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Paid to Omar Khadr: $10.5-million
Imagine you are the parent of a child who was crossing the street and a drunk driver ran a stop sign and struck her. Imagine the worst injuries. Quadriplegia, severe brain injury or maybe a combination of spinal cord and brain injury. Your child will require 24/7 care for life. She will never work, marry or have children. Pause for a moment and ask yourself how much compensation for pain and suffering and loss of enjoyment of life the law will allow your child. It does not matter whether you live in Victoria or St. John's or some point in between. The amount is the same across Canada. Is it $10.5-million? More? Less? The answer: about $388,000, based on three Supreme Court of Canada cases from 1978 that lawyers refer to as "the trilogy."
Casey Hill was a Crown prosecutor. He sued a Toronto lawyer and the Church of Scientology for defamation. In 1992, he went to trial and won. He was awarded $300,000 in general damages, $500,000 in aggravated damages and $800,000 in punitive damages for a total of $1.6-million. The verdict was upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada. It is uncertain how the defamation impacted upon Mr. Hill's career or reputation. He was later appointed to the Superior Court of Ontario, where he still sits as a highly respected judge.
Omar Khadr was a child soldier and was tortured. His rights, on a number of fronts, were grossly violated. Who knows what demons he has to deal with for the rest of his life? The federal government has just paid him a settlement of $10.5-million. Unlike the severely injured child above, Mr. Khadr can feed himself. He does not have to worry about pressure sores becoming infected. He can move. He can walk, bathe and talk.
I am not saying that Mr. Khadr or Justice Hill were paid too much. But somehow, our laws on reasonable compensation for victims, whether they be victims of torture, defamation, negligence or any other actionable wrong, have to be consistent and make sense. Currently, they do not.
Mike Winward, Mackesy Smye LLP, Barristers & Solicitors, Hamilton
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The payout to Omar Khadr is not a reward for his behaviour. Instead, it's a punishment for the misbehaviour of his country, Canada, toward one of its citizens. This penalty is a legal victory for law and order and should be acknowledged as such by every citizen because one day this rule of law might be applied to them. Rest assured. Canada has just been put on notice to protect its own.
Tony D'Andrea, Toronto
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No longer is one left untouched as a victim (of something) in our society. But of what is Omar Khadr a victim? Bad parenting? Bad choices? Human-rights issues notwithstanding, he was fighting with terrorists. Perhaps he deserves an apology from our government: I simply do not know. But he certainly does not deserve any financial compensation.
Rewarding bad behaviour will not result in behavioural change, either for Mr. Khadr or for others in a similar situation. What on earth are we thinking?
David Collins, Victoria
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Less theatre, more action
Adjacent articles in your Friday paper neatly summarize Justin Trudeau. At the G20, politicians and musicians gush breathlessly about our Prime Minister (G20: Chancellor Holds Out Hope That World Leaders Can 'Find Compromises'). In Northern Ontario, Indigenous communities are in existential crisis (Four More Indigenous Youths Die By Suicide In Northern Ontario, Sparking Calls For Action).
Remember when Gord Downie told Canadians that Mr. Trudeau would champion Indigenous issues? I do. A year later, it looks like that was just another branding exercise for the Trudeau marketing machine. Enough with the staged, viral photo ops; take action on the horrific disparity of education funding for Indigenous students, suicide, and so many other issues.
Christopher Price, Toronto
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Last Saturday's debacle rankles
Phoenix pay system? Parliament Hill 150 Celebration? Did they both have the same government planners? The coincidence is too much to ignore.
Relatives from Medicine Hat, Alta., drove five days to participate in Canada 150 on Parliament Hill. Neither the 3,000-kilometre road trip, nor pounding rain could deter them from their goal to celebrate Canada with their fellow citizens on the Hill.
However, they failed in their quest by 500 metres.
Having braved distance and weather, we were defeated by parliamentary security. It is disingenuous of the government's spin machine to invite all Canadians to Ottawa to celebrate our heritage, only to have our security forces prevent us from joining the party.
As torrential rain flooded streets and the hours passed, the lack of portable toilet facilities became obvious. It also became obvious that few people were actually entering the screening area. In need of food and a bio-break, we abandoned our wait a block from the prescreening gate. We had been told by fellow tourists that the screening process would be another two to three hours inside the gates.
The lack of signage, guidance, toilets, water stations, and enough security gates all contributed to a unacceptable experience. If this is the future of security on the Hill, I suggest that next year the VIP speeches and entertainment be held in a secure (perhaps undisclosed) location and just broadcast, as this would save money. Give the Hill back to the owners, taxpaying Canadians.
David C. Rothwell, Kanata, Ont.
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The spin on baseball? Well …
Re Baseball Becomes A Hotbed For The Grassy Knoll Society (Sports, July 5): While Cathal Kelly hits a home run with this article, I thought he might have overlooked the "conspiracy of new numbers."
Nothing in the law of unintended consequences says the results have to be positive. That's preferred, but problematic results are exactly what define the formulation of the rule. And so it goes with baseball.
All the new numbers applied to the game tend to hype higher performance. A pitcher's wins and losses are now meaningless and earned run average (ERA) is misleading, if not useless.
One of the new metrics is spin rate, because it's assumed to be the critical factor for improved pitch quality, causing fastballs to disrupt the air more efficiently, making curve balls break sharper. Not a game goes by that an announcer doesn't celebrate the pitcher's ability to "spin the ball." But the only way to elevate the spin rate is to increase friction, which requires a tighter grip and a quicker pull at release. And because another irrefutable law of physics states that for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction, the result for pitchers trying to increase their spin rate is, quite naturally, blisters.
We love numbers like WAR (wins above replacement) because they tell us who's most irreplaceable. But since for every win there's exactly one loss – there's a "loss below replacement" out there somewhere, too. So it seems spin rates are the quality we seek, blisters are the unintended consequence.
Like all the new numbers, spin sounds exotic, even exciting, and is surely inaccessible to the general fan. It seems to tell us something. But as with all numbers, it may well tell us things we don't want to know. Conspiracy, indeed.
John P. Foden, Toronto