Wednesday 7am - After the Mistrial: Lindsay Clancy Jurors Break Their Silence

0:00This is the Toronto Today podcast. I'm your host, Greg Brady. We wanted to give you a sense as well with new tariffs, like I mean, new tariffs since yesterday morning and since lunchtime. And since the early afternoon yesterday, you may have heard Scott Monock run some of them down, but they sure involve a lot of farm implementation parts, Canadian booze. I had no idea how popular. I mean, you got to feel for it, right? How popular Canadian alcohol is in the United States. The state of Texas. It's incredible drinks more crown royal than all 41 million of us in Canada do. That's amazing. They make crown royal and gimme manitoba. You might remember the premiere of the province in a stunt and it was a struggle. It was a struggle to pull the stunt off. You maybe he didn't show up to rehearsal or they changed things on the fly, but Doug Ford tried to pour out a bottle of crown royal because of a bunch of jobs. Important, important to know. And we all remember it. He's getting the job done there. There were 250 jobs that were going to be lost as a plant closed near near Windsor.

1:05Well, what we're talking about now is thousands of direct jobs in distilling and the booze industry that are under threat just because of the snap of a finger stroke of a pen from Trump yesterday. Eileen is going to join us bottom of the hour. I thought he won the day yesterday doing around a television interviews, but he'll join us live after after seven thirty. All right, give you someone else who won the day yesterday in trade lawyer Mark Warner. Let me give you this clip from I spotted it Sunday night, go you to Monday, but here's an Albert of farmer. Now take that out of it. You're already thinking, well, I wonder who he votes for. Don't do that. He's just talking practically about numbers thousands of people everywhere vote for this party, that party, this person, that person. We do this all the time. Oh, Florida, all Trump fans down there. Thousands of millions of people voted for Kamala Harris and Florida. Again, I tried to tell you all summer in 24 and I think I was right. There's no good option here for American voters. There just wasn't there wasn't.

2:06Central party anyone. They don't have that in the United States, but here's farmer John Kowalshuk noting that when the tariffs went on as they do yesterday, forget all these counter tariffs coming back at us from the United States that are going to choke the life at a certain industries. Here's him documenting what he has to pay for his massive Ferguson. What a name. Massie Ferguson, Combine. And he's got no choice. He's got to keep going. Here's his story. So starting Tuesday, September 8, the tariff goes on Combine parts coming in from the US. So that means on Tuesday, I will pay 15% more for every part I buy for this Combine. The fact of the matter is that comes directly out of our bottom line and it's on top of already inflated costs for parts. I don't see how that's helping anything. It's just costing small business more money.

3:06The tariffs that aren't on farm equipment and on other things coming into Canada from the US are just affecting the cost of consumers. It's basically we're just pawns in a game. The politicians are using us and at the end of the day, is it really helping? Is it helping businesses that helping trade? They just need to get back at the table and get this figured out. Was that understood? Like does that make sense to you? Get back to the table, figure it out. No one's going to win here. And we're likely, we're the more likely to get crushed. You know how they give point spreads for an NFL game NFL season starts tonight, doing on Seattle. One team's favorite, one team's the underdog. Do you even want to guess how much of an underdog we are to win, win a trade war against an economy 14 times the size for us? Maybe you could give examples of tinier countries, 40 million is pretty tiny compared to 360

4:08million. 14 to one 14th the size of the economy. Maybe you've got a long list. Can you give them to me an alphabetical order of countries that have bested the US at this kind of navigating and negotiating? We have a, we could be one of the richest countries in the world. We already know that we're sure not getting off to a great start in showing that and demonstrating that kind of promise. Mark Warner said this on CBC yesterday, he's a trade lawyer. He's documented before the size of the of the fight in the dog, right? That slogan. That's not really how this works here. He got to navigate massage, be pragmatic about a relationship when you've got a neighbor. Maybe we'll still be friends again. I'm hoping we'll make good and be friends 14 times our size, all the hubris, all the public posturing, all the high fives, all the damn elbows. You can't win a brute force trade, tariff war and that is not some kind of anti-Canadian active capitulation to note so.

