NDP critic falls in pile of preposterous assertions

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/05/2016 (2887 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Shame.

The word has many meanings for many people, but in the world of parliamentary democracy, “shame” is the term most used by politicians to express disdain for the deeds and statements of opponents. It’s political shorthand for intellectual dishonesty, a lack of accountability or transparency or, in some instances, a complete lack of moral or ethical standards.

It is not clear if members of the new Progressive Conservative government resorted to yelling “shame” Tuesday when NDP justice critic Andrew Swan stood to ask Premier Brian Pallister about his recent decision to hire former Free Press columnist Deveryn Ross as a speech writer. Although you could make a case it would have been an appropriate time to employ this venerable parliamentary tradition.

Swan was concerned Ross had been retained while he is the subject of “a serious matter before the courts.”

Swan said in hiring Ross, Pallister had “pre-judged what is going to happen” with that legal matter, a decision that impugned “the independence of the Crown.”

Now, to completely understand the purpose of Swan’s decision to bring up Ross, a lot of background information must be imparted.

This is no simple matter.

The first important bit of background is the origin of the “serious matter” to which Swan refers.

Ross was a lawyer in Brandon in the early 1990s when he was charged criminally in relation to a failed restaurant venture. In 1995, he was convicted of fraud and sentenced to 18 months in Headingley jail.

Following his release, however, Ross worked tirelessly to prove his innocence. (These claims were documented in an extensive Free Press investigation I wrote in 2005.)

In 2014, a decade after filing an application for review under Sec. 696 of the Criminal Code, then-federal justice minister Peter MacKay referred Ross’s case to the Manitoba Court of Appeal for final review after concluding there was “a reasonable basis to conclude that a miscarriage of justice likely occurred.” An investigation by the federal Criminal Convictions Review Group revealed thousands of pages of undisclosed evidence from the case, much of it strongly suggesting the two main Crown witnesses used to convict Ross may have lied to save themselves from prosecution.

That leads us to the second bit of important background information.

In obtaining that verdict from MacKay, and a reference to the Court of Appeal, Ross has put himself in very rare company. Convincing the federal justice minister “a miscarriage of justice likely occurred” is a very steep hill to climb, and one very few people attain.

In other words, Ross is not involved in any run-of-the-mill legal matter; this is an extraordinary legal matter that has finally, thankfully, worked its way up to a hearing at the province’s highest court.

The final bit of background is about Swan’s personal connection to this case.

Swan was the attorney general of record in 2014 when the case was referred to the Manitoba Court of Appeal, giving him inside information about both the background of the case and the importance of MacKay’s decision to refer it to the appellate court. And yet, despite being burdened with all this knowledge, Swan decided to use Ross — a man who has fought stoically to rebuild his life while still fighting to prove his innocence — as a political football in a bid to embarrass the new Tory government.

If Swan had not been privy to the background of the Ross case, or the machinations of the Sec. 696 process, or the material importance of Ottawa’s decision to ask the Court of Appeal to review new evidence, then one might be able to conclude it was just an instance of bad judgment to use Ross to get at Pallister.

In this case, however, Swan cannot make any such claims. As such, this could be one of the most indiscriminately cruel and mindlessly partisan acts ever authored by a member of the Manitoba legislature.

A spokesman for the NDP offered that Swan was only trying to point out that the premier should not be demonstrating faith in someone facing an important date before the Court of Appeal. That in hiring Ross, Pallister was using the power of the Crown to influence the court, something that would be a conflict of interest for the leader of the new government.

Those are preposterous assertions.

Swan knows better than most there is already a formal administrative firewall between the cabinet in general, and the attorney general in particular, and the prosecutions branch of government. No hiring decision at the political level of government could ever be interpreted as a decision of the department that prosecutes criminal cases. Swan is also aware that in a bid to ensure no perceived or real conflict of interest, Manitoba Justice hired an independent prosecutor to handle the case before the Court of Appeal.

Swan is also aware of the fact the Court of Appeal, by virtue of its institutional and professional independence, is truly beyond the reach of any cynical political ploys.

When you know all that background, it’s easy to see Swan had little interest in the integrity of the justice system, the impartiality of the Court of Appeal process or the accountability of the new government. Swan was seeking only to embarrass Pallister by reminding everyone he has hired a man with a criminal record, even if that man has, through his own indefatigable persistence, arrived at the very precipice of exoneration.

After you review the background of the original case, Swan’s connection to it, and how much he really knows about the extraordinary circumstances of the Ross case, there is really only one word that comes to mind.

Shame.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca