Matt Gurney: The Edmonton police did a shocking thing. Good. We need a shock

Unless we want to end up like the Americans, things need to change here, fast.

By: Matt Gurney

This isn't going to be a column about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I don't think I have anything original to say about that awful crime. Besides, news events are moving incredibly rapidly. I've had to change the intro to this column three times just trying to keep up with events south of the border.

But the assassination of Kirk does make for a depressingly apt starting point for what I was already planning to write about this week. In the aftermath of the assassination, I have been dismayed by what feels to me like a lot of people giving up on the notion of debate, liberal democracy, free speech, tolerance for those who disagree with you, and all the rest. Only time will tell, but it really has felt to me that in recent days a lot of people who would normally identify themselves as being pretty moderate and reasonable are now giving up and picking a side. If a war is coming, the vibe seems to be, they'd better declare themselves one way or the other early.

I honestly don't know if the Americans are going to be able to pull themselves out of this. I think it's a pretty sick country right now, and I'm not sure they have the tools left to get themselves out of it before something catastrophic happens. But here's where we pivot back to what I was planning to write about this week. Right here at home, I have been encouraged, in a pretty bleak way, by something that may stop our own slide in that direction. It's an ugly thing, but it might be the only chance we have left.

I'm talking about what the police did in Edmonton this week. In a shockingly rare move, the police have objected to a (claimed) plan by Crown attorneys to cut a deal with someone responsible for killing a child.

There’s a lot we don’t know about this case; there is a publication ban in place, as often happens when victims are young. And there is some important disagreement between what the police and the Crown have said publicly. I’ll get to that shortly. For now, here’s the basic outline of the story: an eight-year-old girl was killed in 2023. The Crown was preparing this week to accept a plea bargain for the accused; a charge of second-degree murder would be dropped to an accepted plea for manslaughter.

Here's how the Edmonton Journal described the facts (hat tip to Jonny Wakefield, the reporter covering the story — I know from experience how hard it is to do this kind of work):

The accused was living with her three biological children and the eight-year-old victim at an apartment in west Edmonton. On April 22, 2023, a friend came over to drink and use methamphetamine. The two were in the bathroom when the children started fussing.

When the woman returned to the bathroom, she said “something had happened” and asked for the man’s help. He went to the other room and saw the little girl on the floor, unconscious and bleeding beneath a hole in the wall.

“It is unknown how this head injury occurred,” [prosecutor Terry] Hoffman told court.

Instead of calling 911, the woman focused on what to do with the girl’s body. She called several associates, who arrived and placed the child in a hockey bag. They then dumped the bag in the bed of an abandoned pickup on Samson Cree Nation.

That just about gives you the outline of what's known. And again, that's from the Edmonton Journal. The only details I'd add, and again, this is all from the reporting, is that the young girl's body showed evidence of "chronic" abuse. Family members of the victim have also said publicly that the child had been tortured before her death.

This week, before the plea was scheduled to be entered, the police sent a letter to assistant deputy justice minister Kim Goddard. Megan Hankewich, the executive director of legal services for the Edmonton Police Service, asked Goddard to intervene using her own powers to block the plea deal. What the police were specifically objecting to was what they said was an agreement between the defence and the Crown to an eight-year prison term for the accused.

“Our position is that to allow this plea deal to go ahead would be to bring the administration of justice into disrepute and constitute a significant miscarriage of justice,” Hankewich wrote in the letter, which was released to the media. The police also said that if the deal went ahead as proposed, the police would release additional facts — presumably horrible ones — about the crime. Since there would no longer be the prospect of a jury trial, the letter reasoned, there was no reason for the police to hold back gory details.

That’s clearly a message to the prosecutors, and the government more broadly. I am not naive about that. It's also important to say this clearly: the Crown dispute the police version of events, and when the plea deal was accepted in court this week, there was no agreed-upon sentence. The sentencing will come later, and both the defence and the Crown will have the opportunity to tell the court what they think is justified.

I don't know if the police were wrong about there being an agreed-upon sentence or if the police action caused the Crown to back away to save face. For my purposes today, it's not even relevant. What's interesting to me is that the police did this at all.

I hate that they did this. I’m a democratic norms kinda guy, and this is well outside our norms.

But I'm still glad that they did this. And hope that it never has to happen again.

If that sounds conflicted, well, I’ll issue my own guilty plea on that score. I am conflicted. Some slopes really are slippery — I hate the police interfering like this, and I am well aware of the dark path this could take us down.

But. We are already on a dark path , particularly as regards crime, justice, and public safety. And I think there is a refusal among far too many Canadians in leadership positions to be candid about that. We have major problems and we are not solving them.