5:08I don't know. I don't really completely understand it. I mean, I think I see the politics of it. I don't see the economics of it and I don't see that the government has left much room to get back to negotiating table with the United States without a complete climb down for Mr. Trump, which again, my reading of the man is that's not what he's going to do. So I don't understand, I just don't understand the strategy. I do, I do hear a lot of people in Ottawa professors and puppets who say the midterms and the Democrats who historically the most protectionist party when it comes to Canada, that Donald Trump's protectionism dates from when he was a Democrat, that somehow they're going to ride to the rescue. All those accountability stuff they have to deal with, each bit, whatever else, all the economic issues, they're going to come Canada, it's going to come top of the list. It's an insane position and it's one that's shared by a lot of people who are influential in Canada. It's a fever that has to burn out. The fever that has to burn out is on our side. You think Trump's fever is going to burn out?

6:10This is what Trump is. Trump Trump's, what can you say? We're not going to emerge victorious because we're more defiant and angry. Does not work that way. Listen to that farmer. There's a crushing proportion of our national economic output that depends on selling things to the Americans and yes, buying things from the Americans. It's pretty vital. They need us less than we need them full stop. They'll feel the pain on a much more moderate level than we will. We can be anger than they are and we can be so symbolic about these retaliatory tariffs. But again, who pays the tariff you and I do, self-inflicted wounds. If I don't get to this, I'm going to burst yesterday, some rather extraordinary post-miss trial interviews given by three Lindsey Clancy jurors, 25% of the Lindsey Clancy jury spoke to television reporters yesterday. Maybe against the advice, I don't know if they have lawyers.

7:11She's obviously the woman who got a hung jury decision Friday, 11 to one in favor. There are 11 people on the jury that wanted to find her not criminally responsible. Of course, she doesn't just get let go out into the wilderness. She'd be kept in a facility, but who knows how long that would be. And she would generally be a free woman after it's deemed. Now she's not insane anymore clinically or otherwise. Postpartum depression and psychosis. Do I have to say this? Yes. It demands more research. Women have to get access to counseling, medical intervention before a crisis like this takes, takes root. One of the most pressing things I heard over the weekend was this woman shouldn't have been anywhere near three kids, let alone, left alone with them. But none of that. I don't, she may not have got the help she needed, but this doesn't make her any less culpable of her horrific actions. But this was, this was difficult for me to watch and witness. I thought the jurors admitted, you tell me of them wrong. I thought they admitted openly. They disregarded the law entirely to make sure Clancy was let off the hook.

8:17And you'll hear in this clip a juror note how excited she was. She was excited to get the paperwork going when it looked like the loan hold out mailed juror was going to join them and they'd be 12 zero in terms of finding her not criminally responsible. I don't know how you talk like this when there's three, three murder and sips siblings. I have no idea. And I, I'd be upset if I overheard this conversation, let alone her blabbing it to a news person. I just found it to be harsh, so very, very harsh. I mean, again, I may be, we're talking with ourselves here, but the fact that they had no character witnesses to, and we got to Lindsay of being a bad mother. I mean, right out of the gate, it's like you're presenting all these medical professionals, but nobody's presenting and for the prosecution, a woman and a mother of three children.

9:17So I found it to be biased right out of the gate. We weren't trying to figure out if she murdered the children. She did. And she's admitting that. She's trying to figure out, did she know right from wrong at that time? And with everybody saying she loved her children so much and everything proved she loved her children from our journals to her mother-in-law, everything proved that she loved her children. I have no idea. I mean, again, I did some pre-law classes in the university, never been a lawyer, but what I know is the character witnesses wouldn't matter in this particular case. The prosecution wouldn't have been allowed to call those kinds of witnesses. You can't bring somebody in and talk even about her being a bad mother because that would have been prejudicial. So the juror would acquit because the prosecution didn't provide evidence. They're not allowed to provide anyway. It would have been irrelevant anyway. One of the other dramatic things you heard yesterday was that, well, the male juror who

10:18held out and didn't want to see a not criminally responsible verdict, the one out of 12, he wouldn't listen to some of the nurses in their testimony. You can't, you're not allowed to bring expert testimony in and have a one juror be more educated about the trial than the other. You all are supposed to start from scratch. It doesn't matter what your occupation is. Here's another juror talking to the media and documenting how difficult the male juror was to deal with who held out. He actually said one day in the end, well, why don't we have the judge coming and read it again? And we were like, no, we have it in front of us. We don't need that. And we would highlight it. And, you know, so and so, this is the definition of reason of both. But he had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsey viciously killed her children. She had a very difficult time. The hardest time letting go of the fact that she murdered her kids, including a baby.

