Wild About Writing

Advertising is a deceptive craft at best. At its worst, advertising can be duplicitous, false, and harmful to the public interest. The scale runs the gamut from the simple bullshit of hair dye commercials to the “Big Lie” fostered by the Nazi Party and others of evil genius.

Advertising can be as crass as TV’s ugly used car salesman pitching his heaps from a littered lot, to the intellectually challenging, graphically inspiring theme of the historic (and since unmatched) Apple Computer “1984″ ad. Advertising of this nature requires immense creative and literary talent.

So where do political attack ads — particularly those of the Conservative Party of Canada — rank on the scale?

I’d say somewhere between misleading and fraudulent.

The latest example is an attack ad on Michael Ignatieff’s alleged position on corporate taxes. It supposedly unravels the Liberal leader’s “plan” to increase taxes. Actually, it’s another attempt at character assassination .Dissect this ad piece by piece, and here’s what you find:

Claim: That Ignatieff is pushing for a $6 billion tax increase. Fact: A Liberal government would cancel the Conservative government’s planned $6 billion reduction in corporate taxes.

Does cancellation of a tax decrease amount to a tax increase? Continuing to pay the same tax rate hardly constitutes an increase. (To say nothing of the merits of the issue: should we be borrowing money to cut government revenues by $6 billion at a time when Ottawa is running a $56 billion deficit?)

Claim : That Ignatieff’s “tax increase” would be paid for by workers. Fact: If there’s anything to be paid (which is debatable) it would be paid by corporations and their shareholders, whom Ignatieff would deprive of yet more  largesse from the public coffers, courtesy  of Stephen Harper.

If Ignatieff were calling for an increase in corporate taxes, you could argue that companies would pass the cost to consumers. But that’s not the case here: products are already priced relative to current taxes (not some future lower rate). The competitive climate doesn’t allow companies to boost prices beyond any increases in real cost.

A question the ad doesn’t address: Would still lower corporate taxes lower prices and boost jobs? Debatable, according to leading economists. Look at Ireland, which has cut its corporate tax rate to the lowest in the world. Today, it’s an economic basket case.

Claim: “He didn’t come back for you.” Fact: Another personal slur on Michael Ignatieff which reduces political discourse to the level of a chicken coop diatribe polluted by arguments unworthy of consideration by any intelligent voter. A “Big Lie” perhaps?

The Liberals have had their share of attack ads but none have descended to the depravity practiced by their Conservative opponents. The Green party, less flush than the two big old line parties, can safely boast they’ll not play this game:

The skill of the ad writers for the Conservative party cannot be questioned. But I leave it up to you to decide if your ability to twist, distort and lie about your competition is  a quality you’d want to put on your resume.

The debate on the role of foreign ownership in Canadian book publishing never seems to go away. Publishing reporter John Barber of The Globe and Mail weighs in today with a long article urging changes in our foreign investment rules to allow foreign publishers to invest in — or buy out — Canadian publishers.

The whole issue of foreign investment in publishing is under review now by Conservative culture minister James Moore.

Barber concedes current rules “helped produce a spectacular literary flowering.” And while allowing that small presses are doing a good job, he laments their lack of financial heft to properly promote their writers.

More Canadian writers are published by the smaller Canadian-owned publishers. But the best sellers usually come from the branch plants of multi national publishers. They have the money to sign — and then promote — the best-known Canadian names. Barber’s argument, shared by some small presses, is that foreign investment in their operations would enable them to better compete with the big branch plants — all to the benefit of both writers and readers.

Facing the digital-only future

Newspapers as well as books are migrating to electronic sales. Montreal’s La Presse, long considered the top daily of French Canada, may be getting ready to phase out its print edition. Its Sunday edition already gone, the paper has assembled a digital team that could move it totally into the digital world.

” … there is a strong possibility that there will no longer be a print edition of a La Presse within three to seven years,’ says the head of the Quebec journalist’s union.

