New chance for justice?

Editorial

Since the provincial government slashed funding to a panorama of programs during the "core review" process three years ago, the Jewish community has been the most vocal and persistent in condemning the gutting of the province's Hate Crimes Team.

Always a small agency with a tiny staff, the provincial Hate Crimes Team was meant to investigate, prosecute and educate inside and outside the strict confines of the legal system to ensure that the federally proscribed provisions for deterring and punishing hate crimes are appropriately considered. With huge cuts to the tiny office, this work fell to the equivalent of two or three full-time staff members to cover the entire province.

The slashing of funds to this already small and lean organization has made it more challenging for both governments and community agencies to see the bigger picture of hate incidents in the province. One of the tasks of a fully funded team was to assemble data and statistics on incidents. This has been lacking in the past three years, which makes it difficult to do strategic planning on the urgent issue of bias- and hate-motivated crimes. The other aspects of the Hate Crimes Team's work – education, investigation and assisting the Crown in prosecutions – have similarly suffered.

The long-awaited resurrection of the Hate Crimes Team budget may be realized as part of the increased spending for policing announced in Tuesday's budget. If so, this overdue allocation is, to a very large extent, a result of the work done by the Jewish community, particularly Canadian Jewish Congress, who have refused to allow the matter to be forgotten by the provincial government or the general public.

Yet, it is ironic, in a sense, that the issue should come to a head with this week's budget. The shortcomings of the entire hate crime process was most clearly demonstrated in the recent trial and sentencing of Ryan Cran, one of the young people involved in the killing of Aaron Webster, a gay Vancouver man.

The federal government created a new category of offence – hate-motivated crime – to recognize that an attack on a member of an identifiable community because of their membership in that group is an attack that has repercussions for all members of that community and, indeed, for all of society. The passage of hate crime legislation by Parliament followed a contentious and divisive debate. Though the legislation eventually passed, the execution of its provisions is dependent to a large extent on the actions of individual police forces, provincial attorneys general and, most directly, on the Crown counsels involved in the prosecution of suspected hate crime cases.

What happened in the Cran case was that the Crown did not introduce into the proceedings the suggestion that the murder was directly related to Webster's sexual orientation and that it therefore constituted a hate crime. Having refused to introduce this concept into the trial, the Crown made it effectively impossible for the judge in the case to consider that aspect in the sentencing. The six-year term Cran received has been assailed by gay and human rights activists as a travesty. (Of Cran's four co-accused, one never faced charges, one was acquitted and two were sentenced under young offender provisions to three-year terms.) Whether the murder was motivated by hatred of homosexuals was not considered in Cran's case. Why? Because the Crown, for reasons unclear, did not raise the issue.

Criminal provisions aimed at punishing and deterring hate-motivated crimes are useless if they are not introduced by the prosecution in the appropriate cases. One of the roles of the Hate Crimes Team is to educate – not only the public, but police, the Crown and others involved in every aspect of a case – about the purpose and powers of the hate crime legislation. In one sense, it could be said that the Crown in the Cran case should have been sensitive to this aspect without the direct intervention of the Hate Crimes Team. But, educating the Crown and pressing this aspect of the case is one of the reasons the Hate Crimes Team exists. There are a number of reasons why the legislation protecting identifiable groups against hate crimes was absent from this case. One of those reasons is that the province gutted the Hate Crimes Team three years ago. Tuesday's budget begins to redress this tragic false economy. But it cannot undo the damage to the gay community or to the other justice-seeking individuals and communities whose faith in the process has been shaken by this case.

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