The Crazy Years #41: Lead us not into temptation
© 1998 by Spider Robinson; all rights reserved
You’ve had a long hard day, and you’re sitting at a bus stop, waiting for the bus to come take you home. A stranger sits down beside you--not a bum or a weirdo, just a guy--and leans over and murmurs, “You look like you could use a little pick-me-up, friend.” You look at him suspiciously, and with a furtive glance to either side he produces and surreptitiously shows you a baggie full of fat marijuana joints. Even through the plastic, the pungent smell reaches you. “Finest BC hydro,” he says. “Dollar a joint.”
Perhaps you smoked pot in your youth, but it’s been years since you even knew anyone who had any--and now all of a sudden you find yourself feeling nostalgic for the 60s. Perhaps you’ve never smoked pot in your life, and this is the first time you’ve ever been offered any--and all of a sudden you find you’re curious. Perhaps you know someone else who you think will be pleased by a surprise gift. For whatever reasons, you decide to accept the man’s offer, and slip him a loonie.
And he puts the cuffs on you.
Spider, your science fiction background is showing again. That’s a ridiculous scenario. Law enforcement officers aren’t allowed to solicit drug purchase offers, to break the law--everybody knows that.
Wrong. In Canada they are.
But surely a cop can’t tempt you into committing a crime, and then arrest you if you succumb? That’s entrapment, isn’t it?
Yes, it is. And it’s perfectly legal...in Canada. As of May 1997, police in this country are specifically permitted to grow, manufacture, traffic and/or sell illegal drugs in the course of conducting a criminal investigation...of a crime that would not have existed without them. In (undefined) “extreme cases,” they need not even ask their senior officers for permission first.
But surely you would have noticed the passage of such a startling law. There would have been intense controversy, long and vigorous parliamentary and public debate, international publicity, threatened court challenges...such a fundamental reversal of the most basic principles of legal ethics and human rights simply couldn’t have been accomplished in a free country without anyone noticing, could it?
Not if it had been done fair and square, no. But it wasn’t. It was done covertly, surreptitiously--not by law, but by regulation.
As Chad Skelton reported in the October 6 VANCOUVER SUN, “Regulations are a necessary but poorly understood part of the legislative process...Laws usually set out the broad explanation of what is and is not permitted...and delegate the fine-tuning of those rules--by means of regulations--to government departments... While new laws are usually the subject of fierce parliamentary debate and press coverage, regulations are passed quietly every day in Ottawa with few taking notice.”
You WERE informed of the new regulation permitting police to break the law at will. It was “published for public comment”--twice!--in the CANADA GAZETTE, a government publication with only 9,000 subscribers. Few members of the public have ever seen a copy, and Mr. Skelton quotes John McIntyre, the director of the BC Civil Liberties Association, as saying, “Lawyers wouldn’t even read it on a regular basis.” The first time the regulation was published there, in May 1994, it was written in legalese, incomprehensible to the average layman. The second time it ran, accompanied by a “plain English” explanation (no mention is made of a “plain French” version), was the month it went into effect, May 1997. Even Mr. McIntyre had never heard of it, until a few weeks ago when the Vancouver RCMP offered 50 kilos of cocaine for sale, busted three men who agreed to buy it, and confiscated the $1.2 million they had offered. (A similar “reverse sting” last April in Montreal also went unremarked, perhaps because the cops only grossed $140,000 then.)
Nor is the power to break the law afforded only to the RCMP: it can be given to any police force a provincial attorney-general designates. It is presently held by 12 different police forces in BC, and 65 nationwide--with more doubtless to come. The April Montreal sting was done by local police.
The solicitor-general’s office did not, of course, promulgate this stunning new “regulation” without consultation. No sir. They solicited input from the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, provincial governments, and Crown prosecutors. Somehow they did not get around to seeking the opinions of civil liberties groups, defense lawyers, or the public, during the 3-year approval process. As Robert Anton Wilson said of the current controversy over medical marijuana use in California, “The people cannot be allowed to meddle in their own affairs.”
Mr. Skelton quotes a spokesman for the BC Trial Lawyers’ Association, Ian Donaldson: “The idea that police are now above the law...is something I would have thought would be [worthy of] public debate as opposed to being snuck through by regulation.”
Mr. Skelton also spoke with Michel Perron, a senior adviser to the federal solicitor-general and the bureaucrat who shepherded the new regulation through the approval process. Mr. Perron “said fears of entrapment are exaggerated...However, asked if the new rules could be used to investigate an individual suspected of using marijuana, Perron said, ‘There is no distinction in the regulation to the amount or the type of drug.’”
Will the regulation stand up under court challenge? Opinions differ sharply; we won’t know for sure until some years after the first cases work their slow way through the legal system.
Meanwhile, Canada -- a country where people care so much about human rights that many of them will risk pepper-spray in the eyes merely to protest the presence of a visiting politician from a land without such rights -- is now the only nominally civilized nation on earth in which the police are allowed to tempt people into criminal activity and then arrest them for it. Just as the public is finally noticing that the War On Drugs has been an ongoing disaster, it has been deemed sufficient excuse to suspend civil liberties.
My thanks to Mr. Skelton, one of the last real investigative reporters in captivity; without his efforts, even I would not have suspected how deep we are into the Crazy Years.