11:19He just, he just couldn't let that aspect of the case go. It's, it's just extraordinary. Do we need professional jurors? Like I would, I would actually be more pleased like, like almost like NHL referees. I assume you're trained. We don't let three fans come out of the stands and two ref for fans and you got two referees and two lines. I almost feel like that's what we're doing with jurors now. I think you should be able to become a professional juror and you should be trained and smart and know the law and maybe be an ex lawyer. We would never let a random person be a judge. Yet we put randoms on jurors like on juries like this. It's amazing to me. I thought I couldn't be more disturbed than Friday afternoon and watching those people speak, maybe more disturbed. Oftentimes we'll do a chat with somebody and then give the website at the end. I want to do it at the beginning so you can kind of follow along where we're going here. If you go to JordanChallenge.ca, you'll see exactly what we're going to talk about with a lawyer, Catherine Marshall.

12:22This is about intimate partner violence, but more importantly, as importantly, let's say it is about these ceilings and if you are unaware of why there's such controversy about this, there's, well, I mean, you can go a bunch of different ways with the controversy. But the Jordan ruling came in 2016 and it was from the Supreme Court of Canada and it put time limits on how long the government, provincial or federal can take to bring an accused person to trial and it's changed. Basically, we don't want our trial. If we're a victim, if we're a victimizer alleged, we'd want our trial to move quickly. I think that we would, but what's happened now is lawyers have figured out, defenselers have figured out how to draw these cases out. For example, more than half the cases in provincial court involving sexual assault or intimate partner violence are stayed. There's never a decision because it goes past the 18 months and whether it's just delays and things getting bogged down or the lawyers or whatever, this has to be fixed.

13:23That's not right now. That's not a serviceable enough time. And then to be honest, victims don't get to be heard and alleged victims don't get to be heard. And the alleged victimizers don't even get their name cleared. They didn't do anything wrong. It's a very controversial decision and trying to turn it around among others is lawyer Catherine Marshall and she joins us now on Toronto today. Thank you very much for the time. Thanks for having me on. Do I sort of please clear Jordan challenge dot C.A. is the website. Clarify anything I didn't get right or carry on from where I'm going, going, a stay of charges is just, it's just, it's not good for anybody, but it certainly isn't encouraging survivors to come forward and tell their story if they're worried about this happening. Yeah, exactly. I mean, survivors are seeing thousands of cases getting thrown out from the courts every year, not because of the evidence or, you know, finding of the judge or jury, but simply because of these arbitrary timelines. I have clients who are part of this lawsuit we're doing as part of the Jordan challenge

14:27who had their cases thrown out the day before trial because there was no judge available. So this is happening thousands and thousands of times a year. It's a terrible problem and, you know, we're hoping that this website will help educate the public, but also apply pressure on the government to do the right thing and fix this travesty. Do I have this right that is it simply that defense lawyers and teams have figured out how to, how to quote unquote, run the clock on this and get it, especially in provincial court past 18 months, or is it just more complicated than that? And there's a bunch of delays and procedures that are too antiquated and take too long also. I mean, it's a combination of both. It's pretty easy to kind of game the system and run the clock, especially because sexual assault cases and intimate partner violence cases traditionally just take longer to go through the court system. They're more complicated. There's a lot of pre trial motions that happen.

