28 Seconds

by Michael Bryant

  At the time, you could pick and choose who you called in the Premier’s Office. So I called Bob Lopinski. His populist instincts were superb and he had the best political nose in that shop at the time. He said something to the effect of, “Well, as long as you just say you’ll look at it, it gives you some wiggle room.”

  I knew there was no wiggle room. As soon as I said that we were going to look at it, there would be no turning back. But, technically, I had clearance from the top. So I called Brennan back at about 6 p.m. and said, “Yes, we’re going to look at banning pit bulls.”

  It was huge news. It was on the front page of the Star. It became national news. It went international; I ended up on CNN. The decision actually changed my political life. For years afterwards, up to 2009, the average person knew me as the guy who banned pit bulls.

  Initially, there was no response from the Premier. But the Liberal caucus immediately began getting emails from angry dog owners, not just pit bull owners. A campaign was launched by the local humane societies, who foresaw the thin edge of the wedge of canine genocide.

  Some members of caucus were fully supportive, laughing off the naysayers. Others started getting antsy. They raised it at caucus meetings. They came up to me in the House, telling me they were taking heat.

  I recall Brad Duguid, now a cabinet minister in the McGuinty government, approaching me; he was one of many backbenchers getting plenty of phone calls on both sides. He stretched out his hands, and said with a smile: “You’re gonna need to stiffen your spine for this one.” Duguid was right.

  So I tried to stiffen the spines of my colleagues, as I had to for myself. I said, “Trust me. The empty wagon’s making the most noise here. This is the right thing to do. The silent majority is definitely with us on this one.”

  From my perspective, I thought it was important that we did it because Liberal governments typically nibble around the edges of these kinds of things with regulations that are more rhetorical than real—things like training for people who own pit bulls, or new penalties for irresponsible dog owners. That kind of thing.

  The truth was, we actually had the legislative tools to deal with this issue. Pit bulls were inherently dangerous dogs, I believed. Let’s actually try to eliminate the problem, not appease a host of voices.

  The issue came to dominate the media coverage of the government. It didn’t matter what we did. Three syllables—Pit! Bulls! Banned!—were the story. I was getting a lot of ink, and loving it.

  The bill to ban the dogs required Cabinet approval. The formidable Toronto lawyer Clayton Ruby had already beat his chest that he was going to challenge the bill in the courts, on behalf of pit bull breeders and owners. So we drafted something that was as tight as possible.

  It hit the Cabinet table and immediately a rural cabinet minister laid into it. A dozen other people raised their hands, some supportive, some not. I had made phone calls, so I thought I had the numbers. But I knew there were some people who were very skittish about it.

  McGuinty cut them off, which he rarely does—he usually lets cabinet members air their opinions. He shut down the debate. He said he didn’t want to spend any time on it. He didn’t want our government to be defined by this issue, but he thought it was good politics and that we were going to do it.

  I picked my jaw up off the table, and then passed him a note saying thanks. He just nodded at me when he got the note. I hadn’t known his support was coming with such finality.

  I later learned that the Premier’s wife, Terri McGuinty, was all for the ban, and that McGuinty himself had introduced a bill when he was in opposition, also addressing pit bulls. My bill had the most important support one could get in the McGuinty government, the Premier himself, and that was that.

  Later on, a famous pollster reported that the pit bull ban was the most popular public event in Canada since Newfoundland Premier Brian Tobin’s rhetorical war with foreign fishing trawlers and his defence of the lowly turbot.

  Come January 2005, the pit bull ban had worked its way into the government speaking notes as one of our accomplishments. And today you don’t read about pit bull attacks in Ontario anymore.

  Malcolm Gladwell, who grew up in Elmira, Ontario, before becoming famous as a New Yorker staff writer and then as an author and speaker, took me up on this in an article in the magazine that was later updated and enlarged for a chapter in his book What the Dog Saw. In a nutshell, he argued that generalizing about pit bull behaviour is a dangerous business, because it leads to bad public policies like racial profiling. The most obvious example occurs when, based on the overrepresentation of African Americans in U.S. prisons, African Americans are targeted by police for crimes by virtue of their appearance alone. I obviously agree with Gladwell on the evils of racial profiling, but a pit bull ban is different.

