Veteran criminal defence lawyer Bill Trudell brings the conversation around to issues of importance to the criminal bar and the legal profession as a whole.
In his Sidebars column, Bill Trudell laments the deteriorating adherence to the Mark Twain adage: “Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”
Winston Churchill said: “Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak. Courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.”
I was reminded of this as I attended a moving and joyful swearing-in ceremony of two new judges of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice on May 21.
Clouds offer us an opportunity to see things differently, sometimes only what we want to see and too often what others want us to see. This is happening in our world, especially in politics, in social media and in our day-to-day interactions. Clouds of incivility, mistrust and misinformation are shaping opinions, perspectives, driving us apart and far away from a clear picture.
We don’t know what actually happened to create such a tsunami of uninformed accusations, but it is time to stop, take a breath and end the careless accusations that are damaging institutions and individuals.
On the weekend of Jan. 19, 2019 in Winnipeg, the 11th Annual National Symposium on Re-inventing Criminal Justice took place. The topic this year focused on Indigenous people and the criminal justice system and an examination of “decolonization.”
More than 500 years later, as I write from Cape Town, South Africa, a positive attitude, perhaps vision, seems very much a part of the fabric of this beautiful land some refer to as paradise.
