Why Judge Camp still makes me itchy

I’m still scratching my head about the beleaguered judge Robin Camp and the dilemma he's created for the Canadian Judicial Council (CJC). Long after other media have moved on, I still can’t shake this one off.

Too much was left unsaid at the council’s inquiry into Camp’s fitness to remain on the bench. Or if it was said, it was not covered by most media.

For instance, virtually absent from the inquiry, or at least from coverage, was a serious analysis of race, class and power, all of which were as important as gender in the now-famous trial that brought Robin Camp down.

After all, it was the affirmative action of race, power and class that granted him a judicial appointment in the first place. Then it promoted him to the Federal Court, where he was shielded from the consequences of his own incompetence.

What brain trust would appoint an oil and gas lawyer to judge the credibility of young homeless Indigenous women such as the complainant in this case? What could he know about her world, and what someone in her position must do every day to make the sun come up tomorrow?

A singularly telling scene in the smash hit Slumdog Millionaire lays out the problem.

A police inspector taunts the protagonist Jamal for being unable to answer a simple and most basic question about India's national phrase. Jamal responds with a question of his own: who stole a bike that's reported missing in the slum. The entire neighbourhood knows who stole the bike — even a five-year old child of the slum would know — but the inspector hasn't got a clue.

Such is the gulf between the powerful and the poor, between our European and Indigenous cultures, that the most basic tenets of each world are utterly foreign to one another. They share little more than language and geography.

Appointing an oil and gas lawyer to oversee criminal trials is akin to hiring an ophthalmologist to set bones, hoping they’ll pick things up as they go along.

You'd never do that unless you didn’t give a fig about the patients.

Vulnerable, poor, minority and Indigenous people are disproportionately represented in the criminal courts as both accused and complainants, where they are too frequently judged by an overwhelmingly white and middle-class legal system that brings pre-packaged judgments about them to work every day. This is especially true for Indigenous people, for whom the justice system has been a long disaster bio-pic.

It’s not a slip that, even as he gave evidence in his own defence, Justice Camp still called the complainant "the accused."

People from comfortable upper-middle-class backgrounds are afraid of the disenfranchised and especially Indigenous people. That’s not a criticism, it’s a fact.

But if the criminal justice system is to have any legitimacy, especially in the 21st century, it must see the women and vulnerable communities not as outsiders and "the other." but as fully-paid up members of the public it exists to serve.

Good lawyers and judges do it every day.

So what does it say when not a single minority is represented on the CJC’s panel? What does it say when the two lawyer (i.e. non-judicial) panelists come from the fields of labour and employment law?

It says that Robin Camp’s interests have become the over-arching focus of the CJC.

It says we still don’t get this Truth and Reconciliation thing.

It says our commitment to victims of sexual violence is a mile wide and an inch deep.

It says something as simple as a judge’s basic competence to do the job is not on trial.

Let's add some context here: a man who's a good enough corporate trial lawyer to be appointed to the bench and then promoted is perfectly capable of returning to his law practice with financial fortunes intact. A judicial appointment isn't a job like other peoples’ jobs.

And there’s no reason for all this legal mystique, like this is a papal conclave and we might fire the Pope.

There are some 1118 federally appointed judges currently sitting across Canada, and probably well over ten thousand more who’ve occupied the post since the Canadian Judicial Council was established some 45 years ago.

In all that time, not one single judge has been forcibly removed as part of the council’s disciplinary process. Not one.

It’s absurd to be tying ourselves into knots about this. Camp was an inappropriate provincial court appointment in the first place. When he didn’t work out in that role, he should have moved on. Instead, the Harper government promoted him to the Federal Court.

CEOs get fired every day in this country. Cabinet ministers get shuffled and demoted. Premiers and prime ministers get voted out. Performance reviews are standard for every job and profession, but it’s literally a federal case to remove a single judge that brought the courts into disrepute.

Meanwhile, our criminal justice system is experiencing a crisis in dealing with sexual assault, and the single biggest problem is the reluctance of victims and survivors to report. By putting himself on the national news night after night for publicly humiliating a vulnerable young witness, Justice Camp did far more damage than he can ever repay.

We’ll never know about the women who don’t come forward to report, because we’ll never hear from them at all. That’s a terrible price to pay to keep one man in his job.

It’s deeply troubling that Camp doesn’t see that this issue isn’t about him and his recovery.

This may come as a surprise, but the sexual assault acquittal rate is actually very low in Canada—only nine per cent of charges laid. That’s almost dead on the eight per cent average for all violent offences. The conviction rate at 45 per cent is also close to the national average (the differential is charges stayed or withdrawn). Let’s make no mistake, giving evidence in a sexual assault trial is hellishly tough and invasive, just by virtue of its intimate and traumatic nature. Yet when competently done, the trial process itself generally works—or works roughly as well as other categories of crime.

The problem is that an overwhelming number of women (and men too) resist reporting their assaults, out of fear that they’ll meet a Robin Camp. Whole populations and categories of women are routinely victimized because they are powerless. Their attackers know they’ll never go to the police.

Those women live with fear and despair. Survival sex becomes a form of currency, and it gets devalued all the time.

Our job as a society, and the job of the CJC, is to put victims’ safety, the rights of the accused, and the integrity of the justice system first, above all other considerations, but especially above one man’s job.

The CJC must send an unmistakable signal that the time is long overdue to modernize the role and place of the judiciary in society, and that includes the appointment process itself.

Robin Camp's got to go.