The prize for something said by a lawyer in Canada in 2014 is this gem of a comment made to over 450 lawyers and judges in Toronto in October by my new comedic heroine, criminal lawyer Marie Henein, who emceed the event. “As criminal lawyers we represent people who have committed heinous acts. Acts of violence. Acts of depravity. Acts of cruelty. Or as Jian Ghomeshi likes to call it, ‘foreplay,’” (Bada-Boom). She now represents Jian Ghomeshi.
Mind you, as Christie Blatchford said in
The National Post a week later, imagine the outcry if that statement was made by a man; a “paunchy male defence lawyer,” or a “boy prosecutor” who would have lost his head and his job the next day.
Still, Henein’s joke was the only amusing thing to come out of this horrible matter; horrible for the parties affected, horrible for the CBC, and whatever happens to the legally-presumed-innocent Ghomeshi, horrible for him as well. But when the president of the CBC says the former host of
Q was egomaniacal and tyrannical and created a culture of fear in the workplace (apparently confirmed by numerous CBC employees), one has to wonder if the CBC’s former boy wonder could even get a job reading the news on the night shift at CBTX in Bella Bella.
The most important lesson from this sad story is this: your reputation is everything. Regardless of your sexual peccadillos and preferences (and people are free in Canada to have them), if someone tries to force non-consensual sexual anything, it will come back and bite them on the bum one day when their chicks come home to roost, so to speak. And if Marie Henein can get away with her “foreplay” line, I should be able to get away with that one too.
I love CBC Radio, and the Ghomeshi debacle hasn’t changed that. My biggest complaint is that the CBC hasn’t fired the brain surgeons who changed the weekday format of Radio 2 a few years back from mostly classical music (and some jazz) to “Canadian Top 40” (or whatever they call the bland, milquetoast format they now have). I loved Radio 2 when you could count on classical music when you woke up, when you had breakfast and coffee, and when you drove into work. I loved the chaotic mix of classical and jazz between 3 and 6 when Jurgen Gothe hosted DiscDrive.
But when they threw the baby out with the bathwater and replaced “mostly classical” with the likes of Burton Cummings, the Barenaked Ladies, and the Foo Fighters, (becoming just another radio station), I gave up on them and moved to the next best thing, ICI Musique, (formerly Espace Musique).
It’s all in French, which is just fine with me, even though I don’t speak French. But with ICI Musique, I get to have breakfast and coffee with a wonderful dose of classical music. And at night, there’s so much interesting jazz and world music on, I’ve bookmarked ICI’s page so I can easily identify what I just heard and buy it on iTunes.
Of course, the CBC at its worst (i.e. Radio 2) is leagues above Sun News Network at its best. So to give prizes where they’re due, the award for silliest words spoken by a lawyer in Canada in 2014 (the booby prize, you could say), goes to Canada’s foremost self described freedom fighter, Ezra Levant, who performs on his Sun News show called
The Source.
First, he accused Pierre Trudeau of “banging anyone” and called him a “slut.” Sun News later admitted that Levant’s comments about Justin’s dad and our late PM were in poor taste and should not have been aired. “We understand why many viewers found both the content and language of this segment to be offensive. We apologize to Mr. [Justin] Trudeau, his family and to our viewers.” Great apology, Sun News! Now why didn’t you force Ezra to make it?
Second, on
The Source, he called the 6,000 B.C. lawyers who voted in our recent referendum against the accreditation of Trinity Western University’s law school (for whatever reason) as “stupid, law breaking bigots.” Yes, you read that correctly. It’s worth quoting a passage or two from the transcript of his Nov. 5 show:
“My esteem for the legal profession itself has fallen. . . . They’re a bunch of bigots and worse than being bigoted . . . you can’t fix stupid. Like I say, ignorant bigots . . . to be a member of the Law Society of British Columbia today is to be affiliated with a group whose members in an open vote chose bigotry. The Law Society of British Columbia is a group of bigots.”
Well, as a bencher of that society (but speaking only for myself), I find this Alberta lawyer’s remarks to be insulting, offensive, and dare I say, unprofessional in the extreme. As to his journalistic integrity, it’s quite illuminating to see how a complicated legal and social issue can be so comprehensively summed up in a few thoughtful, balanced, and informed sound bites.
Last but not least, Ezra gets the silly award by creating what Craig Pearson in an
article in
The National Post called his latest “made-up controversy,” by accusing an Ontario school board of kowtowing to Muslim students who he alleged, wanted to avoid commemorating Remembrance Day.
In fact, the directive from the school board had nothing to do with Muslim families and was a response to safety issues raised by concerned parents whose children might be attending Remembrance Day ceremonies so shortly after the attack on the cenotaph in Ottawa. There’s an excellent analysis of Ezra’s art of being wrong in Sylvia Stead’s
column in
The Globe and Mail, and Edward Keenan’s
column in the
Toronto Star.
I actually liked Levant’s book Ethical Oil and totally agree with him that oil from Alberta is far more “ethical” than oil from Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia (a nation that beheads almost 70 citizens a year for crimes that include adultery, apostasy, and witchcraft).
Unfortunately in 2014, he may have been watching way too much Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh and not enough of The Newsroom. When Simon Houpt in the
Globe describes him as a “
clown who loves nothing more than being in the middle of his own three-ring circus,” it strikes me Levant’s probably past his due date in Canada. He’d find a far more sympathetic and accomodating circus south of the border on Fox News, where free speech (especially speech unencumbered by things like facts, integrity, and good taste) is cherished.
But I’d sure pay big bucks to see him debate Marie Henein if he goes south. It might even be broadcast on
Q!
