“I think you know every Canadian knows you’re guilty. And you can take that to your grave!” Court spectator Mark Iich Shouted at Gerald Regan following his acquittal December 1998 As the author of “that book about”… I spent much of last week being interviewed by journalists, all of whom — like me — were...
Verdict without end
More than 20 years after former Nova Scotia premier Gerald Regan was acquitted of sexually assaulting multiple women, other women are still coming forward with still more stories of what he did to them, still needing finally "to be heard." Including "Catherine."
I shouldn’t be surprised. Not after Me-too. But I am. Still. It happens more often than you might suppose. I’ll be attending a public event, and someone will come up to me. “Aren’t you the guy who wrote that book, the one about…?” Yes, I am, but it was published 20 years ago. “My sister…...
Gerald Regan and the legacy of our #MeToo moment
It isn't the jury's verdict from 1998 we should be remembering today, but the fact the RCMP and prosecutors finally chose to believe women over one of the country's most powerful political men. And, more important, that women — lots of them — stood up for other women, and said #MeToo.
“Members of the jury, have you agreed upon your verdicts?” The court clerk asked her rote question with a wavering, tell-me-don’t-tell-me tone that seemed to capture perfectly the nervous, nerve-wracked mood among the more than three dozen men and women sitting in the Halifax Law Court’s Courtroom 3-1 on the blustery afternoon of December 18,...
From who me to #metoo
In which Stephen McNeil continues to be Stephen McNeil, dismissing calls to apologize to a young man for the province's own security failure. But there is also some small hint of change in the #metoo air. We take our good news where we find it.
Why am I not surprised? Last Monday, Halifax police dropped all charges against the 19-year-old they’d arrested less than a month before for “unauthorized use of a computer with fraudulent intent.” The fact is this case has been a cock-up from the beginning. Even before the beginning. Perhaps especially before the beginning. Let’s review. On...
Winning, losing, and Jamie Baillie
While I don’t believe Baillie should have won last spring’s provincial election, he probably should not have lost either. If he hadn’t — if Stephen McNeil’s Liberals hadn’t barely sputtered across the majority finish line four long hours after vote counting began — Jamie Baillie probably wouldn’t have considered leaving a job he’d only recently begun to grow into.
Many years ago, probably after an election campaign he’d just lost that he believed he should have won, I interviewed then-Nova Scotia Liberal politician Gerald Regan. He was in a philosophical mood. “Victory and defeat,” he told me, paraphrasing a Rudyard Kipling poem, “are equal imposters. Sometimes you lose when you should win; sometimes you...