We’re talking as if it’s urgent. Right now, as Parliament gets set to return next week, the Liberals and Conservatives are in a race to see who can propose a better bill to fix what both parties now agree is a dysfunctional bail system. All of us have heard the news stories of horrible acts of violence being committed by people who have already been arrested and are now on bail pending trial — it’s almost like those release conditions aren't proving a huge deterrent. This has been a live issue for years, and we’ve been told before it’ll be fixed. It wasn’t.

Overall, the most recent StatCan data on violent crime shows a minor drop last year, followed by a 15 per cent increase in the years before that. That’s bad, but what’s worse is that a lot of crime is simply going underreported — and that includes my own assault I suffered in Toronto. Some random guy, clearly disturbed, took a swing at me out of the blue when I was heading downtown for an interview. It wasn’t much of a swing. I wasn’t hurt or particularly bothered, and knew the cops wouldn’t do anything, so just went on with my day. A shocking number of people I know have similar stories — and that was never the case before recent years.

The loss of faith that any help would come is warranted. It is established fact that courtroom delays are resulting in appalling miscarriages of justice. And as I have written here several times in recent years, it's equally clear that in general, the police are giving up — surrendering, as I've described it.

Recall The Line Podcast episode we released just a week ago. We're now at a point where Jen and I are having to spend time debating the ethics and morality of senior police officials in large, densely populated jurisdictions in this country, telling people to simply comply with home invaders. That's not a great sign.

But this is worse: a Leger poll released just a few days ago showed that more than half of Canadians do not believe the justice system is working. Not even a third of Canadians take the opposite view.

This is a crisis for Canada, and it’s the worst, most corrosive kind of crisis. When people give up on the justice system, they don't give up on the idea of safety or security. They simply stop counting on the state to provide it, and seek it elsewhere. Canada isn't all the way down that dark path yet, but we are definitely at least some way down that path. Arming selves? Private security? Watch groups? That’s all happening already.

I have been waiting years to see who is going to make it better. All I've seen is a federal government that wants to waste billions on a completely useless gun ban while also forgetting to appoint judges, leading to some of the court delays that are responsible for this problem. I've seen politician after politician talk about bail reform. I've yet to see any bail reform. I see police forces giving up and telling the public to give up, too. I’ve seen it become politically controversial to take the position that perhaps public parks should not be repurposed as encampments and drug dens.

And to bring this column back to where it started, I’ve seen our neighbours to the south begin to engage in a national-level sorting exercise, largely because people are giving up on the idea that the state's institutions will protect them, so they'll have to protect themselves. I see a significant percentage of Americans thinking it's a fantastic idea that the president keeps sending military troops into large cities.

Again, Canada's not there yet. But this is the trajectory we're on, and no one here is doing anything about it.

A recurring theme in The Line in recent years has been our lament about the state of our accountability mechanisms. It's a vague term that encompasses a lot. But think about how change is supposed to happen in a democracy. You have grassroots organizations and civic institutions like churches and not-for-profits. You have a thriving media that is able to keep the government accountable. You have a bureaucratic class that moves quickly and decisively to fix problems before they draw the attention of the political masters. And you have politicians that are actually focused on the real problems, and ensuring they are effectively handled, lest they pay an electoral price.

Is anything I just said a description of how Canada is functioning today? Seriously. Do any of those things apply to this country today?

If this country’s institutions, and that very much includes the government and the politicians, don’t start showing they can fix things, public confidence in our public safety is going to collapse even further than it already has. That collapse will be amped up by social media and, probably, hostile foreign regimes preying on our failures here and making them worse. This is a nightmare scenario. We’re all seeing where America is today. No one wants that here.

But it’s where we’re headed, and so far, no one in power in Canada is doing much about it.

So yes. I hate what the police in Edmonton are doing. But I can’t really think of anything left that might shock and shame government officials into actually doing something. I don’t want politicized police, but staying apolitical amid a collapse in public confidence in justice is a choice, too.

I take some small comfort in how the Edmonton police did this. It was savvy and measured. A letter to a public official, providing the media with the letter … the police clearly aren’t comfortable with what they’re doing either, and did it as carefully as they could. I think they’re pushing against the line of what’s acceptable, but I don’t think they crossed it.

Yes, it’s shocking. I know. But we need the shock. The shock is the point. It’s what might give this a shot at working. Our government officials and our politicians need to be shocked into doing something before things slip past the point of no return.

After years of wondering who’d do something, and after trying to use my platform here to help as best I can, it turns out that the Edmonton Police Service has stepped up to the plate. Wouldn’t have been my guess, or even my preference. But you know what? It’ll do. Let’s hope it works.

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