The Montreal daily wouldn’t be the first. Several American papers, including the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, have shut their print editions and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp has launched the first all electronic newspaper designed for Apple’s iPad — The Daily.

My own E-Book – Boy in the Picture

So maybe now’s the time to mention that my recent book, The Boy in the Picture, is now available as an eBook from Chapters Indigo, among other online retailers. A bargain at $7.79. Thanks, Dundurn Press, for opening up this wider market for me.

A young man burns himself to death, the result of bitter frustration and humiliation. A distinguished but little known American scholar writes a book on how to organize a non-violent revolution.

Of themselves, events of no great importance. Taken together, they’ve played a big part in the uprisings now shaking the Arab world.

The death by self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a fruit and vegetable seller working the streets of the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, was the spark that set off revolt in that country. (The main square in Tunis has been renamed in his honor). The spirit of revolt spread quickly to Egypt, Libya, Yeman and other countries.

But the techniques of many of the leaders of those uprisings have been borrowed from the writings of Gene Sharp, emeritus professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts and founder of the Albert Einstein Institute.

Sharp is the author of numerous books, the most important being From Dictatorship to Democracy, which he wrote for the Burmese democratic movement in 1993. It outlines 198 non-violent methods to bring down an oppressive government, and has been translated into more than thirty languages.

According to filmmaker Ruridh Arow, whose film, Gene Sharp: How to Start a Revolution, will be released this spring, Sharp’s methods of popular non-violent resistance have been put to use in Serbia, the Ukraine, Egypt, Libya, Iran and Burma.

Writing on the BBC World News site,  Ruaridh Arrow says:

His central message is that the power of dictatorships comes from the willing obedience of the people they govern – and that if the people can develop techniques of withholding their consent, a regime will crumble.”

Portions of the book are downloadable here.

PUBLIC OPINION POLLS — OUT OF DATE?

There’s an interesting debate raging — again — over the role of public opinion polls in shaping political views. Michael Adams of the Environics Group weighs in on the subject today in the Globe and Mail.

Adams makes the point that sophisticated pollsters are fully able to factor into their polling the effects of changing demographics. He disagrees, for example, with Alan Gregg who argues that younger voters are not fairly represented in polls. Gregg said on the CBC that people who have abandoned land lines and use only cell phones are being left out of pollsters’ calculations.

All this comes just a day after a new poll showing a big drop in support for the Harper Conservatives. It reminds me that Rex Murphy made a prophetic comment on air last week when he observed that whenever the Harperites nudge into majority territory, they screw up. The latest example, of course, being the Bev Oda saga. Sure enough, that dust-up is being blamed for the drop of a dozen points in support for the Conservative government.

We’ve got a government in Canada that’s always trying to play the angles. One is to announce new policies via Twitter. Industry minister Tony Clement has become an old hand at this. And this is  how PM Harper’s office let out the word that it wants to roll back the decision of the CRTC to force telecoms to charge Internet users by usage – the more you use, the more you’d pay.

A popular move, you say. No one on  a fixed rate wants to be shifted to User-Based Billing where it would cost extra to down load movies and other heavy data features.

Under the current system, the big Telcos – BCE and Telus, for example – set a cap on how many gigabytes a subscriber can draw down. You get notified when you’re near the limit, and likely to run into more charges. It’s the independent companies — Small Internet Service Providers — who buy bandwith from the telcos and re-sell it to subscribers who would be hit. They’d have to give up offering unlimited downloading, and start charging heavy users extra.

As a result of Ottawa’s blow-back, the CRTC is reviewing the decision. It says it’s doing it “of its own initiative.” Believe that, and I have a bridge I can sell you.

This fiddling with the CRTC decision  on bandwidth is just another example of how the Harper government has made a shambles of telecom policy.

First, they overrode the CRTC to allow Globalive, backed with Egyptian money, to start up in Canada regardless of rules that are supposed to limit the entry of foreign providers. We won ‘t apply the law in this case, the government  said.

Few of us, especially me, have any objection to another entrant in our over-priced mobile telephone market.

