Letter from Kenora
[Some five percent of the Canadian population are indigenous peoples. Laurelly Dale, a criminal defense lawyer who practices in Kenora, a small city along Lake of the Woods in Northwestern Ontario, is the granddaughter of one of them. Indigenous Canadians, most of them women and girls, have been what a National Inquiry this summer called targets of violence, of genocide centuries in the making. Lawyer Dale doesn’t call it that, but it hardly tempers the pain of losing fifteen of her own indigenous clients to homicide, suicide, or drugs. A columnist for The Lawyer’s Daily, she wrote of her clients on 26 June for that publication, and graciously shares it here.]
15 of My First Nations Clients Are Dead
The final report of the Missing Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) national inquiry, published June 3, 2019, evokes mixed feelings. Do I believe that it is a genocide? No. Labelling it as such implies that there is a single villain. They are the forgotten people. Neglected and vulnerable to crimes of violence. I have been a criminal lawyer for 13 years. In that time approximately 15 of my First Nations clients have died. The majority were young Indigenous girls.
How did they die?
Most died by homicide, suicide or overdose.
I have offices in Toronto and Kenora, Ont. (my hometown). Reading the MMIWG report forced me to reflect on my own life. My paternal grandmother was Métis. She truly felt like she was a “forgotten people,” referenced on page 20 of the Executive Summary of the MMIWG Report.
Traditionally, First Nations women were the decision makers on the reserve. They acted as chief-in-council and were well respected. But that changed over the decades. The testimonies throughout the report tell a different story. As criminal defence counsel, about 90 per cent of my clients in Kenora are First Nations. My office travels regularly to various First Nations reserves — most accessible only by tiny “flying cigar” plane.
A teenage female client once told me something that has shaped my perspective on the fear of some First Nations women and girls ever since. She told me that she wasn’t scared of going to jail but wanted my assurance that they would allow her to keep the light on in her cell.
“Why?” I asked. She replied, “I want to see who is going to be raping me at night.”
Pikangikum, recently engulfed by fires, is the community my office frequents the most. It is plagued with violence, including homicides and suicides. Sadly, death of young people is routine in Pikangikum and other remote First Nations communities.
In 2012, Maclean’s magazine reported that Pikangikum held the title of the “suicide capital of the
world.” In that article, Randy Keeper, a local carpenter who does double duty as the local undertaker, told Maclean’s that he stopped counting the number of funerals.
In 2011, the community of roughly 2,400 had a suicide rate equivalent to 250 per 100,000 — nearly 20 times that of Canada, and far and away the highest in the world. It has been so for 20 nearly uninterrupted years.
Most recently, the young daughter of one of my clients from Pikangikum was evacuated to a small city in Southern Ontario due to the threat of fires in the community. She was struck by a vehicle and killed while crossing the street.
While the death of each of my clients affects me profoundly, one in particular stands out.
I represented a female young offender from Pikangikum, age 14. We shall call her Lauren (not her real name). Lauren had been addicted to intoxicants since the age of 9. She was initially charged with mischief and two counts of breach of a probation order. On this set of charges, she was not detained.
At the time, court in Pikangikum was held in their hotel/restaurant. At one of Lauren’s court appearances, I was standing and speaking to a police officer about another client. I could see through the corner of my eye that Lauren was behind us, most likely waiting to speak to me.
I began wrapping up my discussion with the officer when “BAM” — something hard fell on the back of our legs.
Lauren had passed out, falling face first on the ground, her fall only slightly broken by the backs of our legs. The officer quickly assisted. Lauren came to and when asked about the last time she ate anything, she replied “three or four days ago.” She reeked of gasoline and was brought to the nursing station.
A week or so later, she incurred a new set of charges, specifically: assault with a weapon, assault andbtwo counts of breach of an undertaking. I recall an axe being involved. Lauren was detained.
In Pikangikum, detainees are flown out to Kenora to appear in person before a justice of the peace. I met Lauren in the cells the following afternoon. The matter was adjourned, and we put together a release plan. Lauren was fixated on returning to her community. She was released on consent with strict conditions and flown back to Pikangikum.
Four days later, I received a call that Lauren had committed suicide. She hanged herself.
That week, court was cancelled. Court was frequently cancelled due to a death in the community.
