittle has spent the last 20 months looking into how police respond to allegations of sexual assault. The result is an important, ground-breaking piece of investigative journalism the Globe & Mail has dubbed “Unfounded“:

National policing data, compiled and reviewed by The Globe as part of its 20-month investigation, reveal that one of every five sexual-assault allegations in Canada is dismissed as baseless and thus unfounded. The result is a national unfounded rate of 19.39 per cent — nearly twice as high as it is for physical assault (10.84 per cent), and dramatically higher than that of other types of crime.

Halifax’s unfounded rate, at 13 per cent, is better than the national average, but still much higher than the single-digit unfounded rates in Toronto, Winnipeg, Surrey and Windsor.

As Doolittle points out:

When complaints of sexual assault are dismissed with such frequency, it is a sign of deeper flaws in the investigative process: inadequate training for police; dated interviewing techniques that do not take into account the effect that trauma can have on memory; and the persistence of rape myths among law-enforcement officials.

“What does unfounded mean to you? What does unfounded mean to anybody? It means ‘You’re lying,’” says Ottawa criminologist Holly Johnson, who has extensively studied that city’s unfounded cases. She believes that high rates send a message that police don’t believe large numbers of complainants, “which reinforces damaging myths that women lie about sexual victimization, and could act as a deterrent to already low reporting.”

The allegations against Al-Rawi were not called “unfounded” by Halifax police, in part because the main witness was a police officer. However, that no one bothered to interview the bar staff suggests that either police were confident they had a rock-solid case without the bar staff’s evidence, or that they didn’t take their investigation seriously enough.

3. Bad judges of the past

The Gregory Lenehan matter brings to mind other problematic judges.

A reader points me to the case of Raymond Bartlett, who died in 1989. The Chronicle Herald noted his passing:

A controversial former family court judge from Truro has died.

Raymond Bartlett was 84 years old when he died at home earlier this week.

In May 1989, the former judge was found guilty of kicking his wife. Mr.
Bartlett, a fundamentalist Christian booted from the bench two years earlier
for preaching to women and telling them to be subservient to their husbands,
was convicted of assault and fined $350.

Lillis Bartlett, who has since passed away, told provincial court her
husband kicked her in the buttocks after she refused to reveal who she was
talking with on their home telephone.

“He was supposed to straighten out families, not be abusive in his own
home,” she said on the stand.

The former judge testified he mistakenly touched his wife with his lifted
foot when he reached down to pick up a chair she had pushed to the floor.

Mr. Bartlett was appointed to the bench in 1967. The province turfed him 20
years later after a dozen women complained publicly about his eccentric
behaviour.

As Dal prof Wayne MacKay wrote in 1995:

The case of Family Court Judge Raymond Bartlett in Nova Scotia concerned in-court speech of such an outrageous nature that the judge was eventually removed from the Bench. The fact that it was not until a women’s group complained that anything was done about Judge Bartlett is an issue in itself, Judge Raymond Bartlett, a self-professed born-again Christian, used his court as a forum in which to air his views. His lectures were primarily directed at women and related to their proper roles within the family and society. He berated women for not obeying their husbands when some of these women were seeking redress from abusive spouses or other related divorce issues. Judge Bartlett’s speech was not hidden nor, presumably, was it condoned by those within the legal community. In fact, Judge Bartlett’s reputation preceded him and some lawyers said they had known about his behaviour for as long as 10 years. 

In a far more extreme form than the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal Inquiry (Marshall Affair), the Bartlett case provides an example of judges using their power to victimize vulnerable people. It must have been very painful for the women appearing before Judge Bartlett to be lectured about the virtue of being obedient to a spouse who has beaten her and her children. Indeed, the cruel irony of the situation was heightened when Judge Bartlett was himself charged with assaulting his spouse. The fact that he was finally removed in early January of 1987 after a formal investigation by the provincial Judicial Council is only a partial victory. It cannot satisfy critics who point out that Judge Bartlett had remained on the Bench for far too long. There is a serious need to make judges accountable for their conduct and speech within the courtroom.

Then there’s Lewis Matheson, who was brought up in the Donald Marshall Inquiry in 1989. Wrote Helena Katz in Justice Miscarried: Inside Wrongful Convictions in Canada:

The inquiry also heard about allegations of racism and a two-tiered justice system. Lewis Matheson, who was by then a Provincial Court judge in Nova Scotia, was still a Cape Breton County prosecutor when he said that a fence should be built around the nearby Eskasoni reserve to prevent the Natives from going to Sydney to cause problems.