But we either have laws or we don ‘t. That’s why the Federal Court, in a stunning slap at the Harperites, has told Ottawa it had no basis to allow Gobalive in. So now the future of their Wind Mobile is up in the air, and investors are scratching their heads as to whether telecom in Canada is something that it’s safe to invest in.Not a healthy situation.

Clearly the Harperites are seizing on every populist opportunity to try to make friends and influence voters.

How about trying to do it in a rational, sustainable way?

In principle, there’s nothing wrong with user-based billing. The problem is there’s not enough competition in telecom in Canada. That’s why our cell phone costs are so high, and why South Koreans pay a fraction of what we do for ten times the Internet bandwidth we enjoy.

In principle, it’s a good idea to encourage foreigners to invest in Canadian industry when new competition will be beneficial to consumers.

But the idea of allowing one company to circumvent the foreign investment rules, or stopping an eminently sensible user pay system for the internet, makes for an incoherent, unpredictable, and risky public policy.

These decisions might seem  beneficial to consumers in the short run, but their demoralizing effects on investment will do Canada no good in the long run.

So here’s my idea: Let the CRTC do its job. Makes rules for the telecom players. And if we want to lower the cost of cell phone and Internet access, open up the market to anyone who wants to provide service.

Competition, anyone?

There’s an encouraging endorsement from the Globe and Mail about why books will always be with us. In an editorial about Wikileaker Julian Assange’s plans to write a book on his trials and tribulations, the Globe says:

The release of hundreds of thousands of U.S. embassy cables through WikiLeaks has provided an incredibly detailed look at the inner workings of the U.S. diplomacy. But such a massive dump of information without context is entirely meaningless. Information requires order. Books – in whatever format readers prefer – serve the valuable purpose of sorting through large swaths of information, retrieving what is relevant and putting it in manageable form. This is a need that transcends technology. And it is because of this that readers will be prepared to pay to read Mr. Assange’s book, even if the raw material exists for free on the Internet.

Whether he wants to admit it or not, Mr. Assange’s seven-figure deal stands as tangible proof that books will be with us for a long time to come, and that they’re still worth paying for.”

Bravo!

MORDECAI RICHLER AS SOCIAL HISTORIAN

I spent much of the Holidays plowing through Charles Foran’s excellent biography of Mordecai Richler — The Life and Times (Knopf Canada). It is a formidable book although its 800 pages contain  so much detail that I found myself scanning parts of it. I had the pleasure of meeting up with Richler in one of his favorite haunts, the Maritime Bar of the Ritz Carleton Hotel in Montreal. Our five o’clock date was the prelude to an uproarious evening during which he managed to get thoroughly drunk and insult the client whose affair I’d arranged for Richler to speak at that night.

It’s said that Canadian universities are neglecting Richler in their Canadian lit reading lists (report here). If they don’t want him in the English department, I suggest his Duddy Kravetz and St. Urbain’s Horseman be made required reading in History studies. Like all great novelists, Richler was a social historian as well as a story-teller. Reading Foran reminds me that Richler drew on a rich treasury of social history reposing in his Montreal Jewish community. He wrote of what he knew, capturing his society from an era that has now largely passed away. His books are a form of contemporary history rooted in his 40s and 50s upbringing. In fact, his writing was so concentrated within that genre that one critic, according to Foran, remarked: “I love his book. I buy it every time he writes it.”

Foran points out that Richler, of course, delighted in pricking the academy. He wonders if this is why “little scholarship has been devoted to Richler’s fiction in recent years, an absence all the more striking given that his two greatest novels may also have been his last: Soloman Gursky Was Here and Barney’s Version.”

Foran’s book is so fact-filled it’s inevitable he got a few things wrong. He cites the ban on  U.S. comic books in Canada during World War II (which created a temporary bonanza for Canadian comics) as an effort to conserve paper. Wrong: it was a foreign exchange decision, one of many measures to stem currency outflow. Also, he has Richler writing for Maclean’s as a weekly when it was still being published semi-monthly.

