Howard Anglin: Canada’s criminal justice system will not be fixed by stale progressive tropes

Perrin is not a trained social scientist and it shows in his heavy (and often credulous) reliance on long quotes from reports and studies of varying quality.^{2I was, at first, tempted to dismiss the whole exercise as quaintly démodé cod structuralism, but there is no evidence the author is consciously working within that tradition, let alone aware of the range of poststructuralist revisions to it, or the many critiques of both. After probing the text for any evidence of solid intellectual grounding, it is clear that Perrin is drowning in quicksand of his own invention.}  He is, however, a law professor. Yet when he discusses the law—for example, when he breezily dismisses the 1,000 year old foundations of our criminal justice system—he still mostly just summarises what others have said without adding original insight. Whether this reflects an impatience with traditional jurisprudence or an indifference to it, it is, alas, consistent with the eclipse of analysis by the lure of activism in our law schools. Who needs doctrine when you have indignation?

The book’s approach to law is something like former Justice Rosalie Abella’s warm and fuzzy (with emphasis on the fuzzy) idea of the “rule of justice,” which Stéphane Sérafin dismantled in a recent article. Like Abella, Perrin isn’t much interested in the distinction between law and politics. But law must be approached as something distinct from politics or, to borrow a metaphor from Mr. Justice David Stratas, you risk turning the mansion of the law into “a never-ending construction site,” forgetting that people have to live there.

The sheer scale of social disruption that his “new transformative justice vision for Canada” would entail doesn’t appear to give Perrin pause. Then again, radicals rarely question the means to their ends. Because he has uncritically swallowed every faddish academic caprice—abolish prisons, defund the police, decolonisation, White Fragility^{3He encourages readers to read the book. Really.}, and systemic racism all get shout-outs—he is apparently willing to accept as the price of change a level of public violence and degeneracy that, fortunately, most Canadians sensibly reject.

Ironically, when Perrin does have something interesting to say, he often doesn’t seem to realise that it is already being said by the mean-spirited Conservative governments that are the villains of his story. So he writes that a just criminal justice system “requires the use of restorative-justice opportunities, involving people who were harmed” and “people who caused them harm” without noting that then-Minister of Justice Peter MacKay was expanding restorative and community-based justice programs before the 2015 election.

Perrin also advocates a “housing first” approach to the problem of “people experiencing homelessness” without mentioning the Harper government’s adoption of a housing first policy when Jason Kenney was minister of Employment and Social Development. Elsewhere he says that “We need a compassionate, evidence-based approach to helping people who use substances [he means people who abuse drugs]”—which is what the UCP in Alberta began doing under (again) Kenney and is continuing under the current government.

Alberta is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on new treatment beds to reduce wait times (something Perrin explicitly calls for in the book), building specialised recovery communities for addicts with wrap-around services (ditto), and is decoupling drug policy from the criminal justice system (double ditto). You can criticise these policies individually, but you can’t say it’s just the same old “tough on crime” playbook, as Perrin does.

Speaking of those mean-spirited Conservatives, Perrin, as he loves to remind reporters, readers, and no doubt passing strangers and random squirrels, used to be one of them. If you’ve heard his name before, it was probably just after he was introduced in the media as a “former advisor to Stephen Harper” and just before he started savaging Harper, Kenney, Pierre Poilievre, and any other conservative politician the journalist pointed him to. For you see, Perrin has since seen the error of his ways.

Perrin credits his volte face to a recent conversion experience. Good for him, and I mean that sincerely. Alas, his reborn metaphysic seems unable to grapple with the nature and consequences of the objective reality of evil, except through the language of wellness influencers and DEI consultants. There is no room for the moral value of punishment; no recognition that retribution is an element of justice, or that human dignity presupposes just desert. It offers instead a discount Marxism that subordinates personal choice to the fatalistic determinism of race, sex, or class, and reduces men to automatons of appetite.

In Perrin’s world, the criminals are invariably also victims, not of their own actions but of the system. No one is truly bad or irredeemable, he assures us (though perhaps wisely he doesn’t explain what trauma-informed treatment of a Robert Pickton or a Paul Bernardo would look like). It’s all the state’s fault, you see. This is dime-store Foucault but without the erudition (or the attribution). Surely sociologists doing sociology have caused enough problems that we don’t need law professors stumbling in and adding their own untrained opinions.

At this point I should probably confess my own (quite conscious) bias. Because I spent a good part of my first year in Stephen Harper’s Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) cleaning up the mess Perrin left behind after his short stint as a mid-level staffer there, I came to this book with a sceptical eye. On the other hand, that experience qualifies me to recall just how unhelpful his work was then and to recognise how little has changed in that regard, conversion or no conversion.

Reading what Perrin has to say about his former views, I suspect the problem was that they were only ever a crude caricature of conservative principles. Having abandoned them, he now attributes the same simplistic views to his opponents. This would explain why he repeatedly invokes anachronistic Reagan-era rhetoric about a “war on drugs” to describe current conservative policies that eschew prison in favour of treatment and support for addicts. He may have traded one set of beliefs for its opposite, but his blind zealotry remains consistent.

I debated whether it was worth mentioning Perrin’s record as a staffer in the Harper government in a book review, but since he has made the vocal repudiation of that work his professional calling card (his apology for his time in the PMO, which manages to be both simpering and self-important, is one of the book’s most nauseating passages), I concluded that it is not just relevant but important. I will, however, spare you the full litany of his disservice, as one story suffices to paint the picture.

Perrin, as you probably don’t remember (he doesn’t mention it much himself), was the liaison between then-PMO Chief of Staff Nigel Wright and Senator Mike Duffy’s lawyer for the negotiation of the terms of the $90,000 payment to Duffy. This was particularly shocking considering that at the time he considered himself to be “the prime minister’s lawyer” (a nonsensical title for a partisan staffer) … but somehow he never got around to telling the prime minister what he was doing behind his back.

Such a gross lapse of judgement would chasten most lawyers into permanent silence about anything to do with the matter. If I had missed so many obvious legal red flags and hurt my employer so badly and so publicly, I would probably avoid ever mentioning that work again. But here is Perrin, a decade later, still leveraging his brief, shambolic service to attack his former boss and promote himself. It is a sad, shabby gimmick.