About two months went by since Lauren’s death. As was my routine when in Kenora, I attended the cells first thing in the morning before attending court. I approached the female cell. I peered in, searching for my client, when I found myself face to face with Lauren!
Was I staring at a ghost? She seemed tired and didn’t respond to my questions. I ran to the office of the First Nations court worker to tell him that I had seen Lauren.
We waited for the Crown to arrive, as the court docket had not yet been printed. The Crown told us that I had actually seen Jackie (not her real name), the identical twin sister of Lauren.
I spoke to Jackie with the assistance of an interpreter; she spoke little to no English. We discussed her sister and I expressed my condolences. I went on to represent Jackie as counsel.
Through each election cycle we hear about the quality of life on First Nations reserves in Ontario. The hardships are not caused by genocide. These cyclical tragedies are caused by factors beyond the scope of this article. The MMIWG is an important report.
Most Canadians truly have no idea of the misery that is so much worse in remote First Nations
communities — the forgotten people.
Letter from Kent
[Adam Holloway, who wrote this piece, is a Member of Parliament for Gravesham, in the United Kingdom, and has been since 2005. He was a Captain in the Grenadier Guards, serving in the Gulf War. A former journalist and documentarian, he became interested in the problem of homelessness when he spied a man drinking from a puddle, like a dog. More than interested: he spent five months on the streets, learning the life by living the life. Last month he wrote about what he learned for The Spectator, and kindly shares his article here.]
We are encouraging homelessness instead of fixing it
Over the years, I have spent around five months sleeping rough on the streets of London, Birmingham and New York, making undercover TV programmes. Matthew, who works in my Westminster office, spent last summer involuntarily homeless after he was cheated by his business partner. I suspect we are the only people within the Palace of Westminster who have been through the unpleasant experience of sleeping rough, and we both have come to the same conclusion. Street homelessness (as opposed to the homelessness of temporary accommodation) is, for the most part, a symptom or consequence of a different problem: addiction to drink or drugs, or mental illness. If politicians want to deal with it, they must accept this.
Homelessness is a popular subject in SW1. It enables both sides of the political divide to project their prejudices onto the least fortunate. The right tell them to get a job; the left see them as victims of inadequately funded services by the state. But both sides have a point: for the addicted or the mentally ill to even get near a job, many will need the intervention of social services.
Rough-sleeping could and should be a cross-party issue, but for this to happen, everyone must wake up. The left in particular must accept what George Orwell called ‘unacceptable facts’ – and here follow a few from our own experience that will tweak the noses of the pious.
Most beggars are kept in heroin or drink by the kindness of strangers. If you give money to a beggar you are almost certainly enabling the addiction that put them on the street. Here’s the test – look at the recipient’s teeth. If theirs are carious, blue-black Elizabethan stumps or they have none at all, their owner is a smack addict. Staff at the homeless charity St Mungo’s told me of one addict who now wishes the public had not given him cash for ‘a cup of tea’ or ‘a hostel’ because it enabled for a decade the habit that lost him a leg. ‘If I hadn’t been given that money, I would have got help much sooner,’ he said. Beggars in London can make more than £100 a day; in places such as Winchester or Oxford, where there is a huge oversupply of credulous tourists and students, they make even more. Having a cute puppy, I was told, increases your take.
Another ‘unacceptable fact’ is that some people do choose to live on the streets. When I spoke in a Westminster Hall debate I said this and a Labour MP interrupted me to say: ‘I simply cannot believe that anyone would choose to sleep rough.’ This rhetorical technique is what Richard Dawkins calls the ‘Argument from Personal Incredulity’, and it’s as useless in examining homelessness as it is in taking on the arguments against evolution. A person’s failure to believe something does not make it false. A minority of people do choose to sleep rough. Some don’t like the rules enforced at night shelters that forbid drink and drugs; a smaller number like the escape from bourgeois conventions and responsibility.
Some months ago, I slept out for a few days behind the goods-in entrance of McDonald’s by Westminster Cathedral where many addicted to the horrific synthetic cannabis ‘spice’ are turned into zombies. There I made friends with an alcoholic in his thirties called Andy who showed me the keys to the flat he lived in – he does not actually live there, he told me, because he gets so very lonely, and on the street the passers-by now freely pay for his beer.
