Is there a double standard at work in the story of Rahim Jaffer, the former Conservative MP who this week saw two serious criminal charges dropped against him as he pleaded guilty instead to a lesser one of careless driving?
Oh, you bet there is, but it's not what you've heard.
The real double standard is that Mr. Jaffer has been painted as being every bit as guilty of the charges (excessive blood alcohol while driving and possession of cocaine) as if he'd been convicted of them.
When the 38-year-old former politician appeared in court in Orangeville on Tuesday, he was facing those charges in connection with his arrest by the OPP last fall.
Telling the judge she had carefully reviewed the evidence, Crown attorney Marie Balogh said there was no reasonable prospect of conviction on those counts and withdrew them, and Mr. Jaffer pleaded guilty to the careless driving count; he had been driving at 93 kilometres an hour in a 50-kilometres-an-hour zone when he was stopped.
He was given a fine of $500, and already had agreed to make a $500 charitable donation.
As he was presumed to be innocent when he was charged, so did he leave the courthouse with that presumption as his shield; you could fairly call him a careless driver, period.
But there in Question Period just hours later was Liberal MP Anita Neville crowing, "Members of this government are always quick to comment on any court judgment that doesn't align with their get-tough-on-crime rhetoric. They always say, 'You do the crime. You do the time.' What then is this government's comment on the dangerous driver in possession of illicit drugs who gets off with no record and a $500 slap on the wrist?"
She went at it again a bit later, shrilling, "The Conservatives are conspicuously silent only when the law is being flouted by one of their own ... why the double standard?"
Her suggestion was unmistakable: Mr. Jaffer got a sweetheart deal because he's a powerful guy who's married to a Tory minister (Helena Guergis, the federal Minister for the Status of Women) and mysterious strings were pulled on his behalf. He was guilty, he had flouted the law, and gotten away with something.
It is absolute hogwash.
This sort of plea arrangement is absolutely the norm in Canadian courts. As the Criminal Justice Review Committee noted in a 1999 report for the Ontario government, the vast majority of all criminal cases in Canada - 91.3 per cent of charges at the time in Ontario - are resolved by guilty pleas or by the prosecutor withdrawing charges, without the necessity of a trial.
What Mr. Jaffer, his lawyer and the prosecutor had engaged in was nothing more than the same process that happens hundreds of times a week across the country - plea bargaining or, as the participants prefer it be called because it lends dignity to a crudely pragmatic system, resolution discussions. These are approved discussions held in private, deemed confidential and protected by solicitor-client privilege, with both sides having access to the evidence.
