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Front Burner Transcript for May 29, 2024

Host: Elaine Chau

ELAINE CHAU: Hi, I'm Elaine Chau, in for Jayme Poisson.

ELAINE CHAU: On April 6th, 2018, in rural Saskatchewan, Jaskirat Singh Sidhu drove a truck through a stop sign and into an intersection. He crashed into a bus carrying the Humboldt Broncos hockey team, killing 16 people and injuring 13 others. In the weeks and months that followed, we heard stories about the incredible loss each of those 16 lives represented and the different ways so many more lives were changed forever.

SOUNDCLIP

FIRST SPEAKER: His sense of humour, his humility, his passion for life that he had.

SECOND SPEAKER: It's just constant reminder all day, every day that, you know, he was there, he was, you know, he did this. There's just a 24 seven, you’re just reminded of him.

THIRD SPEAKER: Death just seems so final, and I, and I know my son's not coming home. I know he's not going to come and lay on the couch, but I'm just kind of not ready for that yet.

ELAINE CHAU: Nearly a year after the crash, a judge gave Sidhu concurrent sentences amounting to eight years in prison. But there's also been another consequence hanging over Sidhu, one unique to non-citizens in Canada, and that's deportation. On Friday, an immigration board confirmed the decision to deport Sidhu to India. It's a ruling that victims and families have a range of opinions on, and one that gets into the controversy over how Canada treats permanent residents differently from citizens. Today, what does justice and accountability look like in the aftermath of such a horrendous accident? And what does it tell us about why and how our justice system punishes offenders? I'm talking to Sharon Riley. She's the prairies bureau chief for the narwhal. In 2022, she investigated criminal deportations for a piece in The Walrus called How Much Punishment is Enough for Jaskirat Singh Sidhu?

ELAINE CHAU: Hi, Sharon.

SHARON RILEY: Hey, Elaine.

ELAINE CHAU: So I want to start with a bit of a quick reminder about how Sidhu ended up driving a truck on the day of the accident. How long had he been a trucker at that point?

SHARON RILEY: Yeah. So I think it's important to take a step back and think about how Sidhu had only been in Canada for a few years at that point, and he had just recently been married. His wife was enrolled in a program to become a dental hygienist. They were just building their futures in Canada and he wanted to financially support her. Trucking was not his background at all. He had studied business in school, but he took a job in trucking to try to support his wife there. He spent two weeks in training with another driver, followed by one week on his own. And then that brings us to April 6th.

ELAINE CHAU: And what possible explanations have we heard for why Sidhu went through a stop sign and into the intersection that evening?

SHARON RILEY: Yeah. So what we know about that day is that Sidhu wasn't doing any of the things that we typically think of when we think of someone causing a car accident. He wasn't texting. He hadn't been drinking. He wasn't under the influence of anything. But he was stressed out. We know that for sure. He was driving a truck with two trailers weighing in at over 45,000kg. And remember, this was his first week on the job by himself.

ELAINE CHAU: Right. 900 bales of peat moss, is that right, in the bag?

SHARON RILEY: 900 bales of peat moss. And there were tarps over that peat moss. And what he told the court was that he was worried about the tarps. They were flapping in the wind. And he was looking in his rear-view mirror, we can only assume trying to figure out if he was losing part of his load or if those tarps were a problem, and his eyes were not looking forward. So there was an oversized stop sign. There was a flashing red light. He didn't take that in, and he did not stop at the intersection.

ELAINE CHAU: And Sidhu was charged with 16 counts of dangerous driving causing death and 13 counts of dangerous driving causing bodily harm. But in this criminal case, how did Sidhu defend himself?

SHARON RILEY: In short, he didn't. He mounted no defence. He pled guilty, so there was no trial. He didn't appeal. There was no plea bargaining. What his lawyer and his family have said all along is that he didn't want to prolong the suffering for the victims of this accident, and he just wanted it to be over to close that chapter for them.

ELAINE CHAU: And what did his prison sentence ended up being, especially kind of compared to what we normally expect from charges like this?

SOUNDCLIP

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: The court has a particularly difficult job, as there is no set sentencing precedent in Canada for a case such as this.

SHARON RILEY: Yeah. So he was given eight years in prison for each count of dangerous driving causing death and five years for each count of dangerous driving causing bodily harm. They would all be served concurrently, you know, eight years in prison. His sentence was, his lawyer told me, twice as severe as any other punishment given to someone who hadn't been, like I said, drunk or deliberately driving recklessly.

