Normally, the byelection campaign by a major party leader to gain a seat in the House of Commons doesn’t get quite this … snippy:
Federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh taking part in a Pride Parade in June 2017 (during the leadership campaign).
Photo via Wikimedia.
Maybe someone should put in a kind word for Jagmeet Singh on the rare opportunities when an occasion presents itself. The federal NDP leader found himself on the right side of a ridiculous argument over the weekend as his byelection in the riding of Burnaby South got officially underway. Singh’s Conservative opponent for the open seat, commercial lawyer Jay Shin, promptly issued a press release suggesting that Singh was … apparently the wrong species of lawyer?
“While Jagmeet Singh has spent his pre-political career as a criminal defence lawyer keeping criminals out of jail, I have spent my legal career building Canadian businesses that create jobs and promote international trade,” Shin’s statement read.
When challenged by the Burnaby Now newspaper on his apparent suggestion that, as a former university instructor in International Mining Transactions, he was somehow ethically superior to the underpaid schmucks who provide criminal defence, Shin disavowed any such meaning.
Criminal lawyers “play an important role; everybody has a right to defence,” the Conservative candidate insisted. (Whew!) “What I’m saying is, he played that role. As a criminal lawyer, he defended criminals. That’s all I’m saying.”
One notices that even this characterization may leave a civil libertarian uneasy, since criminals aren’t criminals until the Crown successfully convicts them. A defence lawyer doesn’t “defend criminals”: he defends the accused. But maybe that is the sort of distinction you forget when you are busy building Canadian businesses, or trying to become a Conservative MP.