  Firstly, racial profiling is unconstitutional and wrong because of its impact on homo sapiens. Canine profiling impacts homo sapiens only as commercial dog breeders and offended owners. Secondly, I think Gladwell is guilty of making a category error, although he accuses me of the same. Category errors, according to Friedrich August Hayek, arise when someone slaps categories onto a group based on some abstract, if not random, description but then treats the categorization as an undeniable truth. For example, whether Pluto is a planet depends on how one defines planet.

  I think we can get lost in all this circularity when assuming that dogs and people are in the same category. The same argument justifying the U.S. prohibition of keeping wolves as pets applies to pit bulls. Yes, the categorization of wolf and pit bull is an abstraction. But there’s no denying that something approximating the abstraction of a wolf, and a pit bull, roams the earth. That we cannot always rely on the abstraction’s description doesn’t mean we deny the very existence of these dangerous animals. Rather, we categorize as best we can, however imperfectly, and regulate the dangers accordingly. This conclusion and my legislative action deeply offended some people, for whom their pit bulls are hardly “property.” They are truly loved ones.

  What I hadn’t realized at the time was how pit bull owners were demonized in their own communities during this public debate. The consequence was unintended, but I feel responsible for the ill treatment of pit bull owners and apologize when I can to people directly. One kind elderly lady sent me a hand-written note expressing sympathy for my 28 seconds experience but gently chided me for ending her practice of using pit bulls for dog therapy. She, and many others, claim their pit bulls are not dangerous. I have little doubt that domestic wolf-owners would say the same thing.

  Those who oppose the pit bull ban include a few people who have (sorry) dogged me ever since. Some have threatened me with violence, publicly compared me to Hitler on Facebook and websites, and otherwise vilified me on every issue regardless of whether it’s connected to the pit bull ban. I stand by the law. My bombastic campaign for the bill was over the top, no doubt, although I was careful never to engage in personal attacks on dog owners. The same can’t be said of dog owners’ words about me. Alas, sticks and stones—nay, pit bulls and wolves—may break my bones, but their owners’ slander will never hurt me.

  Notwithstanding McGuinty’s unexpected intervention in the cabinet debate, more often than not I found myself very fortunate to receive my colleagues’ support for the justice initiatives I spearheaded. George Smitherman, Health Minister and eventually Deputy Premier, and Kathleen Wynne, the Education Minister, were important allies, as was my good friend David Caplan, Minister of Infrastructure and later Health, and Rick Bartolucci, the Emperor of Northern Ontario, to name only a few.

  Chris Bentley would succeed me as Attorney General in 2007, and he was a veteran criminal lawyer before entering politics in 2003. But he always brought his opinions directly to me, and never undermined me at the Cabinet table. Sandra Pupatello, Minister of Social Services and later Economic Development, was also a good friend and could be called upon for support in a pinch. Greg Sorbara was the most powerful cabinet minister outsi
de the Premier, and during his tenure at Finance, he supported many justice initiatives, including significant legal aid budget increases. The same would be true of his successor, Dwight Duncan.

  Then in 2005 came Toronto’s “Summer of the Gun,” with its explosion of gun-related homicides. By mid-September, 40 gun homicides had occurred, and the year’s final tally was 52. One killing took place at the funeral for another’s death-by-firearm. The 52nd happened on Boxing Day, near the Eaton Centre in downtown Toronto, when a bystander, 15-year-old Jane Creba, was shot while shoe shopping. The crime garnered international media coverage.

  It’s worth stopping to consider these statistics. Firstly, as far as gun homicide stats go, Toronto’s numbers in 2005 were much higher than in previous years, and since then those numbers have plummeted. Secondly, even in 2005, Toronto’s gun homicide rate was a fraction of that found in big cities in the United States. Chicago is about the same size as Toronto, and sees about ten times the number of gun homicides every year. In other words, Toronto used to see about 40 gun homicides a year; Chicago, about 400.

