Comparative Criminal Law

This commentary was first published in The Lawyers Weekly on November 16, 2007, page 17

Ronald Smith of Red Deer, Alberta is slated to die the same way that Stanley Faulder of Jasper, Alberta did in 1999: by lethal injection. It can be a cruel death, leaving people gasping for air and writhing in pain while jailhouse “doctors” try to hit a vein with the poisoned needle. Observers at the 1994 execution of killer John Wayne Gacey in Illinois told reporters that the person who inserted the tube in his arm appeared to have “never taken I.V. 101”.

The two Canadians also share another trait: brutality. Faulder murdered a 75 year old Texas woman by crushing her skull with a blackjack and then stabbing her with a kitchen knife, while Smith killed two young Native Americans in Montana by shooting them with a sawed-off shotgun at point blank range in the back of the head. Two cold Canadians whose confessions left little doubt as to the identity of the killers and horror of the crimes.

And yet with all the similarities, Canada has responded in starkly different ways. In Faulder’s case, the government turned interventionist, petitioning the U.S. courts and requesting clemency from the governor of Texas. By contrast, in Smith’s case, the government has turned isolationist, refusing to intervene in a judicial system that shares the same rule of law approach as Canada.

On Friday, Dec. 5, 2008 the University of Toronto Faculty of Law hosted a panel discussion about the Governor-General's decision to prorogue parliament. The following is a summary of the remarks made by panelist David Cameron.

I’ll be brief. I see no reason to take more time than Stephen Harper did in his weirdly pointless address to the nation on Wednesday night.

I will make four points, none of them on topic. When I initially agreed to speak I was told the subject would be something like “constitutional crisis or democracy in action?”, to which I probably would have answered both.

But as the planning for the session evolved, and events proceeded, the topic morphed into “Was the Governor General’s Decision to Prorogue Parliament Constitutional?” or something like that. To which I would probably answer yes and no.

However, since I expect my eminent legal colleagues to cover that topic like a blanket, I thought I would turn to something else, to some observations on the politics and implications of what the country is going through.