Poppa Bear gets a little flustered under questioning in the witness box, which in this case is actually made out of cardboard, painted a walnut-brown colour.
We are in the tense opening minutes of a blockbuster defamation trial. Wendy Witch has launched a $50,000 lawsuit over comments written on the blog of two local children, Hansel and Gretel. They accuse her of having threatened to eat them, and it has hurt Ms. Witch’s gingerbread business.
Other witnesses, including the Gingerbread Man and the Old Lady Who Lived in a Shoe, sit in the gallery, eagerly waiting to testify. Faced with the hushed courtroom, Mr. Bear has briefly forgotten what he meant to say.
The judge is Harry Perlis, who has experience in grown-up courtrooms. A tall man, he looks resplendent in his black robe and red sash, but a bit oversized, compared to the black-robed lawyers lined up before him, and the child-sized chairs most in the courtroom are sitting on. He calmly reassures Mr. Bear, who is allowed to consult his notes.
Mr. Bear’s head and ears are knit from brown yarn. When he speaks, he uses a deep, gruff Poppa Bear voice. Before sharing his own story of a problem with a child burglar – an intruder known only as Goldilocks – he tells the court he has nothing against witches.
“At first I did not trust her, because she was a witch,” says Mr. Bear, who is really Grade 4 student Vikram Bhatt, age 9. “But I realized over the years that it was wrong to judge her just because she was different.”
The fairy-tale litigation taking place here in Portable No. 2 at Gracefield Public School in North York seems to be taken pretty seriously by the Grade 4s and 5s in the courtroom.
It is part of a three-year-old project of the non-profit Ontario Justice Education Network (OJEN) meant to bring the legal system into Toronto elementary schools – particularly schools like this one, in diverse neighbourhoods with the challenges of large immigrant populations and low-income families.
The initial idea came from Sam Marr, head of the 3,000-member Toronto Lawyers Association. Mock trials were common in high schools, but rarely tried at the elementary level. Mr. Marr says he thought younger children would benefit, as would the lawyers who volunteered to take part: “These are lawyers doing good in the community, using their skills to better society, for no pay and outside of the glare of the spotlight.”
The volunteers, including Mr. Perlis – who in real life is both a lawyer and a deputy small-claims court judge – coach students beforehand and administer the trial on the big day. Teachers work units about the justice system and the concept of defamation into their already crowded curriculum. This year, 12 classes in six schools took part, a number OJEN hopes to double next year.
Before taking his place in Portable No. 2., Mr. Perlis says he was amazed at how quickly children absorbed legal concepts: “I felt really silly for underestimating what they were capable of.”
The benefits of the program go beyond learning about how a courtroom works, he added: “Going through something like this gives them a certain respect for the rules, the system, that they might not have otherwise had.”
This day at Gracefield P.S., a diverse school not far from Black Creek Drive and Lawrence Avenue West that has many children of families from India, there are two courtrooms, running two versions of the same case.
Over in Portable No.1, the judge is Justin Jakubiak, a litigator with Fogler, Rubinoff LLP in Toronto. He runs a tighter courtroom, so forcefully demanding that lawyers stand to address him that the children continue to stand to ask questions in class even after the trial is over.