ELAINE CHAU: Right. I thought it was really interesting in your piece about this that you pointed out some of the similarities, actually, between this crash and one involving the man who's now literally the province's top politician, right?

SHARON RILEY: Mm hmm. Yeah. So that was Scott Moe back in 1997. Scott Moe was not the premier then. He also drove through a stop sign on a rural Saskatchewan highway, and he also collided with another vehicle. He killed a 38-year-old mother of two, but he wasn't charged criminally the way Sidhu was. He was given a traffic ticket for failing to come to a complete stop and driving without due care and attention, which has significantly different penalties.

SOUNDCLIP

SCOTT MOE: It's something that you wake up with every morning. There's others I know in the province and across the nation that have likely similar incidences. And the fact of the matter is it's an accident. And you try to use the outcomes of that accident to help you shape the best decisions that, in my case, that I can in my personal life, in my career and in the decisions that I make as an individual each and every day since then.

ELAINE CHAU: So that's the prison time, the punishment that a judge initially gave Sidhu. But this case was really made more complicated by Sidhu's immigration status, the fact that he's a permanent resident and not a citizen. I should note that he has lived in Canada for years. And what happens, Sharon, to non-citizens who are convicted of crimes?

SHARON RILEY: Yeah. So if a permanent resident is sentenced to a prison term of at least six months, or they're convicted of a crime where the maximum sentence is 10 years, whether or not they're sentenced to 10 years, they are basically automatically considered for deportation. Some advocates have said that the term permanent resident is something of a misnomer, that it's in fact not permanent at all. And they've described it as a bit of a maybe conditional residency or a long audition for a citizenship.

ELAINE CHAU: And I understand the term for crimes that meet this threshold for deportation is serious criminality. And what kind of crimes might meet that?

SHARON RILEY: Yeah. So when I was doing research for this story, I went to Canada's Criminal Code and looked at different crimes where a person could be sentenced to at least six months in prison, and there's a wide variety. It could be any number of crimes. It could be a major crime, but it could also be a petty crime. It can include crimes ranging from impaired driving to joyriding to dining and dashing to nudity, and then, of course, to more serious crimes like murder.

ELAINE CHAU: So let's go through how this law has unfolded in Sidhu's case. And he was granted full parole last year. But how did the Canadian Border Services Agency decide whether Sidhu should be deported?

SHARON RILEY: Yeah. So after he was convicted, a CBSA officer was tasked with writing a report about whether he should be deported or not. They wrote that report and they recommended that he should be deported, and a delegate of the minister approved it. Sidhu's lawyer tried to appeal those decisions and failed, and the hearing on Friday was the last step in what many have described as a foregone conclusion.

ELAINE CHAU: Right. And with the hearing on Friday, like what did the official from the Immigration and Refugee Board say about like whether legally, the deportation should go ahead?

SHARON RILEY: Yeah, he said it should go ahead. And he noted specifically that he could not consider humanitarian and compassionate factors in the decision. So essentially, all that had to be established in that hearing on Friday was that Sidhu is who he is. He's a permanent resident, and that he was convicted for what he was convicted for. There's no room for consideration of remorse or a circumstance or any other factors in that hearing, and there's no access to appeal of that decision for Sidhu.

ELAINE CHAU: There are real consequences to that kind of punishment. And what would it mean for Sidhu’s family if this went ahead? His wife is a full Canadian citizen now.

SHARON RILEY: Yeah. So Sidhu is married, and he's also since this all happened, he's a new father. He and his wife have a one-year-old baby who unfortunately has had a number of health struggles basically since the get go. That baby spent the first three months of his life in the NiQu. So when I spoke to Sidhu’s wife in 2022, she had said that she would go to India with him if he was deported because she couldn't imagine not being by his side with PTSD and depression. But now, with the addition of another member of their family, the baby is still undergoing a lot of medical treatment, has access to a lot of specialist care here in Canada, and, you know, their days are filled with getting medical help for their baby. But this week, before they dealt with the next step in the removals process, they took their son to the Calgary Children's Hospital, to kind of give a sense of what their days are filled with right now. And then there's the other element of it is that Sidhu can now no longer work in Canada, so they have some pretty serious concerns about how to support their family.