Six years later, Matheson, then a judge, hit the papers. As I explained in a footnote in my Dead Wrong series (you have to read the footnotes):

On November 22, 1995, Justice Lewis Matheson had sentenced a man named Colin Boutilier to probation and no jail time for forcible entry into his estranged wife’s home. “It’s unfortunate that at 54 years of age you have to appear for the first time in a court of this type,” said Matheson at sentencing. “I don’t know, even having heard everything that was said, whether it’s your own fault or you happen to have a very sensitive mate who is easily rattled.” Just 13 days later, on December 4, 1995, Boutilier was charged with the first degree murder of his former girlfriend Leah May MacQueen, a 45-year-old Grade 5 teacher who was found dead in her driveway. “Boutilier was found at the scene with a gunshot wound in the stomach,” reported the Daily News, which went on to note a previous incident in the judge’s past: “Last year, Matheson — who’s in his 60s — found himself at the centre of a controversy after jailing a 42-year-old man for sexually assaulting two 15-year-old girls and a 12-year-old girl. Before sentencing, the judge said: ‘What is most serious about this, is that it involves children …If these were 35-year-old women, women that (the perpetrator) had done this to, I might smile and throw this out of court.’” See “More trouble for Glace Bay judge,” Daily News, December 9, 1995. Boutilier was subsequently convicted of the murder of MacQueen.

Two women complained to the Judicial Council about Matheson’s remarks, and the council issued a ruling, but that decision is not online; next time I’m in Province House, I’ll stop by the library and read it.

I haven’t been able to find Matheson’s obituary, but he died sometime before 1999.

4. Accessibility bill

“Nova Scotia’s proposed accessibility legislation needs to be significantly strengthened, advocates for the disabled told lawmakers Thursday,” reports Keith Doucette for the Canadian Press:

Sue Uteck, of the March of Dimes Canada, told the legislature’s law amendments committee that the Accessibility Act is weaker than similar legislation in Ontario and Manitoba — the only provinces with accessibility laws.

“If enacted as is, it would be the weakest such law in effect in any province that has enacted a comprehensive disability accessibility law,” said Uteck.

[…]

Gerry Post, who represents a coalition of 35 disabled groups, said the bill’s economic analysis provisions would render it “stillborn.”

“Accessibility is a basic human right,” said Post. “We know there are concerns in the private sector and alarmists say that this act will put them out of business. This is furthest from the truth.”

He said the legislation as written is only a promise to act and needed some teeth, including a broader definition of disability.

Post said making the province more accessible should be seen as a driver for business, with about 20 per cent of the population living with disabilities. He said that figure is projected to grow to around 30 per cent by 2026.

5. Darrell Dexter, drug dealer

Former premier Darrell Dexter is now working for the PR firm Global Public Affairs, where he “will be leading the firm’s cannabis industry clients as marijuana legislation and regulations are rolled out,” reports the CBC.

I was particularly taken with the ceeb’s line of questioning around Dexter’s personal drug use:

Q: What’s your personal experience with marijuana?

A: From an investment perspective, I don’t really have any experience with it.

I saw my colleague Tom Clark saying that the people that are in nursing homes today, many of them were at Woodstock.

For me, like most people when we were young, we were experimenting at the time. 

Q: Do you still consume marijuana recreationally?

A: No, I do not. That’s my own personal choice. My interest in this industry comes from a purely professional perspective.

Yeah, whatever. Were I the reporter, I would’ve followed up: Darrell, what about booze? A shot in the morning coffee to steel yourself for a hard day’s work? How ’bout a couple mid-evening lines, a little pick-me-up? Hillbilly heroin? You ride the horse through the weekend?

Alas, the CBC has lost its journalistic instinct.

6. Errata

I wrote yesterday that judge Gregory Lenehan was the judge in the preliminary hearing of Christopher Garnier. He wasn’t. He was involved in some other pre-trial matter. Also, after spelling Lenehan’s name correctly a couple of times, I careened off and for some reason replaced that last N with an M.

Errors are regretted, and I will strive for better.

Views

1. Equity in transit

“I was excited for Shift, the annual conference organized by Dal planning students even before speaking to Monica Tibbits-Nutt, the Boston-based transportation planner who will deliver a keynote address Friday morning,” writes Examiner transportation columnist Erica Butler:

Tibbits-Nutt will be speaking about equity in transit services, something that’s been distinctly left out of the conversation in Halifax so far.