15:29And, you know, if you're a defense lawyer and, you know, you can have, it's pretty easy if it's part of your strategy just to sort of run the clock and, you know, have this stay hit, right? And, but it's also just the courts like there are enough judges. The courtrooms are often empty because there aren't enough judges. The government's not appointing them fast enough. I don't know why. They're aren't enough resources. And the government is bringing emotion to dismiss our entire lawsuit in December. And they're claiming that it's because it's not their problem. Yeah, that's what I want to get to. You're filing a lawsuit in federal court and the argument is the government of Canada has unjustifiably infringed the plaintive rights. There's two charges, two sections rather, the Canadian charge of rights and freedoms. What is your theory as to why the federal government and the federal court wants to take this on and fight you on this and not make this better for alleged victims?

16:31I think they want to make it the province's responsibility and they say that in the motion. They say that it's not their responsibility to administer the court system, but that's not correct. They have a lot of power over our court system. And one of the things we're asking the federal government to do, which is really simple, and it's only something the feds can do, which is to suspend the Jordan timelines, ideally, with respect to intimate partner violence and sexual assault cases. And they can do that. They just refuse to. Catherine Marshalls are guests on Toronto today. I want to get back to the lawsuit. What makes it's a listener question to and I was going to ask it anyway, what makes a trial go to provincial court or go to superior court? The hockey Canada sexual assault trial goes to superior court of justice of Ontario. But what's the jurisdiction, jurisdictional difference? Because that's a 30 month deadline instead of an 18 month deadline. They might have been right up against an 18 month deadline had a gone to a provincial court.

17:35What makes the difference as to what goes where? It's just the different types of charges and offenses. Most charges, most offenses will go to provincial court. And that's is a jurisdiction thing. That's essentially it. But you know, the problem with the sexual assault and intimate partner violence cases though is they take so long to go through the system because the defense brings all kinds of emotions and they slow down the process. And then the crown starts to realize, well, this is probably going to get dismissed. And they go to the victim and they say, look, we think it'll get dismissed because of Jordan. You should just agree to a peace bond and walk away. And that happens every day. And of course, the peace bond, there are useless piece of paper. You know, there's no conviction, no criminal record. These guys just get to walk. Yeah, that's a good outcome for them.

18:35It's a terrible outcome for everybody else. The website's JordanChallenge.ca. We're speaking with Catherine Marshall. You've sat before, I'm sure with victims who don't not only do they not get justice, there's no telling which way the case would go, but they sure don't get closure. What's that like explaining to an alleged victim, someone that tells your story brave enough to come forward? They're uniform as to what happened and what didn't happen. And Catherine, they never get closure the rest of their lives. It's horrible. You know, I've sat with many people, victims and I've told them, you know, you should go to the police and have charges pressed. But now I have to say to them, look, I can't guarantee that you're going to get a trial. You might go through this system for two years and you won't get a gain court. And that's a gut-wrenching thing to absorb as a survivor. And honestly, a lot of people at that point are just like, well, I'm not going to bother.

19:37Why would I bother to go through this process if I don't even know that there's a light at the end of the tunnel? And this is what the government's forgetting. Because of this system we have right now, so many survivors aren't coming forward. They're just not bothering to even call the police and that's that's terrible. So then we have so many unreported crimes. And this is why every day when you open the news, you read about another homicide, another domestic homicide. I'm glad you brought this up because it's not even the stress which must be unbelievable. Uh, uh, over. I'm not even sure I'll be believed by a judge or a jury. You could be convinced you're going to be believed, Catherine. But then the next leap of faith is we can get this done in time like that. It should never come to that second layer of it. Lever should it. Never. And I've got clients who have a very well evidence cases. They have cases where there's video evidence, which is the best kind of evidence to have. There's text messages.

20:37There's all kinds of very persuasive evidence where a conviction was very likely to happen in their case. But the case got thrown out anyways without anyone ever looking at the evidence without a judge ever looking at any of the evidence. And I've had clients tell me that it feels just as bad as the initial assault to just the betrayal of the system against them. And, um, I tell my I've lawyer friends in other countries and I tell them what's going on in Canada. They can't believe me. They're like, what are you talking about? How is this happening in Canada? We got to keep talking about it and got to fix it. Catherine, thanks for doing this. People can go to Jordan Challenge dot CA. Can't they and find out a lot more about your lawsuit? Yes, and they can sign a petition. Yeah, petitions there as well. Catherine, thanks for being on the show this morning. Thank you. There's Catherine Marshall joining us. World and they do not think this is the way to go everybody. It's only the people that have nice cushy protected jobs that think this is a wonderful thing. Ian, you bring it so well. Thank you so much for the time today.