ELAINE CHAU: Let's get into the different points of view that we've heard on whether Sidhu should be deported, starting, of course, with the families and victims of the crash. And we quickly saw a statement from the father of Logan Boulay, saying he and Logan's mother were, quote, thankful for the decision. The father of Jackson Joseph also told Canadian Press, quote, this is not a death sentence that some people want to make it out to be. He simply just lost the privilege to stay in this country. And also, quote, we can't begin to heal as long as we keep seeing Sidhu's face everywhere in the media and hearing the different opinions from people who have no skin in the game. This should be about the victims and their families, unquote. And Sharon, what else have we heard from families about whether they support deportation?

SHARON RILEY: Yeah. So like you mentioned, there's a huge range of reactions. These people have gone through unimaginable tragedy, and the full range of human emotion and reaction is on display even in this small, fairly tight knit community. One of the victims that I spoke to was Scott Thomas. He lost his son, Evan, in the accident. And he has, you know, a different point of view on this than some of the people that you quoted earlier. He said, you know, that forgiving Sidhu was part of continuing his son's legacy. He talked about how, you know, he always tried to teach his kids about forgiveness and fairness and empathy, and that he thought that Evan would not want to see Sidhu punished any further.

SOUNDCLIP

SCOTT THOMAS: And I don't think this is a necessary step for him and a necessary conclusion to all this. We've made our peace with this a long time ago, and Mr. Sidhu has done his time.

ELAINE CHAU: I've read about how Scott Thomas and his wife had written Sidhu a letter of forgiveness and actually gave him a pendant with the number 17 engraved on one side. That's the number that their son Evan wore in hockey, and the Humboldt Broncos insignia on the other. And they've also met, right, I believe.

SHARON RILEY: Mm hmm. Yeah, they met during the criminal proceedings, which was something Scott Thomas had wanted to do. And the two of them, you know, they cried together. And Scott Thomas told me that the two of them, they hugged, and that he felt deep empathy. He felt that Sidhu was a broken man, and he too felt at the time that he was also a broken man dealing with the loss of his son. He felt that Sidhu is going to be thinking about that day for the rest of his life, and that is punishment enough. He did not think that what he called piling on punishments with deportation was necessary.

ELAINE CHAU: Mm hmm. I also just want to acknowledge here just some of the things that we've heard in the past from families about the impact of this tragedy. During the sentencing hearing back in 2019, 90 victim impact statements were shared. You know, Sharon, you wrote about accounts of children lost forever, lifelong emotional trauma, brain injuries, seizures, very difficult roads to recovery. The judge described the pain detailed at the time as, staggering was the word that they used. It's clear to me that the way that each family has arrived at what outcome makes sense for them to heal, it's obviously a really deeply personal and a very private thing, right?

SHARON RILEY: Absolutely. Yeah.

ELAINE CHAU: Sharon, Sidhu's deportation case really raises a lot of questions about Canada's system for deporting non-citizens, and it's a system that's come under quite a bit of criticism. And why have critics said that this process is often unfair?

SHARON RILEY: Yeah. So for someone like Sidhu, who lives in Canada, he was working in Canada, he studied in Canada, he's married someone in Canada and made his life here, critics argue that he is subject to a punishment beyond what was dealt with in the criminal justice system alone, and far beyond what any Canadian citizen would receive for the same crime. Critics argue, you know, that citizens commit murders often, and once justice is served, we allow them to reintegrate into society. But what we hear from a lot of legal experts on this is that deportation can be almost a form of exile. It can mean severing ties with your family and your community, and it goes far beyond the punishment that the criminal justice system prescribed.

ELAINE CHAU: You had mentioned earlier that there really isn't a lot of recourse for people ordered deported in this way. Sidhu had sought a judicial review about the CBSA recommendation that he be deported, and that failed. But after the order is made, there's really no way to appeal it. But it wasn't always like this, right? How was it different for non-citizens decades ago?

SHARON RILEY: Yeah. So it was only in the 1990s or so that the ability to appeal started to be chipped away. It was first that the minister was able to step in and deny an appeal if they believed that a person posed, you know, it was known as an extraordinary risk to the public. Then appeals were denied to anyone who received a sentence in prison greater than two years. And then things really ramped up at around 2013 under the Stephen Harper government. He passed what was called the Faster Removal of Foreign Criminals Act, and that restricted appeals to people sentenced to less than six months in prison. So dramatically reducing over time the threshold where people would have access to appeal.