Equity is about far more than the cost of getting on a bus or ferry. Not that programs like Halifax’s newly minted Low Income Transit Pass program don’t help, but there’s a much broader issue than simply ability to pay user fees. “It’s way greater than that,” says Tibbits-Nutt. “The bus, especially in the US, has been treated as a second class option that caters to second class citizens. And that is just horrific. And we know that it is wrong, but as an industry and as a discipline, have been very slow to take it on to the level that we should.”

The sometimes unstated, sometimes overt propensity to build services for “choice” riders, and ignore the needs of so-called “captive” riders, has created inequities in the distribution of transit services. While there hasn’t yet been an analysis of this distribution in Halifax, there’s reason to think that the pattern is repeated here. For instance, Halifax Transit’s highest quality transit services are aimed squarely at 9-5 commuters from outside the urban core.

2. Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise

White space
“Raped at age seven, famed author Maya Angelou refused to speak for the next five years,” writes Evelyn White for the Halifax Examiner:

The experience stands at the centre of her debut 1969 novel, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The instant best seller takes its name from a line in the Paul Laurence Dunbar work, “Sympathy,” and has never been out of print.

Those familiar (or not) with the narrative will find themselves transfixed by Angelou when, in And Still I Rise, she recounts her journey from sexually abused black girl to the “Phenomenal Woman” depicted in her poem of the same title; a work that the writer, activist, actor, singer, dancer, and film director performed, to triumphant effect, all over the world.

Speaking with the sonorous Shakespearean diction that came to define her, Angelou, author of 36 books, declares in the film: “I had a lot to say.”

Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise will premiere at 7pm on Saturday, March 4 at the Spatz Theatre, 1855 Trollope Street, Halifax. The event is part of a series of Black Film Festivals that Montreal entrepreneur Fabienne Colas has mounted in Canadian cities since 2005.

White has more here.

3. Cranky letter of the day

To the Cape Breton Post:

During a CTV news report on Feb. 22, some New Waterford residents were complaining about the smell and noise from about 50 chickens.

In my opinion, these individuals must have great ears and smellers.

I hope that CBRM officials offer very little response to this situation.

It was pointed out in the report that these chickens are part of a 4-H project.

Robert Richards, Dutch Brook

Government

City

No public meetings.

Province

Friday

Law Amendments (Friday, 9am, Province House) — Bill No. 75 – Accessibility Act.

On campus

Dalhousie

Feminist Intervention (Friday, 12:30pm, Room 2021, Marion McCain Building) — Louise Carbert will speak on “Historiography and Hagiography of Feminist Intervention into Canada’s Constitution.”

Chemistry (Friday, 1:30pm, Chemistry Room 226) — Jason D. Masuda will speak on “New Main Group Chemistry Involving Carbon, Phosphorus and Aluminum.”

Passage to India (3:30pm, Friday, Room 1170, Marion McCain Building) — Gordon McOuat will speak on “JBS Haldane’s Passage to India: How Postcolonial Knowledge Went the Other Way.”

Saint Mary’s

Refugee Symposium (Friday, 10am, Theatre A, Burke Building) — Keynote speakers include Katie Tinker, Rohini Bannerjee, Catherine Baillie Abidi, and Russell Daye, with a showing of After Spring, a documentary that focuses on the Syrian refugee crisis. To sign up contact international.centre@smu.ca  .

Irish Literature (Friday, 7pm, Room 225, the building named for a grocery store) — Philip O’Leary speaks on “What Should I Read? Proposing a Canon for Literature in Irish.”

In the harbour

7am: CSL Tacoma, bulker, moves from Bedford Basin anchorage to National Gypsum
7am: Nolhanava, ro-ro cargo, moves from Anchorage #2 to Pier 36
7am: Oceanex Sanderling, ro-ro container, moves from Autoport to Pier 41
10:30am: Hoegh Singapore, car carrier, arrives at Autoport from New York

2pm: Energy Patriot, oil tanker, arrives at Imperial Oil from Houston
3:30pm: Hoegh Singapore, car carrier, sails from Autoport for sea
4:30pm: Nolhanava, ro-ro cargo, sails from Pier 36 for Saint-Pierre

Footnotes

Busy day today.