REASONS FOR FIXING THE COPYRIGHT ACT

Toronto author Bill Freeman, chair of the Creators’ Copyright coalition, makes a good argument in the Georgia Strait for fixing the Copyright Act when Parliament resumes study of Bill C-342 in February. It’s here.

I’ve always viewed copyright as a rather arcane subject, but the issue here is whether educational institutions should be allowed to do wholesale copying without compensation to the creator. As Bill says:

Bill C-32 will allow universities, colleges, and school boards to copy works and distribute them to students without payment to writers and publishers. Just how much we don’t know. The legislation is imprecise and so the courts will have to decide. With this legislation a school board or university could scan parts of text books, trade books, or journals and distribute them without payment.”

I understand there’s an Opposition motion to pin down the lawful copying section more precisely. That could help.

Here’s an offbeat subject that I think would make a great book topic for 2011:

LAST DAYS OF THE NEANDERTHALS

I’ve been reading of new discoveries about the Neanderthals. For some reason, these ancient pre-human types, whose time span interlaps with humans, have always intrigued me. We once thought of this specie as a crude, non-verbal, animal-like character, way below homo sapiens capabilities. No more.

The latest evidence, from a cave in  Spain, suggests Neanderthals were, among other things, cannibals. A very human quality, I’d say. This report tells of the findings of broken and apparently gnawed upon bones of a family, suggesting they were attacked by another tribe. There’s also new evidence — taken from plaque in Neanderthal tooth fragments, that they had fire and cooked their food.

What happened to the Neanderthals is of course a question for the ages. My private theory is that we homos wiped them out. Surely some great dramatist could create a marvellous story of the interaction  of humans and Neanderthals – potential for lots of conflict, suspense, and moralizing. Just remember where you got the idea!

WORDS THAT SHOULD BE BANISHED

An obscure little university in Michigan — Lake Superior University – has made a bit of a name for itself with its annual list of words that should be banished. Its nominees for 2011:

Viral, epic, fail, wow factor, a-ha moment, back story, BFF (best friends forever) man up, refudiate and mama grizzly (both courtesy Sarah Palin), the American People, I’m just sayin’, Facebook/Google as verbs, and Live Life to the Fullest.

I’d also give the heave-ho to NDP leader Jack Layton’s “ordinary Canadians” and new Toronto mayor Rob Ford’s “Just call me!”

THE LAST WORD

It’s Never Over was the title of one of Morley Callaghan’s first novels (1929). Anyone who’s written any kind of long form literature knows it’s never over until the last carefully marked proof is sent back to the printer. So I’m  celebrating the completion of the first draft of my historical novel, Vandeleur. Put the finishing touches to it on New Year’s Eve. It goes in now for a professional edit. Maybe this time next year?

It’s the biggest challenge of the Internet Age and governments around the world — spurred by a nervous Obama administration — have declared a virtual war on WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange.

The assault has become ferocious. The first move came when Amazon denied WikiLeaks access to its servers. Since then, the web site has been chased all over Europe. It’s now resident in Switzerland but it is uncertain how long it will be safe there.

WikiLeaks has been denied access to Paypal, the Internet payments service. People will no longer be able to contribute money via that handy and reliable web site.

Swedish police have issued an arrest warrant for Assange, variously on a charge of sexual assault but also for apparently illegal disclosure of government documents.

The documents revealed by WikiLeaks are of U.S. diplomatic exchanges. But because many incriminate foreign officials in the furtherance of American foreign policy, the outrage is not confined to the Pentagon or the State Department.

The reason the WikiLeaks disclosure have aroused such intense criticism is that they reveal devastating failures in American foreign policy.

We now know that the European Union no longer believes in success in Afghanistan. European troops are there “out of deference to the United States,” according to a leaked diplomatic memo quoting EU president Herman Van Rompey.

If the current American surge there doesn’t work, “that will be it,” he’s quoted by U.S. ambassador Howard Gutman. “No one believes in Afghanistan any more.”

The brutal fact of such leaks is that they expose American policy as incoherent and incapable of achieving their goals.

