Tansi. Honourable senators, I’m honoured to join you today from Edmonton — or to give it its Cree name, Amiskwaciwâskahikan — and I’m honoured to give what I believe will be the first Senate speech delivered from Treaty 6 territory.

I’m grateful to the technology, to the professional expertise and to the political compromise and grace that have allowed me to address the Senate in this way during this pandemic emergency, and to speak specifically to Bill S-207, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (independence of the judiciary).

The last time I rose in the Senate to speak to the problems and moral dilemmas arising from mandatory minimum sentencing in Canadian courtrooms, I told you about some of the horrible and shocking murder cases I covered when I was a journalist in Edmonton.

Today, we are reviewing the flaws of mandatory minimum sentencing, and I would like to tell you about another, much more recent case. In fact, it made the headlines last week.

It involves the very sad story of an Alberta woman named Helen Naslund, and I hope it will serve as another illustration of the counterintuitive impact of mandatory minimum sentences on Canadian justice.

Helen Naslund was an abused wife. She was just a teenager when she married her husband, Miles. Helen, Miles and their three sons had a ranch near Holden, Alberta. According to an agreed statement of facts entered with the court, there were many instances of physical and emotional abuse over the course of the couple’s 27-year marriage. Miles Naslund was a huge burly man with a bad temper, who controlled his wife’s movements and conversations. Helen Naslund was petite — in the words of her family, about 100 pounds, soaking wet.

Both the Naslunds had a problem with alcohol abuse and depression, made worse by the fact that their farm was not doing well financially. Finally, on the Labour Day weekend of 2011, things reached a crisis point.

Miles Naslund had been drinking heavily all weekend and was highly intoxicated, according to court records. Helen, meanwhile, was hard at work in the fields, cutting the hay with a Haybine mower. But when the mower broke down on Sunday, Miles exploded in rage, going on a tirade and throwing wrenches at Helen, whom he blamed for the malfunction.

With their mower inoperable, Helen returned to the house to prepare Sunday dinner for the family. When Miles came in from the field, he berated Helen and told her she would pay dearly for what she had done to the Haybine.

He continued to rage. Then he violently knocked all the dishes, cutlery, glasses and food from the fully set dinner table, shouting at Helen that the meal she’d prepared was not fit for a dog.

According to the agreed statement of facts, his violence and threatening behaviour grew worse through the evening. Things only calmed down when Miles Nasland passed out late that night.

In the middle of the night — or rather, in the very early morning hours — while her husband lay face down in a drunken stupor, Helen went and got a .22-calibre revolver pistol the family kept at their home. Then she shot her husband twice in the back of the head.

When day dawned, Helen and her son Neil made a plan. They dragged the body outside and placed it in a large truck-bed tool box. They placed a bag over the head, drilled holes in the box, filled it with tractor weights, then welded it shut. Later that evening, they drove to a dugout, rowed the box out in the middle of the slough and dumped it, where it sank into the mire. As part of the plan, they also crushed Miles’ car with an excavator that Helen had borrowed, and buried it on the farm. And then, with the body and the car disposed of, they called the police and reported that Miles was missing.

The family kept its terrible secret for six years. But eventually, family and neighbourhood gossip alerted the RCMP that Miles hadn’t just disappeared. Six years — almost to the day — after Miles Naslund was killed, RCMP found a large metal truck tool box covered in silt and mud at the bottom of the slough, a few kilometres from the Naslund family farm. Inside the box, they found Miles Naslund’s partly decomposed body.

Helen Naslund turned herself in and confessed. She was charged with first-degree murder — a charge with a mandatory minimum sentence of life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years.

A mandatory minimum sentence of life in prison: In theory, that might seem like a fair sentence for a first-degree murder. After all, the deliberate murder of another person is one of the most serious of all crimes. Of course we wish to denounce murder and protect our community by imposing stiff sentences on those who commit such a heinous crime.

But not all murders are the same, and not all murderers are the same, either. Does a battered woman such as Helen Naslund, who shot her husband after an evening of threats and violence, really deserve the same sort of sentence as a misogynist serial killer like a Robert Pickton or Paul Bernardo or Russell Williams, or the same sentence as a racist mass murder such as Alexandre Bissonnette? As I said during my previous speech on mandatory minimum sentences, each murderer is different, and every murder is its own unique story.

For better or worse, it was also obvious to the people who prosecuted and sentenced Helen Naslund that imposing the mandatory minimum sentence for first-degree murder in this case would be a miscarriage of justice. And so a compromise was found. Mrs. Naslund agreed to plead guilty to manslaughter. Last week, in an Edmonton court, she was sentenced to 18 years and will have a much earlier opportunity for parole consideration.

Yes, you may well say, then, “Fine. The system works as it is. Courts are finding innovative ways to impose appropriate penalties after all.” But honestly, a situation like this makes a mockery — or at the very least a pretzel — of the justice system.

Whatever Helen Naslund did, why ever she did it, finding a gun and shooting your unconscious husband in the back of the head doesn’t really meet the conventional definition of manslaughter. Moreover, one can imagine it would have been hard indeed for Mrs. Naslund’s lawyer to go to court and risk offering a battered-wife defence, or even arguing self-defence, with the threat of a non-negotiable life sentence hanging over his client.

Might a jury have exonerated Helen Naslund? We’ll never know, because the spectre of that mandatory minimum sentence made a truly fair trial impossible.

This is just the latest example of the way mandatory minimum sentences distort our justice system. They put Crown prosecutors and defence lawyers into uncomfortable, sometimes impossible, positions. They undermine the independence of the judiciary and undercut the authority of Canadian judges. They bring the administration of justice itself into disrepute and instill distrust of our legal system in the general public.

We want Canadians to know that we have well-trained, experienced, impartial judges on the bench and that we can rely on those judges to weigh all the individual, specific facts of the case and impose the right sentence, bearing in mind the unique circumstances of each case and each defendant before them.

If we’re worried that a few of our judges don’t have the training, expertise, temperament or judgment to do their jobs, then we need to address those problem judges, not hamstring all the rest of them. It’s time for us to stop boxing in judges in an effort to get neat, identical conclusions to complex human tragedies. If we want sentences passed without compassion, insight and moral judgment, without a fair weighing of case-specific facts, we can write algorithms, hire robots and handle trials with assembly-line efficiency. Or we can appoint qualified judges, prepare them for their duties, relieve them of political interference and restore public confidence in the independence and the integrity of our courts. In other words, we can support Senator Pate and Bill S-207.

Thank you very much, and hiy hiy.