ELAINE CHAU: Mm hmm. And you alluded to this a little bit already, but there's really like a bigger philosophical question here, right, about how and why our justice system punishes people and how deportation fits into what we want to accomplish with punishment. And what have like different experts and lawyers that you've talked to told you about like whether the punishment of deportation specifically makes sense for what Sidhu has done, like especially on top of prison time?

SHARON RILEY: Legal experts that I spoke to would argue that the criminal justice system should have taken care of any considerations of whether the person is, you know, a safety risk, that the deportation process doesn't really carry any consideration of whether the person is a safety risk to the public, because there is very little opportunity for anything other than whether or not they meet the threshold for serious criminality to be considered. A lot of the conversation around this is based on the rhetoric around people being referred to as foreign criminals, as I mentioned, like the Faster Removal of Foreign Criminals Act. In reality, deportation in these circumstances catches a much wider net than just the image portrayed by some members of Parliament when the Faster Removal of Foreign Criminals Act was passed.

ELAINE CHAU: Ultimately, do you think this is about the rights that we give to citizens versus what we give to permanent residents?

SHARON RILEY: Yeah, it's been described by a lot of people as a form of double punishment that applies to only one segment of people living in Canada. In a lot of circumstances, permanent residents have been here for a very long time. Their community is here. Their family is here. They're very integrated into Canadian society, and the only thing that differentiates them from a Canadian citizen is their paperwork. This could also apply even to people who came here as children. They may or may not have any connection to the country to which they're going to be deported. Deportation is not legally supposed to be a form of punishment, but in reality, it is, as many legal experts have told me, lived out as a form of punishment and exile.

ELAINE CHAU: Sharon, what could happen next here for Sidhu? Like what could decide whether he gets deported or not?

SHARON RILEY: So the next step is what's known as a pre removal risk assessment. So he can try to prove that deportation will mean he'll face physical harm in India. He can also try to defer his deportation. And if that's not granted, he can try to appeal that. But ultimately, his last chance is to apply for permanent residency again based on, you know, what are known as humanitarian and compassionate considerations. His lawyer said that he's working on that as we speak. But also, as Sidhu’s lawyer has pointed out to me, there's always the option for the federal government to intervene.

ELAINE CHAU: Right. Yes. Like could the federal government step in here in some capacity?

SHARON RILEY: Yeah. So as his lawyer told me, the minister can always step in. In cases like this, ministers have stepped in in the past in instances where, for example, say, a person who came here as a child, came to Canada as a child was going to be deported to a country where they didn't speak the language and had no family. The minister has intervened in cases like that and has the option to override that deportation. There's also the possibility that the Trudeau government could make a statutory amendment. They can change the law. They can refine the law. Sidhu’s lawyer describes it as refining the excesses of the Harper era. He's disappointed that the Trudeau government hasn't looked at the right of appeal for permanent residents in these circumstances, and hasn't addressed what he calls the arbitrariness that has been introduced into the immigration system.

ELAINE CHAU: Sharon, I'm wondering how have your ideas of justice and what accountability looks like in a situation like this. Like what are some of your own reflections on that as someone who has followed this case so closely?

SHARON RILEY: I think it's been very striking to me to think about this as I am myself a Canadian citizen, to think about the different set of repercussions people who do not have citizenship but who live in Canada face. Sidhu's case is not a one off. In the five year period that I looked at, between 2017 and 2022, there were more than 2000 permanent residents that were issued deportation orders based on the serious criminality threshold. This strikes people from all walks of life who share one thing in common, and that's their paperwork. I think also, one of the things that really stood out to me is that I think a lot of Canadians consider it foundational to our justice system that people have the right to appear before an open court and to appeal decisions, and that in this case, it can seem to some people like a bit of a loophole where there is no access to appeal. So for a decision like this to be this long bureaucratic process and to feel like a foregone conclusion, for a lot of people, I think, is really discouraging when they think about Canada's immigration system.

ELAINE CHAU: Thank you, Sharon, for your time today.

SHARON RILEY: Thank you for the chance to talk about it.

ELAINE CHAU: That's all for today. I'm Elaine Chau. Thanks for listening to Front Burner.

For Humboldt trucker, what punishment is enough? - Transcript

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