21:38Thanks very much. Elys from the Sprot School of Business at Carlton University. All right. We're two days away from the 25th anniversary of 9 11 and stepping up yesterday. And these are the right things to say. You can imagine 3000 people killed in a terrorist attack. New York City will never be the same, but there were weeks and months after those attacks in September of 2001. The people in New York got told, what about the air? I feel ill. Something's still not quite right. Are we safe to do this and safe to do that? And months later, health officials were still finding that maybe that wasn't true. John Stewart has been, well, you know who he is. Box show host comedian, et cetera, has been one person out there and he doesn't care if he's blasting Republicans or Democrats. I like that. Blast them if they did something wrong. He said this about the 9 11 air in New York yesterday. The city began covering their ass three weeks in in a memo. The memo is entitled legislative alternatives to the fiscal responsibility for 9 11.

22:47These people had to fight sick and dying for years. And I'm not saying that the information may have changed the outcomes, unfortunately, for their families. But I guarantee you it would not have been the struggle that it was to get people to recognize that what they all knew and what we all knew who live in downtown Manhattan is that there was poison in the air and on the ground and in the window sills and in your air conditioners and covering your pets and your clothes. And it stayed there for months. Everyone knew. And now it's very clear that the city knew as well. So now 170,000 pages of previously withheld New York City records warning of potential liability from all this toxic exposure is out there now. It's again, there's a bunch of remarkable, awful, heart breaking stories about 9 11 that

23:51you're already hearing this week and you sure will hear on Friday. But this is one of them as well. Miriam Diamonds, a professor at University of Toronto in the Department of Earth Sciences. She's done a lot of work, a lot of study and a lot of commentary on this as well. Miriam, thank you very much for the time today. Thank you for inviting me. What an important subject. And I don't, some are accusing Stuart of grandstanding in this moment, but when, if not now and he has been out there, Hasney, for the better part of a half decade documenting that everybody let New Yorkers down with the lack of awareness and the lack of alert. Yes. And I just want to comment the reason that I can comment or talk about this is because my lab group went down six weeks after 9 11 to measure chemical contaminants in the zone. And we found very high levels of chemicals that are known to be hazardous. We found them predominantly within the ground zero, within one kilometer, 100 times higher

24:55levels as you went out into St. Brooklyn. Yeah, the asbestos levels were crazy out of control over right around that area there. There's a photo in the New York time story I'm looking at that documents. How it was just, it was covered like caked onto many parks and many tree limbs. The cover up is one thing, Miriam, what could the city, what could the entire United States have done to make for a safer environment? Beyond warning people, hey, it's not, it's not safe to do a B or C yet. What could they have done? You know, one thing I want to point out is that at the time it was overwhelmed, everybody was overwhelmed. So there was a response, the first responders were trying to put out the fires that persisted until December 6th. So there was a lot of action going on just at ground zero. And then I think the first responders were overwhelmed by the magnitude of the event. I mean, there were, there was 1.2 million tons of building material that collapsed and

26:0111,000 tons of fine particulate matter that went into the air. So as with, as happens with every catastrophe, the immediate focus is on cleanup and minimizing the immediate disaster. Now the US EPA did have air monitors out and they were looking at air quality conditions. There was insufficient attention paid to the indoor environment and there was insufficient attention paid to protecting the people in the environment. But let me see, there are two reasons for this. First, as I mentioned, that there was the immediate response to the catastrophe. The second thing is that we don't have a good enough grasp of the health impacts of the chemicals that were, that came out of that catastrophe.

