Wobbly Morals - the Mike Duffy Trial

It is hard to imagine any political junkie in Canada who was not waiting with some anticipation to Justice Charles Vaillancourt's ruling on the thirty-one charges against Senator Mike Duffy. I suspect that most of those observers were more than a bit surprised when Duffy was found not guilty on all of those charges.

Generally speaking criminal trials are about whether or not the person committed the act. The exceptions to this are when the trial is about whether or not the person was sane when the act was committed or whether or not the person had a legitimate reason (e.g. afraid for their life or property). The Duffy defence did not suggest that he had not committed the acts that he was charged with. There was no real debate as to either the amount of money that was taken from the public coffers or how it was spent. The only real question was whether or not Duffy by doing so - had with intent committed a criminal offense. The judge said no. By stating that there were no “sinister motive”(Globe and Mail) in Duffy's action, Duffy was absolved from all wrong doing.

The judge, perhaps without any authority to do so, did criticize in rather harsh language a number of the other players in the long dragged out drama. Comments such as "“The political, covert and relentless, unfolding of events is mind-boggling and shocking......The precision and planning of the exercise would make any military commander proud” (Globe and Mail) are a harsh and hopefully embarrassing condemnations  of the PMO and others within the political power structures of Ottawa. The over-all tone of the 306 page judgement is that Mike Duffy is not guilty because he listened to and followed (some would say coerced into) the advice of people who were in a position of trust and power. Duffy's defence was that he was when he was not sure about some of the rules  - he asked for advice. He then followed the directions he was given. When, for example, he questioned whether or not he could be a Senator from PEI - because he knew he was at best only an occasional visitor to that province- he was told to ignore the rules. He did so and promptly claimed living expenses while in Ottawa.

Justice Charles Vaillancourt's ruling makes it clear that according to the law - Duffy's action cannot be called criminal. That Duffy was not guilty of any of the things he was charged with either because the rules were unclear or he was shown that it was okay to bend what few rules there are. It seems to me that the judge while stating that all of the decisions that Duffy made were not good ones, he had sought advice and therefore cannot be held accountable for following that advice.

Balderdash!!! There were a series of trials in the late 1940s in Nuremberg, Germany that clearly argued that an individual was responsible for their actions regardless of what their superiors told them to do. By the time someone gets to be appointed to the senate, one would have hoped that the individual would have grown a sufficiently strong backbone to do what is morally right as opposed to following the direction of political hacks and their sycophant followers.

Are We As A Species Getting Dumber?

Some time ago I read an article discussing how traditional Inuit navigated across the frozen lands of Canada's north. Of particular interest was the fact that the hippocampus was smaller in the brains of younger Inuit hunters who used a GPS as opposed to using traditional wayfinding to find their way. That led the authors to suggest that if you don't use certain parts of your brains, they get smaller. I can't find that specific article but there are others such as one from Psychology Today that discuss what a reliance on technology can do for our brain development (or lack thereof). In the last few days I have had two experiences that have caused me to think about the above research and to start to wonder if there are other implications to our ever increasing reliance upon technology.

This past weekend I was on Salt Spring Island. On Saturday afternoon I was hitchhiking towards Vesuvius and the Crofton ferry. The car I was in stopped and picked up another hitchhiker. I don't remember how we got onto the topic, but within a few minutes, the new passenger was ranting about how he had voted for the Liberals only because they had promised to legalized marijuana. The hitchhiker was very angry that in the past four month there had been 20,000 arrest for pot use in BC. For him that  was proof that the Liberals had lied. My driver was quite comfortable in believing that the police would do such a thing. It fuelled his belief that the police were inherently bad. If it had been a four or five hour ride, it would have been interesting to dissect and analyze the various components of the passenger's rant and of my driver's beliefs. However, as we were only in the car for five or so minutes I did not get chance to.

The fact that this person who I assumed was in his late 20s voted for a political party because they promised to change the laws on drug use, while not surprising, is somewhat disheartening. The fact that he thought that these changes would happen within four months is just downright scary. While there are many valid reasons as to why people are sceptical about political promises and in general mistrust politicians , becoming angry over something taking longer than four months to take action on what is a relatively low priority issue is not one of them. However my main concern was with his information.

I have search on a number of sites, using a variety of search engines and I can find no information that would suggest the RCMP, in British Columbia have arrested 20,000 people for drug use in the past five months. The facts are just not there, Clearly the gentleman got the "facts" directly or indirectly via one of the silly sites on the internet. Equally clearly neither he or any of his friends had the intellectual capacity to check the facts. For what it is  worth.... for the last year for which facts are available (2014) there were 15,773 arrest for all marijuana related offences in B.C. (Statistics Canada). While that sounds like a lot of people, it was a few thousand less than the number of people who were charged in Ontario, and only a few thousand less than the number of impaired driving offenses. To imagine more people being  charged in four months than were charged in a whole year is inconceivable. 

The second story was in a CBC news item. A couple with three children rented a villa in the Bahamas for one week over Christmas break.  There were apparently good reviews on line so they believed that everything would be fine. When they got there it was a disaster with cockroaches in the kitchen and plumbing that did not work. The internet site that they used to rent the property says they are not responsible for the inaccurate (to say the least) reviews. I can only imagine the frustration of the family having wasted $10,000 on a holiday from hell. To be fair, they did speak directly to a real estate agent in the area who said the villa was in good shape. However, they were seduced by the information  and the pictures on line. They clearly wanted to believe that the villa was a good deal and therefore suspended any critical capacity. They did so in spite of the fact that were some danger signs. If I were thinking about spending that much money on a week's vacation (admittedly a highly unlikely event) - I hope that I would have used my critical thinking skills to ensure that I was going to get what I was paying for. I would hope that I would have used my pre-internet intelligence to do better research. I feel bad for them that they got "ripped off". But I do wonder if we were all less trusting of the information on the internet if this family would have found a better place.

It is certainly true that the internet has expanded the amount of information available....unfortunately it would appear that the breadth of information available has either reduced our capacity to look at that information critically or it has made us far too trusting and naive.