In a secret visit to Afghanistan last week, President Obama told troops there that a new phase will open in  the war next year — “The beginning of a transition to Afghan responsibility.”

Meanwhile, documents revealed by WikiLeaks demonstrate that the country struggles under a corrupt administration whose leaders, from president Hamid Karzai on down, seem more interested in filling their pockets than in improving the lot of their people. It all sounds more and more like Vietnam all over again.

It was last April that WikiLeaks first captured worldwide attention with its release of a video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in Baghdad (including two Reuters news staff) by a U.S. Apache helicopter gunship. You can see the video here:

One can dismiss as a stupid quip the remark by Tom Flanagan, a former advisor to Prime Minister Harper, that Julian Assange should be assassinated and that “Obama should put out a contract.”

However, it demonstrates the mindset of many people who believe that government actions should never be questioned.

Sober minds knew all along that George Bush’s war on  Iraq — which has cost 4,000 American and 100,000 Iraqi lives — was  a fraudulent undertaking.

Sober minds have also long realized that Barack Obama’s war on the Taliban, considering the allies available to the West in Afghanistan, is doomed to failure.

The governments of the United States, Britain and Canada continue to deny these facts.

It’s takes disclosures of the order of those orchestrated by WikiLeaks to bring the truth into public light.

Perhaps we should look at the WikiLeaks in a historic context.

Imagine how the world might have changed had the secret plans of Hitler and Company for dealing with the Jews of Europe been exposed in the 1930s?

Would Stalin have been able to carry out his mass starvation of Ukrainian peasants if Russia and the world had known what was planned?

Would there have been a war in the Pacific had the secret attack plans of the Japanese Empire been exposed before December 7, 1941?

Apologists will of course say that the current revelations by WikiLeaks point to no such dastardly aims as those cited above.

There is a pattern, however, of wilful deception  and deceit that has characterized American foreign policy throughout the Cold War and since.

In a massive work, Pulitzer Prize winner Tim Weiner has documented the secret history of the Central Intelligence Agency, chronicling its many fiascos and missteps.

His 2008 book, Legacy of Ashes (Anchor Books) reveals how ineptly the U.S. and its allies have been served by the American intelligence apparatus. His 848 pages extend from the beginnings of the agency in World War II to its failures to either intercept the plotters of September 11, or capture their masters, including Osama bin Laden.

Now, more than nine years after the attack on the World Trade Center, it is incredible that bin Laden continues to operate apparently unfettered and untouched, somewhere in Afghanistan or Pakistan.

Remember when George Bush boasted of the old Western tradition of putting out a poster on a wanted man: “Wanted – Dead or Alive.” Apparently no one’s been reading it.

Now, the wanted poster is out for Julian Assange.

WikiLeaks boasts the following quote from Time Magazine on its web site:

“Could become as important a journalistic tool as the Freedom of Information Act.”

For how much longer?

As I watched Bravo TV’s broadcast last night on the Scotiabank Giller Prize for Canadian fiction, I tried to guess the winner among five nominated books that most Canadians — including me — have not yet read.

One of the nice things about the show is the short introductions of the contending books by celebrity presenters, followed by brief video bios of the authors.

I listened carefully to these briefs. I thought I’d most enjoy Johanna Skibsrud’s The Sentimentalists, so I was pulling for this 30-year-old first novel author to win.

By the time we got to Jack Rabinovitch’s presentation of the winning $50,000 check in the last thirty seconds of the show, I was feeling a real sense of shared suspense with each of the nominees.

You can imagine the delight I felt when The Sentimentalists took the big prize.

The story is set in the mythical town of Casablanca, Ontario, where the narrator struggles to understand her relationship with her father, whose life is complicated by the bitter memories he carries from atrocities he witnessed in the Vietnam war.

But it makes me wonder how wise an author is to go with a small press. The Sentimentalists was published by Gaspereau Press, of Kentville, Nova Scotia. It’s the first small press ever to cop the Giller.

