the root of it

After a week of travel – early mornings squashed into small propeller planes, late exhausted evenings coming home – it’s hard to remember exactly where each day is spent. But then, such focus never has been easy. Each village is distinct, of course, unique, like every client and all the many families who cram the backs of varied public halls, but the truth of this is smothered by the tiredness, and, so sadly, the present nature of my trade.

I do not think I am being controversial by saying that, by and large, we do not know the people that we serve. And really, how could we? By training we are meant to parse apart, issue-spot and problem-solve, by numbers we are urban, old, and white, and by timing we are ragged and on-guard: confronted by a law-and-order clime, put-upon and underfunded, sweating out our anger in the growing gap between the paper rights we must protect and the barrier realities. For most in my profession, now, the fight is on, and the enemy is a state-fed public who doesn’t (until it happens to one of them) give two cents for the work we do. Fine – through three years of practice I know this as a worthwhile struggle, know that the thin-enough presumptions of fair trials and innocence would crumble without our persistent insistence, enervating though it may often be. This is a country-wide contest, fought with law-makers and opinion-spinners, cast in black-and-white and balance sheets. I will certainly support this lawyer’s role.

But something, small and deeper, is plaguing me as well. On a picnic bench outside the Armstrong court on summer’s first hot afternoon, an old man joins me as I’m picking through a soggy lunch. We talk, in the door-crack way we can, about his hundred dollar fine (criminal penalties are usually much lighter in the north, to accommodate our guilt and insufficiency), the healing lodge on Lake Nipigon, adopted daughters and the start of blueberry season. It is a rare and brief occasion to get to know a client, and, in theory and empathy at least, it will allow me to better represent him if by chance he needs my services again. Though I must thread everything through law, the greatest part of my usefulness is simply in telling someone’s story to a powerful stranger, to justify a particular outcome.

We merely pantomime this process when we do not know the people we serve. We go through official motions and obtain required results, but we do, as a system, next to nothing good for the humans and communities we serve. I know this because the same folks and families are brought back time and time again, the same witnesses don’t show, the same silences meet our ignorant pleas. Only divisions do this.

At the end of another long day of charades, in the hub that is Sioux Lookout’s airport, a probation officer opens up to me that he’s getting out of the game. “It’s absurd that I’m the one responsible for sentences. It’s ridiculous to expect me to be in charge of their change”. Millions of dollars are spent throwing us up into these communities, invested with everything but the essential knowledge and belonging true justice needs. The problem is immense, but solving it, I believe, begins with a simple admission: we are not the right ones for this job.