  But these numbers belie the tragedy within those stats. In 2009, there was but one cyclist involved in a motor vehicle fatality in the Greater Toronto Area. One. That would be Darcy Sheppard. And yet the tragedy of that enormous loss is trivialized statistically. I’ve always felt the same is true for crime statistics.

  Even one homicide is obviously a tragedy, just as one cycling fatality has impacted so many since the dark night of those 28 seconds, and ended the life of a man. To celebrate the decline of crime statistics is not the triumph of smart public policy over statistical trajectories. It ought to be the celebration of lives saved. More often than not, the media reports on lowering crime statistics as a “gotcha” political salvo aimed at tough-on-crime politicians and as a critique of justice budget expenditures.

  There is, without question, a political or media trajectory that exists for crime sprees. Once the tipping point is met, every additional crime, whether it be a break-in, a carjacking, a rape, or a gun homicide, receives urgent media attention: namely, the lead story on a newscast, or above the fold on the front page of the newspaper. Every single one. Therefore, at some point the numbers reached a critical mass such that in 2005 we had the Summer of the Gun.

  But each of these crimes are terrible stories and chapters and volumes of sorrow. Consider this. On January 21, friends Justin Hodge, 20, and Damian Muirhead, 22, were shot to death at Apt. 313, 180 Niagara Street, Toronto. On February 11, Szilvia Veres, 35, was shot to death in the underground parking garage at 15 Brookbanks Drive. Her 47-year-old husband was injured. Her former boyfriend, John Kovacs, 52, was charged with first-degree murder and attempted murder, but later committed suicide. On February 12, Orlando Grundy, 22, was shot to death with “multiple undetermined firearms” in Apt. 1308 at 2777 Kipling Avenue in Rexdale. Two other males, ages 24 and 25, were wounded. On February 15, Selvakumar Sellaiah, 26, was shot to death in the 17th-floor stairwell of 275 Bleecker Street.

  Those are five of the more than 50 gun homicides of 2005. The year ended with a crescendo of gun homicides that left Toronto dumbfounded and angry. On December 1, part-time used-car salesman Sepehr (Danny) Fatulahzadeh-Rabti, 25, was shot to death by two men after a fight at his family’s car lot at 4877 Steeles Avenue West. On December 23, Cordell Charles Skinner, 25, was gunned down on the grounds of 5 Turf Grassway. On December 26, Jane Creba, 15, was shot and killed while Boxing Day shopping with her mother and sister on Yonge Street near Elm. Six others were injured.

  Because I had been the tough-on-crime guy for the Liberals, I became the government spokesperson on that issue, one that was almost impossible to manage publicly and personally. I found it excruciating, less because of the media fury than because each death felt like a punch to the heart. There was a lot of self-medication by bourbon going on that year, to be sure.

  During that fall and winter, one Question Period bled into another. The issue had boiled up to the Premier’s legislative desk, and he fielded many of the questions himself. Sometimes he would send them my way, and some days he was unable to attend Question Period. On those days, especially, I’d receive a justified grilling by Opposition members about the reports of deaths and more deaths by firearm.

  One day I was taking a breather in the West Wing, as it’s called: the area between the legislative chamber and the door leading to the hallway outside the Legislature, where media cameras awaited. The wing is always full of MPPs during Question Period. Many are on the phone dealing with a local issue in their riding. Many staffers for the MPPs are also there, particularly for the cabinet ministers expected to be “scrummed” by media after Question Period. If you’ve not experienced a media scrum, just imagine being outside on a very rainy day, without an umbrella, trying to keep your composure, but instead of raindrops it’s TV camera lights blinding you, microphones jutting into your face, and about 25 people simultaneously shouting questions and false mockery to provoke a reaction.

  As I stood there beside the coffee station, one of the legislative security officials sidled up to me. These individuals were always extremely polite and did their job well. Conversations were inevitably brief, and I’d never in my years at Queen’s Park had a political conversation with any of them. It was all business, with the occasional chat about the weather or the time of day.