That’s great. But it’s been a disappointment to read of the refusal — so far, at any rate — of Gaspereau’s principals to accept much-needed assistance in printing and distributing their prize winner.

When the book’s inclusion on the Giller short list was announced, Gaspereau had cranked out only eight hundred copies on a 1960s offset press. The publisher vowed that anybody who buys a book in Canada will buy a copy that’s come off their press. According to the Gaspereau blog, they ran two proof presses “straight through” the night to print jackets for books being sent to the International Festival of Authors in Toronto.

Toronto book store owner Ben McNally, official seller at IFA, says he got 40 copies on the last day.

It’s said that Giller winners usually sell 60,000 to 80,000 copies. You’d think Gaspereau would feel an obligation to their author to make arrangements to meet this kind of demand.

Jack Illingworth, writing in the National Post, thinks Gaspereau is following “a commitment to a thoughtful, rigorous, refined mode of publishing.” He says their lists are “cultural products embodying a few individuals’ ideas of what literature can be.”

There’s clearly a cultural clash here. Writers work hard to produce their books. They want people to read their stories. And among the writers I’ve met, they’d all like to get paid for their effort.

With the exception of Ben McNally, not a single major book seller across Canada has The Sentimentalists on the shelves right now, when interest in the book is at its peak. It is available at Indigo on Kobo, at $9.89. Internationally, William Heinemann, an imprint of Random House, has bought UK and Commonwealth rights outside Canada. No word on a U.S. publisher.

Gary Dunfield, a co-founder of Gaspereau, told Quill & Quire that the publisher won’t be supplying Indigo with the bulk quantities it usually requires. He says:

“The chains want you to send 2,000 to 3,000 copies, and then they’ll return 80% of them.”

Hello, Gary. You’ve got a Giller winner! Congratulations to Ms. Skibsrud. I wish her a productive and lengthy writing life.

A couple of good things happened in Canada this week. I have to credit the Harper government in both cases.

First came the announcement by Environment Minister Jim Prentice stopping the proposed Prosperity gold and copper mine in the Chilcotin district of British Columbia.

Then we had the decision of the federal government, announced by Industry Minister Tony Clement, to bar the acquisition of Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan by the Australian mining giant, BHP Billiton.

I’ve written here previously about the Prosperity mine. It’s said to have offered promise of five billion dollars in jobs and other benefits over the next 20 years. This in an area that’s been hard pressed economically.

But even that’s too high a price to pay to destroy the ecology of this incredibly beautiful and pricelessly pristine region. The idea of draining Fish Lake and using it as a tailing pond was an obscene and despicable concept.

The scheme would have been fought “to the death” by First Nations of the area, according to the local chief.

I first gained an appreciation for the grandeur of the Chilcotin district when I read Rich Hobson’s classic book, Grass Beyond the Mountains.

It tells the two of two young Americans who meander into the Chilcotin country in the 1930s and establish a cattle ranch far beyond the existing ranches of that day. I finally had the opportunity to visit the district just a few years ago. It’s breathtakingly beautiful and we need to keep it that way.

Grass Beyond the Mountain has since become a classic of Canadian pioneering literature, a 20th century counterpart to Susanna Moodie who wrote of the primitive life of early 19th century Upper Canada.

Both decisions of the federal government this week were a little bit unexpected, although it seemed to me that in the case of Potash, Harper & Co. had little or no choice in view of the almost universal opposition the deal ran into in Western Canada.

The Saskatchewan mines of Potash Corp.  hold about a third of the world’s known supply of potash, the key ingredient in fertilizer. The world is going to massively need this stuff if a global famine is to be avoided in the next fifty years.

Potash, along with oil and water, has the potential to make Canada the richest country in the world in the 21st century.

Some see the decision as a betrayal of Harper’s pro-business Conservative philosophy. The rejection supposedly imperils Canada’s claim to be open for business. Foreign investors won’t want to come here, according to this argument.

That’s a fallacy.