What’s more, in the summer sleeping rough is not that unpleasant, certainly more comfortable than being on army exercise (if you are of sound mind, able-bodied and not in the throes of addiction). Trouble is, what starts as a street party or escapism for some can turn into a downward spiral of addiction and mental illness.
What was depressing in our experience on the streets recently was how little had changed since the early 1990s. Despite billions of pounds of public money, countless worthwhile charitable initiatives and royal visits, Matthew and I saw the same cohort of the addicted and the mentally ill. What, then, is to be done? This is where we need to listen to both the left and the right.
The public must stop giving cash directly to beggars. (The Oxford University business incubator has developed an app to give money to beggars via an account where it can be used as a deposit on a flat or for food.) In addition, money must be allocated for emergency mental health assessments. Someone with a serious psychiatric illness is extremely unlikely to be able to maintain a tenancy. Mental health support should be embedded within outreach teams, so that the money goes to the tip of the spear, and then follows people through the system rather than being absorbed by general mental health budgets.
Lastly, the ‘Housing First’ policy, which puts a homeless person in accommodation before asking them to deal with their addictions, is very obviously the right one. It has been a great success in Finland and America and is being trialled in three cities here.
That those least able to help themselves end up homeless is ultimately driven by another unacceptable fact: we are not building enough new homes. This is in part about immigration. For 2018, net international migration was estimated at 275,000, and there were 121,000 more births than deaths: 396,000 more people. But for many years, housing stock has not kept pace. You cannot keep adding to your population while failing to build enough new homes.
All in all, we are mostly only dealing with the symptoms of homelessness rather than its causes – and in the process we are keeping those most unable to help themselves on the street.
Go Back to Where You Didn’t Come From
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
I love it when the sentient Orange Julius who is President of the United States is overseas shaking hands with one foreign leader after another who wonders where that little hand has been.
The crime wave that is the Trump Administration has left our shores. The air smells fresh again. The sun is just a little brighter; our step, just a little lighter.
It could always be like that.
A lawyer I know, invested with the quasi authority to act as agent for the President, is even now looking at an investment opportunity that would save the big guy from both impeachment and criminal indictment.
Turns out that the government of Pitcairn Island, unlike our own, is not only not hostile to immigration, but views it as a national security imperative. With a total population of fifty (maybe only forty-nine at the moment: the demographic skews to the elderly, most of them descendants of Marlon Brando), the governing Island Council is encouraging new migrants bigly.
Encouraging, as in giving land away for settlement. The Island Council supplies the land, no charge, and all the migrant has to bring are the building materials and the salt and pepper shakers.
The Pitcairn Imperative: If you give it, they will build. Cheapest deal for a foreigner since Trump told everyone Mexico would pay for The Wall.
So the lawyer, at the implicit direction of the President himself — who’s always looking for a cheap deal — has contacted Pitcairn government authorities to explore the immigration possibilities for Donald John Trump, with the following query which he’s exclusively leaked to me:
If the people of the United States of America are able to persuade him, would Donald Trump be welcome on Pitcairn?
How many members of his family would he be allowed to bring with him?
Any members of his cabinet?
Would he have to disclose any tax returns?
Will he be able to bring his gold toilet with him?
I apologize, but he would want me to ask: can he just buy Pitcairn Island?
Best of luck with the deal, Mr. President. I really mean that.
Groundhog Day
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
Things you can do in the United States in less than a minute:
Get a third of the way to the perfect soft-boiled egg.
If you’re the current President of the United States, be halfway through a romantic session initiated by your never-fail go-to, the pussy grab.
Kill nine people and wound twenty-seven others.
Dayton’s was the second mass shooting in America in less than twenty-four hours.
But it was just another day at the Oval Office for Donald Trump, who immediately suggested we need stronger background checks, then did his own background check with Wayne LaPierre over to the N.R.A. and remembered oh, yeah, we already have good enough background checks.
That’s our President pictured above, celebrating the first mass shooting of that day, in El Paso.
Every mass shooting it’s the same thing. Thoughts and prayers, vague promises, I never said that, those moving lips you saw on TV weren’t mine, fake news.
Again and again.
Forget it, Don. It’s Toledo.