It's not the first time Stockwell Day is getting a bit of a bum rap from critics and journalists. Canada's favourite political punching bag is being
worked over this morning thanks to the case of Mohamed Kohail, a 23-year-old dual citizen of Canada and Saudi Arabia who is currently awaiting a death
sentence in the desert kingdom for being part of a mob that invaded a schoolyard and killed a student in a mass brawl. Last year the justice department
refused to lobby for the life of Ronald Allen Smith, an Alberta man facing lethal injection in Montana for a heinous murder no one seriously doubts he committed,
and for which he received a fair trial a quarter-century ago. The public safety minister became the point man for a new policy of assisting Canadians threatened
with capital punishment abroad on a "case-by-case basis" instead of aggressively trying to prevent its exercise everywhere.
The concern now being raised is that if Canada will not ask the United States for clemency on behalf of Ronald Smith, it cannot reasonably ask Saudi Arabia
to spare Mohamed Kohail:We have retreated one tiny little inch on the holy principle of total, unconditional opposition to capital punishment, and now we are
completely helpless to request that our imprisoned citizens be given any rights at all.
If this were true, the government's failure to stand up for Ronald Smith would have been a catastrophic mistake indeed. But of course, it is not true. Our diplomats
suggest that our lassitude on Smith has made it harder for them to argue on Kohail's behalf. Well, if they are too dim to outline a logical distinction between a fair
application of the death penalty and an unfair one, then they are obviously not much good for anything at all.
Some true bleeding-hearts, to be sure, will interrupt me here to object that there can never be any such thing as a procedurally fair application of capital punishment.
But this is obvious balderdash, as the boys on Death Row will be the first to tell you. Anyone charged with a crime would rather have a fair trial than an unfair one,
even if his life were at stake in both.
It is not the use of capital punishment that makes Saudi justice fundamentally objectionable to "Canadian values," which countenanced hanging well within living
memory. As Ed Morgan argues elsewhere on this page, it is the question of due process, without which no penalty of law can be applied justly. Kohail's trial lasted
just 90 minutes, his own lawyer was excluded from the courtroom for most of it, there are hints of witness intimidation, and it is not clear why a surprising verdict
of first-degree murder was applied to a spontaneous melee that seems to have involved a large element of mischance.
This isn't rocket science. Canadian representatives can raise questions about all these specific facts without challenging the traditional norms that allow Saudi Arabia
to behead murderers in the public square. But for some reason that is exactly what the government's critics deny. Yesterday, former Foreign Affairs ultra-mandarin
Garfield Pardy released a timely legal brief on behalf of Ronald Smith: It contained the pointed argument that "To not seek clemency in Country X because it was
seen as democratic and where the rule of law predominates, would seriously erode efforts to obtain clemency in Country Y where such conditions did not exist."
Countries X and Y, you see, will sit perfectly still and listen sympathetically while Canadians denounce them for having the death penalty-- but any other form of
advocacy, or even simply asking them not to kill our citizens as a favour, is totally out of bounds.
The weaving of such fantasies would not be so objectionable if it did not, in fact, put Mohamed Kohail's life in greater danger with every word by goading those
who will decide his fate. Liberal MP Dan McTeague tore into the Harper government yesterday, calling its request
for clemency an "insult" to the Saudi kingdom. This is how our opposition apparently goes about protecting our citizens abroad -- by encouraging the view that
foreign countries have perfectly good reasons to feel "insulted" if they are approached by our consular officials with questions about a criminal trial. Golly, Dan,
couldn't you find a free day in your schedule to go sharpen up the executioner's sword for him?
McTeague added that treating Saudi Arabia differently from the United States would indicate "that you disagree firmly with the nation. You bring into question
its judicial, its legal, perhaps even its political process." Pardon me for asking, but doesn't Canada, in fact, question those things? Hell, the Saudi monarchy itself
questions them, which is why the country is in the midst of judicial reform.
McTeague's advocacy of transparent lying to Saudi Arabia about the amount of respect we have for its justice system should not be mistaken for a sophisticated
understanding of diplomacy, just because diplomacy does sometimes require transparent lies to be told.
ColbyCosh@gmail.com