The Billiton bid was for Potash shares, which would of course have given it ownership of the company. The proceeds would have gone to current shareholders, fewer than half of whom are resident in Canada.

The only Canadian investment that could have come from this deal would have been if Billiton were to back up its share purchase with additional money to expand the business, open new mines, and create more jobs for Canadians. The record of other foreign buyers, such as U.S. Steel (Stelco) and Vale Inc. (Inco and Falconbridge) in this regard, is not good.

The government has made the right decision. It also probably saved a dozen Tory seats in Saskatchewan – most of which might have been picked off by the NDP in the next election. No wonder Jack Layton tried so hard to characterize the Clement announcement as but the prelude to an eventual cave-in.

In the case of the Prosperity mine, Mr. Prentice cited the “scathing” report of an environmental commission that looked at the project. He has since resigned from cabinet, announcing he has accepted a senior position at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC). He’ll be missed. Don’t be surprised if you see him back one day in some future Conservative party leadership campaign.

A sizeable crowd of legal types has gathered at Osgoode Hall, the pre-Confederation Gothic building that serves as York County’s courthouse, for the annual book launches of the Osgoode Hall Legal Society. I’m attracted because one of the titles marks Toronto writer Chris Moore’s latest foray into the legal jungles, The British Columbia Court of Appeal: the First hundred Years. 

There’s a bit of coincidence at work here in that a couple of my current writing projects involve crime and punishment. I’ve had to do a good deal of research on arcane aspects of case law (got me talking just like a lawyer) and the appeal process, and how it’s worked throughout Canadian history.

As a native of B.C., I found Chris’ book an opportunity to learn more about famous cases I was either only vaguely aware of, or had forgotten about entirely.

Another coincidence was the release by the B.C. Court of Appeal last week of its findings in the case of Ivan Henry who was locked up for 27 years for a series of rapes of which he was innocent. He’s the longest-serving, wrongly convicted, Canadian. The appeal court’s judgment makes powerful reading on such matters as the unreliability of witness testimony, the willingness of a judge to allow tainted evidence, and the foolishness of trying to represent yourself at trial.

Ivan Henry, now 64, was arrested in 1982 and charged with 10 counts of sexual assault involving eight women. He objected to being put in a police lineup where witnesses might identify him. Police handcuffed him and dragged him into the lineup where an officer held him in a headlock. Three witnesses identified him definitely; during the trial all eight said they recognized Henry from the lineup or from his voice.

Pictures were taken. Henry somehow got hold of one and acting as his own lawyer, entered it as an exhibit. He argued that the picture of himself in the grip of a policeman proved the lineup had been a farce. The police used force, although the law does not require a person to take part in a lineup.

Because of a previous conviction for sexual assault, Henry was jailed indefinitely as a dangerous offender. He spent years studying the law and submitted fifty applications for a review of his case. All were denied, including his request for legal aid so he could have a lawyer prepare a proper appeal. While in jail, his wife, mother and father died. His two daughters grew up without ever seeing him.

It is to the credit of the justice system that when certain information came to light in 2005 during an investigation related to serial killer Robert Picton, a special prosecutor was appointed. After a thorough investigation (and the conviction of another man), Henry was released and his case was referred to the B.C. Court of Appeal.

The appeal court noted that the attacks took place in the dark, the attacker took steps to obscure his face, the police line-up was “flawed and unfair” and much evidence was never disclosed to the defence. The judge erred in telling the jurors they could give weight to  the Crown’s argument that Henry’s objection to the lineup suggested a “consciousness of guilt.”

Released, Henry expressed little rancour over his fate. He spoke of his pride in his grandchildren and added:  ”I got a little dog I look after. He is my friend.” The victims, meanwhile, can only wonder where their justice had gone.

My upcoming article, Reasonable Doubt, explores the frequency with which Canadians were wrongfully hanged during the time that Canada had capital punishment. It will appear in the December issue of Canada’s History.

I know a lot of people think our justice system is weak and ineffective in dealing with criminals. I think it’s as important to protect the innocent as to apprehend the guilty.