27:01So we're continuing to learn, unfortunately, and the people at 9.11, the people in Manhattan have been the guinea pigs. So at this point now, more people have died in the aftermath of 9.11 that were killed during the actual lockdown. More than 3,000 people that's remarkable. Yes, but there are lessons learned about this. And you know, I really want to focus on what have we learned? I think it's important to consider the cover up and it's important also to note that God forbid it were to happen today. The U.S. EPA would be probably unable and politically unresponsive. The U.S. EPA is an agency on life support system right now and is politically in handcuffs. So I would like to focus on what we should be doing today to protect people today.

28:03The second point I want to make is that we're putting many people in harm's way for our forest fires. We have not learned the lesson of the health impacts coming from fires. So you know, one of the reasons why first responders were so badly affected is because they had the firefighters had gear on to breathe through their respirators. Then there were volunteers that had no protective equipment and some of those have to come to have had lung cancer. I know of one of those people that went in immediately in the aftermath to clean up. No protective gear. And then after the immediate event, the first responders didn't have protective gear. Are wild land fire fighters do not have respirators? Well, let me, I think broader picture, even thinking about the wildfire smoke we had this

29:08summer in the city. I wonder about that. The fine particulate matter goes pretty deep into people's lungs and blood streams and like almost anything else with health for some people, healthy individuals, you're not going to face any long term health risks, but we can't universally say that for everybody, depending on their level of health and the level of exposure. Do you worry that a moment like this summer for those two and a half days has long term impacts and our, our governments, our cities are our provincial governments, whomever is not really we're not quite in that 9 11 realm of New York city, but Miriam, we're certainly not giving people enough detail after the fact it's like it's not safe to go outside and now it is. How more nuanced to it than that? Well, I mean the people living in BC around the forest fires are in fact, we're living that reality. Yes. Yes, I do worry about the health effects. I worry about the health effects. They are so well established. The relationship between breathing in, fine particulate matter, the incident and the increased

30:13incidence of heart attacks, of other respiratory illnesses and even causing mild cognitive impairment in other words, dementia like responses after the fact well documented. And you can't just say, oh, you know, I'm healthy today. I'm going to be fine. You don't know what's going to happen in 20 years. I know you got to go in a minute with that. Let's revisit. You go to New York city in the shadow of 9 11 still that fall. It's not winter yet. What did you notice? Did you notice yourself with your own breathing and your own health, a different air or did it take doing the, doing the studies itself to figure out that something's still not quite right with the pollution? We knew that the pollution was very high from, from our studies and I just want to call out my graduate students who drove down in a van and managed to get right close to you. Well, that's college life. They should be in a van. That's college life.

31:14Exactly. We don't want them in first class. So they're, they're my heroes. Anyway, yes, we knew it was very clear that the air quality, not just the air quality, but as you mentioned, soil and also with the surfaces within homes and so on, we knew that there was toxic chemicals deposited. Still such an important story. Thank you very much for the context on this, Mary. I really appreciate you being on. Thank you very much. Um, Miriam Diamond, Professor at University Toronto, the Department of Earth Sciences, the School of the Environment and on the International Panel on Chemical Pollution. That was, again, this summer for the couple days, I was away and I would at Toronto's in like Western Ontario, Grand Bend, Iperwash area, West of London for my sisters and I each, each of our families get a cottage for one week. And maybe it's the one week out of 52. We can all stand each other, but we all go anyway for like 13 straight years. So that air was happening there as well. But I'd hear from people in downtown Toronto going, we're not getting a lot of information

32:16on this. It shouldn't just be, you know, we're back to stay home, save lives. Well, for how long? Which lives? Who's more susceptible? When, when, like, what are the risk factors? You didn't get a lot of intel and information. It was just, cancel, cancel, cancel, don't do this, don't do that. There's so much more nuance to it than that. But I understood people with a well fitted N95 or KN95 wanted to wear one outside. Thanks for listening to the Toronto Today podcast. We drop the highlights of the Daily Show every weekday morning. Don't forget, you can hear the entire show on the radio at home on your smart speaker ask Alexa or say, hey, Google, play 640 Toronto or Toronto today. We can hear us on between 530 and 9 weekdays on 640 Toronto. Have a great day.