Colin Thatcher walks out of the chamber after the speech from the throne at the Saskatchewan Legislature in Regina, on Oct. 26, 2022.Heywood Yu/The Canadian Press
By the end of this week, the view from the Saskatchewan Party was that a backbench MLA’s choice to bring convicted killer Colin Thatcher to the throne speech had been an error in judgment. Premier Scott Moe said it was a decision made by the MLA alone, and an unfortunate distraction from the governing party’s strong set of policy initiatives.
Mr. Thatcher – the son of a former premier, a once-powerful cabinet minister and wealthy rancher, sometimes called the “J.R. Ewing of Saskatchewan” – resurfaced in the province’s legislature Wednesday at the invitation of MLA Lyle Stewart.
Initially, Mr. Stewart said the now-84-year-old Mr. Thatcher – found responsible of first-degree murder in the violent death of his former wife, JoAnn Wilson, in 1984 – was “a fine individual.” He added that Mr. Thatcher had a tough life because of his many years in prison, not mentioning that Ms. Wilson’s life was ended at age 43.
“If anybody has a right to be here, it’s Colin Thatcher,” Mr. Stewart said to the bafflement of many. Mr. Thatcher was granted full parole in 2006, but his life sentence means that he’s under supervision until the end of his days. Still, Saskatchewan Public Safety Minister Christine Tell said of him: “He’s a citizen of our province who paid his debt to society. That’s just the way it is.”
Events from four decades ago can seem like ancient times. Today, I would rather be writing about the sometimes clumsy but rational Saskatchewan government battle with Ottawa over carbon pricing and climate policy.
But Mr. Stewart’s invitation of Mr. Thatcher to such an important day has thrust an infamous, painful part of Canadian political history back into public consciousness. The details surrounding Ms. Wilson’s death were horrific, especially to women. Before she died, she said her ex-husband “thinks he’s above the law, and that the law is for somebody else.”
As the Saskatchewan Party talks about strengthening its fight on crime, including cracking down on the illegal use of firearms, Mr. Thatcher’s appearance as a guest in the legislature can only be viewed as a sign that the government is not serious. Or that some members regard killing your former wife as a different kind of crime.
Try to imagine any one of an array of different scenarios: Would a politician of any stripe invite someone convicted of killing a police officer or a child to the throne speech, even four decades later?
Jo-Anne Dusel, who heads PATHS, the association for agencies that provide intimate-partner violence services across Saskatchewan, said the optics of inviting Mr. Thatcher to the Throne Speech are “that JoAnn’s death is inconsequential – that a person can be deemed guilty of femicide, of the death of the mother of his own children, and still be welcome in the halls of power.”
The Canadian Press said that when a reporter in the rotunda asked Mr. Thatcher if he thought the province needs tougher crime measures, he laughed and said “enough” before walking away. He then joined Mr. Stewart for tea at a social gathering.
It’s far removed from the acrimony of the Saskatchewan court where the child-custody and matrimonial-property battle played out between Mr. Thatcher and Ms. Wilson in the early 1980s.
“I was afraid of him – very much afraid of him,” Ms. Wilson said at the time.
“I was physically afraid of him, and I don’t mean just a punch in the eye.”
Mr. Thatcher’s one-time close friend, Dick Collver – who led Saskatchewan’s Progressive Conservative Party for much of the 1970s – testified that even when Ms. Wilson agreed to a negotiated settlement of their assets much below the original court-ordered amount, Mr. Thatcher told him that she “isn’t going to get anything.”
While that legal battle was playing out in January, 1981, Ms. Wilson was shot by a high-powered rifle through her patio door window, injuring her shoulder. As the Supreme Court of Canada would later recount, she was hospitalized for three weeks. She was terrified. No one was ever charged with that shooting. But even as she was still recovering, she ceded custody of her second oldest child to Mr. Thatcher – as he had long demanded.
Less than two years later after being shot in her home, Ms. Wilson was killed in her garage – she was hit with a curved instrument at least 47 times, then shot behind the right ear.
Mr. Thatcher was convicted in a trial where Mr. Collver spoke of the former’s obsession with finding someone to hire to kill Ms. Wilson. A farmer and neighbour of Mr. Thatcher’s testified – with an agreement of immunity from prosecution – that he tried to help Mr. Thatcher hire someone to kill Ms. Wilson, and helped with obtaining cars and guns, and doing cleanup, in the days around the first shooting in 1981, and the second in 1983.
Testimony also came from a former girlfriend. Lynn Mendell, who lived at Mr. Thatcher’s Palm Springs condo for a time, recalled him saying, “I have to admit it is a strange feeling to have blown your wife away,” shortly after Ms. Wilson was killed. As reported by Maclean’s in 1984, the defence lawyer asked Ms. Mendell what kind of woman sleeps with a man she knows has killed someone. Someone “afraid that if she didn’t, she’d get smacked around,” she replied.
Mr. Thatcher has always said he was a man unfairly convicted and imprisoned, as either the contractor or the hands-on killer. He said the stories from witnesses were concocted. His three children supported him through the decades. But his appeals went nowhere.
Today, Mr. Moe is the most popular Premier in Canada. His government has only a weak opposition to manage, and his province’s economy is thriving by providing the “food, fuel and fertilizer the world needs.” But on Thursday, he said Mr. Thatcher’s invitation to the Throne Speech was unfortunate, but he wouldn’t himself apologize.
“This is an individual [member] who invited someone, not a government who invited someone. I think we need to draw that distinction,” Mr. Moe said.
Government or not, the Premier must get his house in order. No one will be able to focus on his law-and-order agenda, the economy or any other policy initiative when his own MLAs don’t understand the harm of hosting an unrepentant, convicted killer at the legislature.