"AND IN THE OFFICE ITSELF DURING THE CRITICAL TIME PERIOD, THE TWO JIMS WERE ON PAPER THE BOSSES AND SUPERVISORS OF DR. SMITH, WHO AS SOCIAL WORKERS SAY "PRESENTED" AS A TRAINED FORENSIC PATHOLOGIST BUT WASN'T ACTUALLY, ALTHOUGH HE KNEW ENOUGH TO APPEAR UNASSAILABLE AND UNTOUCHABLE TO MEDICAL COLLEAGUES THERE AND AT THE HOSPITAL FOR SICK CHILDREN, WHERE HE ALSO THEN WORKED.
THE WHOLE BALL OF WAX WAS INFINITELY MORE COMPLICATED AND MORE NUANCED THAN MANY WANT TO PAINT IT - YOU KNOW, AS EVERYTHING ELSE IN LIFE IS."
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Columnist Christie Blatchford: Globe And Mail;
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Globe And Mail Columnist Christie Blatchford has followed her paper's recent hard-hitting editorial calling for accountability in Ontario's Chief Coroner's Office with a hard-hitting column of her own, in which she comes to the defence of former Chief Coroner Dr. James Young and Deputy Chief Coroner Dr. James Cairns.
In the spirit of this Blog, I will reserve my own comments on this column until our readers have had the opportunity to reach their own unencumbered thoughts on what Blatchford has to say.
Suffice it to say for now that the ultimate judgment to be made on Dr. Young's and Dr. Cairn's exercise of their public responsibilities will be made by Commissioner Stephen Goudge after hearing months of evidence under oath - and not by the unidentified "ungrateful" reporters who Blatchford singles out;
"I guess it was inevitable that one day, someone I know and like would come under attack by those in my own business," Blatchford's April 8, 2008, column began;
"I've been writing for newspapers for more than a quarter-century, and after all that time, some reliable sources inevitably became familiar faces, and a very few of those have become friends," the column continued;
"Yet though on some level I knew this day was coming, I was, as Bruce Springsteen sings in Livin' in the Future, for my dough the best song from his newest album, Magic, "Still I was struck deaf and dumb" by the viciousness of it all.
The men in question are the two Jims, as they were sometimes called, Jim Young, for a time the chief coroner of Ontario, and Jim Cairns, the deputy coroner.
This week, they and the institution (although that is rather a grand name for dark little offices in a grim little building) they once ran were the subject of a series of calls for their heads, and a particularly scathing Globe and Mail editorial.
Now, I've never had that much truck for the breed that manages to simultaneously write from the comfort of anonymity and please the newspaper publisher or owner - as most of you know, editorials, unlike columns, are meant to espouse the corporate or newspaper view, and they carry no bylines.
That mixture of anonymity and official sanction can be a recipe for righteous hyperbole.
The two Jims were certainly already well-wounded.
For the past several years in particular, as the story of disgraced pathologist Charles Smith emerged first in dribs and drabs and then in bunches, the small coroner's office has been the subject of what I would call a fairly organized assault, led by lawyers for the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted, which represents a group of parents, some of whose members went to jail or lost their children as a result of Dr. Smith's failures and mistakes, and now even by lawyers for Dr. Smith himself.
The two Jims were key witnesses at the hearings, grilled for days by lawyers.
The key accusation against both of them, in a nutshell, is that they failed to provide the sort of oversight that is such a buzzword now and which in the modern fashion the world appears to believe would have and should have caught Dr. Smith in his tracks, and revealed him as dangerously sloppy at best, and a prosecutorial stooge at worst, far sooner than he was stopped.
Now, the Ontario coroner's system always struck me as just plain weird.
At death inquests, coroners (who are, after all, medical doctors) make legal rulings, wrestle with bright, quarrelsome lawyers and preside over an increasing number of public institutions and officials who arrive at the shabby inquest courts with lawyers in tow, often bent on thwarting the inquest from doing its business and from ever arriving at the facts of a case, let alone truth.
And in the office itself during the critical time period, the two Jims were on paper the bosses and supervisors of Dr. Smith, who as social workers say "presented" as a trained forensic pathologist but wasn't actually, although he knew enough to appear unassailable and untouchable to medical colleagues there and at the Hospital for Sick Children, where he also then worked.
The whole ball of wax was infinitely more complicated and more nuanced than many want to paint it - you know, as everything else in life is.
Dr. Young I know less well.
I first met him when I worked alongside him for a short time in the sports department of The Globe, where he was toiling to put himself through medical school.
Dr. Cairns I got to know better, by watching him at inquests where he was a brave advocate for dead children of the province who sometimes had no other, and because as a reporter, I could always call him for information.
While in the latter years of his tenure we became friends, he was always accessible and honest even in the years when we weren't.
What's more, rare in government and its agencies then and now, he actually believes fiercely in the right of the public to know and in freedom of the press.
In probably two decades of reporterly calls, made at all hours of the day and night, he never once exaggerated a whit.
Most reporters have had the experience of hearing a police officer, lawyer or politician overselling the strength of a case or a position; indeed, that is one of the criticisms of Dr. Smith in the witness box, that he gilded the lily in favour of the prosecution.
As a source, Dr. Cairns never did that.
He really was a "just the facts" kind of source: He'd tell reporters what he knew, what he could, and never more.
If he didn't know the answer, he would say so, and then try to get it.
If he had the answer, but was prohibited by law from disclosing it and could find no way around the law (as I said, he actually believed in the right to know), he would say that, too.
There are reporters at every news organization in Toronto and beyond who would have had comparable experiences with him, yet their voices have gone silent.
I realize this may all seem a little inside-baseball, but the point is, these are good qualities for a public servant to have, or so I believe.
While he clearly misjudged Dr. Smith - who isn't guilty of that? - I have no doubt it was ever deliberate or done, as this paper's editorial suggested, to keep Dr. Smith on a pedestal, and the coroner's office bathing in reflected glory.
Glory, what glory?
This was an office run for the longest time on a shoestring, virtually ignored most of the time by its masters in government and everyone else too, where the stuff of daily life was emotionally battering, and where the workload was enormous and the pay ordinary.
How cruel that none of us in this business, who relied on Dr. Cairns so much for so long, remember any of this now."
How sharper than a serpent's tooth is an ungrateful reporter."
Harold Levy...hlevy15@gmail.com
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