  “You must have the weight of the world on your shoulders, sir,” she said nervously, like she’d perhaps crossed a line.

  I smiled up at her (they were always taller than me), grateful for her genuine and generous effort to comfort me. She looked stressed out herself, as if my angst were contagious. Truth be told, we were, all of us in Toronto, anxious about the gun crimes, the homicides. It was bewildering, scary, confusing, wrong.

  “Thanks,” I said with a big smile. “I’m okay now. Better get back….” And I headed back into Question Period, feeling not alone.

  Minutes after Question Period ended, it was showtime in the scrums. I loved being in media scrums, because it allowed me to feel in control of a universe out of control. Scrums were an exaggerated, externalized manifestation of my internal misgivings and self-doubt. I was inevitably harder on myself, alone, than the media were hard on me, live and in person. I rarely felt as if the journalists were truly judgmental, even if they said things like “People think you’re lying!” or “Obviously you have to resign!” or “The NDP say you’re the worst Attorney General in the history of Canada!!” or “COME ON!! TELL THE TRUTH!!” or “What do you say to the mother of the boy who was shot yesterday …?”

  Moreover, I was always comforted by the fact that I never had to actually answer their questions. There was no score kept of whether I did so. They got to ask the questions however they wished. And I got to answer however I wished. Like a tennis rally.

  If I repeated myself a few times, it was code for “This is all I’m going to say when you ask that question.” Often an Attorney General’s rejoinder to any question is that “The matter is before the courts and therefore I cannot comment.” It was rare that I resorted to that one, but eventually it was easy to offer enough information that the journalist abandoned the line of questioning. The beauty of a scrum was its self-propelling tornado of questions, and the internal jousting among the journalists themselves, physically, violently, verbally. If I ever felt stuck, I could just wait all of one second, maximum, for the next question to arrive.

  In contrast, my own self-doubt and feelings of self-pity were far more judgmental and caustic. A media scrum was a vacation from one’s inner scrum, itself a truly suffocating exercise. With some experience, an external scrum could be easily defused by an unflappable demeanour. My media guy, Greg Crone, used to often say, to prepare me for a scrum: “Okay, we’re gonna channel Gregory Peck now,” and I’d always twist my mind into remembering anything about Gregory Peck, but I got the point. For me, impersonating Gregory Peck was always easier than internalizing the Dalai Lama.

  The word “
scrum” is a rugby term. When rugby players commence play, it’s with arms locked and all crowded around each other—which a media scrum resembles, of course. Both are a sport, a game, no matter how serious: a World Cup match or the wartime scrum of a prime minister. (Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, meanwhile, changed the rules of the game in 2009 when he announced, after years of being scrummed, that he’d address the media only if they gave him a few feet of space. The outraged media obliged, of course—at the end of the day, the goat needed feeding.)

  Like rugby, there are clearly defined goals and rituals for media scrums. Reporters try to get their product so they can file a story and go home. They do that by getting some content that is newsworthy. The more outrageous the reaction to the questions and badgering and physical smothering, the better the product, from the media’s perspective. There would be no need for the physical tsunami of a scrum if we politicians just spit out what reporters are looking for, but we don’t, so they try to squeeze it out of us.

  Sometimes I looked too comfortable in a scrum, such that I would start answering before they could start asking—handing over their needed content with a bow on top, in one take. In other words, I’d give them their sound bite, including all the elements necessary for filing the story. It was mutual manipulation, really, when it got to that stage of providing “one take,” but that usually arose only for less contentious issues. Not so for the Summer of the Gun.

  After the 2005 Boxing Day shooting of Jane Creba, I found myself on the telephone with the Premier, which was a rarity. He called me on the 27th to brainstorm a bit on what we had to do as a government. McGuinty never overreacted to events, in my experience. So if he was worried about something, it was serious. The overall competency of the government was on the line here—in a rare moment when unanticipated, urgent events could topple an otherwise successful administration.