Objective White Male to the rescue

Although Judge Gomery is an old man, he’s still vibrant and in good health – it wouldn’t be fair, just yet, to call him a Dead White Man (DWM).

Nonetheless, he is acting out an ancient, and hopefully dying, role. Gomery has been charged with providing an objective, final account of a Liberal corruption scandal. The public inquiry he led will end up costing close to $100 million dollars. As is frequently noted, he wrote every word of the first report, which came out this week.

But how can anyone believe that what a single man says represents the objective truth?

Jean Chrétien will accuse Gomery of bias before the courts because he didn’t like what Gomery said. But in the arguments he and his lawyer outlined on television on Tuesday, there was no broader questioning of the system: a judicial matter of the highest stakes resting on the judgment of a single human being.

Let’s forget for a moment what exactly Gomery’s first report actually says, and think instead about the kind of knowledge that it represents. In theory, the Gomery report is meant to provide an objective – you could say impartial – account of various facts. It is meant, and understood to be, true.

Maybe the broadest reason this kind of knowledge is valued is that it comes from what we consider the least corrupt branch of government – the judiciary. And if local courts and small-time judges are often held to be corrupt, at least at the highest levels, and compared to politicians, judges tend to be pretty well respected. This is obvious when it comes to Supreme Court justices, with whom we may or may not disagree, but who are treated with a hell of a lot more respect than most government ministers.

We also value judicial knowledge because it’s the closest to a clear understanding of morals and basic societal principles – like the freedoms enshrined in our constitutions. Some political decisions are moral and accessible, such as when deciding whether to go to war, but many others we call would political or bureaucratic, like how to plan a road system. The justice system, meanwhile, and let’s remember that crime TV always does better than political TV, hits close to home. We all feel closely affected by the motives and consequences of crime; and the ideas of guilt and innocence are absolutely central both to our society and to our inner sense of fair play.

So we feel we can trust judges, especially if the procedure is public, and we pay attention to them, because what they tell us is dear to our hearts. And because what they rule on is so important, there is usually an element of democracy built into the highest levels of judicial decision-making. Most criminal cases involve juries, which is the most direct involvement most citizens can have in public life these days. Then, at provincial and appeals courts there is often a panel of judges, reaching nine at the Supreme level.

The Gomery inquiry has no such structure – the conclusions he comes to are his own, and while he’s got a team, he is the undisputed leader. He’s not the first among equals, he’s the first, period.

Whose interests does this serve? On the surface, nobody’s, since presumably everyone would want the fairest possible process, and a more democratic structure would seem to be better than the current one. But there has also been a desire to get as clear an answer as possible to the questions raised by the Sponsorship scandal. As there has been no public outcry over the decision to have a single, omnipotent, and eventually, presumably, omniscient judge, we might even assume that people accept this logic.

I find it disturbing that we still chose, at moments such as this, to throw a living DWM, in all his glory, at a system buckling from the pressure of so many white male elites living out their years in power exactly as one would expect. Irrespective of whether Gomery, on balance, was right or wrong on the details, the fact that a single man has been empowered to find out, and that anyone will take such knowledge seriously as either a form of truth or even some kind of remedy, suggests a scandal completely different from the one described in the headlines. It suggests a structural gullibility of astonishing magnitude at a time when we all agree, at least superficially, that what is needed is the exact opposite.